This is a dedicated study of three performing groups with a particular social understanding of performance. Odin Teatret, Gardzienice, and Song of the Goat Theatre have developed unique theatre practices that investigate art as an integrated component of everyday life. The actors’ daily lives incorporate both artistic activities such as training, research, devising, and performance, and social projects such as cultural barters, expeditions, and pedagogical programmes in a conscious attempt to engage with the wider social world. The Odin, Gardzienice, and Song of the Goat’s work therefore extends beyond theatre and into the lives, traditions, and cultural practices of diverse communities around the world. This approach to performance continues a legacy of art that has emerged specifically from Poland as a result of nationalistic and Romantic trends during the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Poland’s borders were erased by the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian Empires. Dividing the country for well over a century, these partitions introduced cultural, linguistic, religious, and political suppression, creating an atmosphere of defiant cultural preservation as the Polish population struggled to assert itself against their oppressors. Artist such as Romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, neo-Romantic dramatist, poet, and painter Stanisław Wyspiański, and, in the twentieth century, directors such as Juliusz Osterwa and Jerzy Grotowski, contributed to a legacy of art that sought to examine and strengthen cultural identity, belonging, and community. Drawing on the theories of Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tönnies, this study proposes that the Odin, Gardzienice, and Song of the Goat can be considered not only as performing groups but as social groups. Bound together through artistic principles that both define them as unique groups and shape the way in which they interact with the world, these social performing groups represent three unique performance practices devoted to exploring the social connections that connect people in mutual respect and understanding.

The backdrop of this thesis is the emerging phenomenon of the sustainable festival. Namely, an increasing number of performing arts festival organisers, worldwide, are currently claiming that they can recognise and, essentially, address some of the perceived inherently negative externalities of their events. In trying to remedy the unfavourable impacts of their events they incorporate the notion of sustainability into the strategic mission and practical management of these festivals. By calling attention to their sustainability credentials and exercising particular interpretations of the concept, they either label their festivals as sustainable or emphatically promote the events’ contribution to sustainability. In doing so, they seem to become part of a coalition of actors that are committed to confronting some of the major global challenges facing contemporary society. Nevertheless, the discourse over sustainability has been bound to the power effects and processes of establishment appropriation and institutionalisation, which have led to particular understandings and practical translations of its concept. Such processes, along with the policy tools that these convey, have reportedly been responsible for a systematic delimitation of the once plastic, diverse, and open-ended visions of sustainability, defining what counts as sustainability and what does not. As this thesis will argue, these effects have significantly restricted the possibility for alternative understandings of sustainability to emerge from the lower layers of social organisation. The conceptualisation of sustainability as a template for absolute, top-down policy action, however, may be anathema to an institution such as the festival, which is assumed to have a “transformative, transgressive and even revolutionary role” (Bianchini and Maughan, 2015, p.243) in society. Sustainable performing arts festivals have been mushrooming in number and genres, yet the topic of sustainability has rarely been discussed in a conceptual framework within the relevant bodies of literature. This thesis aims to problematise current sustainability understandings and practice, as well as offer provocations to think afresh about its concept in the particular context of the festival. It will provide conceptual coverage to a developing academic field and also add a unique, critical voice to a discipline dominated by studies that tend to rest upon largely managerialist approaches to sustainability. Rather than relying on powerful constructs of sustainability, this thesis will try to gain access to and articulate festival participants’ perceptions and experiences of processes and praxes that provide the possibilities for flourishing festival contexts. The main research question asks: What does it mean for the performing arts festival to contribute to the achievement of a desired future for the festival and its surrounding social context, that is to say, for it to be a sustainable festival?

This thesis examines the claim that women write differently from men, and employs a methodology which compares a range of film adaptations with the books from which they are taken. The thesis explores the agency and voice of four novels and their film adaptations, 1 using techniques derived from narrative analysis where "the implied author" is the agency responsible for the overall relationship of narration (story telling) to narrative (story) and is also the "voice" - the rhetoric of the text. Psychoanalysis forms a conceptual framework for exploring the performance of sexual difference in these works authored by women, but directed by men, and for investigating psychological thrillers, where issues of sexuality and desire are dramatised, particularly in relationship to death and the fear of obliteration. The thesis considers the 'gendering' of the texts - how they construe sexual difference, through fantasy and through desire. Lacan's discourse analysis enables a further investigation of the possibilities of hysterical agency driving the narrative; anxiety and uncertainty over gender and sexual difference driving the needs of the characters and the narration, and therefore, by implication, the real author or authors. It also discusses whether this hysteria is performed differently by men and women, due to their different subject positions, and thereby creates a potential link between the implied author of the text, and the gender of the real author(s). The real author, the agent of the text, cannot, in this formulation, be regarded as either sovereign or unified. Rather, I theorise, following Althusser and the performative theory of Judith Butler, that authorial voice is an interpellation. That is, they are called up and placed into a network of norms and parameters where they assume the agency of authorship. Agency is therefore contingent and traumatic, and a text which creates a less causal and individualistic performance of narrative agency might also be able to explore the relationship of gender and sexual difference to agency without slipping into the Freudian flaw of making anatomy destiny. I consider Mrs. Dalloway, as a poetic, non-linear form, a multi-voiced and multi-determined narrative, which creates a very rich female portrait of its central protagonist and a selfconsciously female narrative voice. In addressing the traumas and hysterias of sexual difference, and relating them to the analogous traumas created through the abuse of power in other realms of life, Mrs. Dalloway provides an alternative way of thinking about sexual difference, gender and agency, one that privileges creativity, reparation and the need to come to terms with trauma, whether one is male or female.

This thesis examines the cinema of David Mamet with particular reference to the five films he made between 1987 and 1997. Its objectives are: to explore Mamet's distinct approach to filmmaking; to analyse the ways in which this approach shaped the formal organisation of his films; and to account for the specific aesthetic effects produced. The central argument advanced is that Mamet's filmmaking practice, which has, to a large extent, been influenced by practices he adopted during his long standing service to American theatre, is markedly different from dominant models of filmmaking in contemporary US cinema. As a result, his films have consistently demonstrated evidence of an idiosyncratic visual style, which has attracted considerable - mostly negative - criticism. This thesis also considers a number of institutional parameters that have impacted on Mamet's cinema. Particular emphasis has been placed on the role of independent distributors such as Orion Pictures and The Samuel Goldwyn Company who allowed the filmmaker to maintain his distinct aesthetic vision, despite his lack of success at the US box-office. Mamet's close association with the institutional apparatus of American Independent Cinema is examined throughout the thesis. My approach to Mamet's cinema takes place within a number of critical contexts that Film Studies uses to discuss both individual films and the work of a filmmaker as a whole. These contexts include: the classical/post-classical Hollywood cinema debate; auteur criticism; performance studies; film adaptation studies; and genre criticism. I use these frameworks to examine particular aspects of Mamet's cinema and also to establish fresh critical perspectives which will enhance our understanding of some of his films. One such perspective involves the proposal that Mamet utilises the generic form of the 'con-artist film,' a film genre previously unexplored within genre studies. This thesis challenges some of the established critical assumptions about David Mamet's cinema and bestows upon it the attention it deserves.

This thesis addresses and analyses the ‘virtual,’ unsighted potentials of the artistic and critical practice of performance through abstraction, deconstruction and remediation of its ‘body.’ It argues that the ontological distinction between material and immaterial representation can be dislodged by the proposition of an ontogenesis of emergence of the dynamic dimension of affect. Such self-organising, recursive system of forces and energies elicits change and transformation expanding the sensual and aesthetic practice of performance as alive art. These arguments connect concepts from affect and political theory with philosophical ideas of virtual multiplicity, relationality, counter/intuition and (dis)individuation passing via the work of Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciére, Jean-Luc Nancy and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as other theorists. The thesis also intersects methodologies and epistemologies from philosophy, science and art with the radical contingencies implicit in performance (art) as a ‘technology of existence’ (in)formed by tendencies of distribution of affective intensities and temporal (re)modulation of shared perception. The point of reference for exploring the parameters of affective distribution and emergent aesthetics is the epistemological gap opened by the ‘wounded body’ as it figures in the folds of representation. Regarding the wound as a state of ‘emergency’ of an ungraspable reality, and as a sensitised and sensitising condition of being-with and doing-without, I pay attention to the demands this figure makes on the timely dimension of (in)human being. This disruptive and interruptive presence expresses the singularity of the experience of openness in the ways that life comes into being exposed to the plurality of its (im)possibilities. Exercising a kind of pressure on the body, this critical point ruptures temporality itself in the way that the (in)human becomes effective/affective beyond its finality. Key works such as Trio A and MURDER and murder by Yvonne Rainer, Self Unfinished by 3 Xavier Le Roy, and the performance series Resonate/Obliterate by Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey will be parsed as singularities revelatory of the intuitive type of creative experience that transduces the lived experience of the synesthetic dimension of affect, and the parameters of processual and emergent aesthetics. Ultimately, I propose to imagine these instances of performance as a vital archive of (perceptive) experience that enables a bodily state of intensity and emergency to flesh out an experiential, visceral field of affective modes of becoming and becoming-other in related mo(ve)ments of aliveness traversed by the ungrasped pulse of a past yet to be/come.

David Mamet's work as a dramatist has been studied in depth and been subject of great critical interest. But Mamet is a varied and prolific author who has worked in other fields, including poetry, novels, children's books and plays, and films. He started his career in cinema as a screenwriter but since 1987 he has written and directed eight films in a variety of genres and topics, from confidence men to adaptations of Terence Rattigan's plays. In contrast with his theatrical oeuvre, Mamet's work on film has received little systematic attention, and when analysed has always been compared to his plays. With my thesis I intend to redress the balance by studying his films, not only in the context of his work for the stage, but also in that of the film genre tradition. Although many of the themes he treats in his cinema are common to his plays also, his choice of classical filmic genres to express them creates a tension that questions both the themes and the generic conventions. I base my thesis on an auteurist concept, using interviews with the author, his own essays, and other works as complementary texts to the films (especially his theoretical writing on acting and directing films). My Inain emphasis is placed on close readings of certain scenes to illustrate Mamet's approach to genre, gender, his characteristic use of language, his favourite themes, his direction of actors, and his development of his own cinematic style. I also place the movies in the cinematic tradition by comparing them to other films of the same genre, or by directors who share similarities with Mamet (like Quentin Tarantino, Alfred Hitchcock, or Preston Sturges). Mamet is not a dramatist who sometimes makes movies, but a dramatist/filmmaker and I hope my thesis contributes to a more complete understanding of his career

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This thesis examines the filmic representation of teenage identity in East German films which were produced in the late eighties and early nineties. Questions of 'identity' assumed a prominent position within the political and cultural discourses at the time of the Wende when the structures within East German society changed dramatically. Academic and public interest in the attitudes, values and the state of mind of the young generation in East Germany was immense because the analysis of the position of the young generation always reveals important facts about relations of power, ideological formations, and belief systems. This thesis looks at 10 films (many of which have not been the subject of academic study before) which have teenage protagonists at the centre of their narratives. It explores ways in which these films represented the young generation of the former GDR and, as cultural products, contributed to the construct of 'East German youth' within the public discourse. To provide the contextual framework for the analysis, the discourses on East German youth, DEFA, and GDR identity, are reviewed and developments within DEF A with regard to the production of films for a young audience are discussed. The close textual study analyses the representation of identification processes which are typical for teenagers, identifies and discusses salient motifs, themes, narrative devices, and stylistic choices. Common features, in particular the metonymic use of the concept of 'family', narrative perspective with regard to the target audience, and the film texts' interpretation of contemporary social developments are explored in detail and discussed within the context of the competing discourses at the time of the films' release. The analysis shows that the films captured key elements of the social and political transition in East Germany. It helps to trace shifts in the cultural discourse at an important juncture in recent German history and to put myths and simplifications about this period into context.

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