My concept is rooted in the fairy tail land of the dark woods like so many other terrifying fairy tails from my youth. Shockheaded Peter, our boogie man, is of the trees. The blood of the rotten children feeds the trees in this concept for the marbles that fall from our children literally representing blood will flow down the rake, across tin gutters, and into a huge tin washbasin out of which grows our gnarly set tree, a gnarly knobby willow. Peter comes from this tree that is fed by the blood of children. I set my costumes in the Regency period and located it in Germany, which gives my costumes the feeling of old fairy tails and their origins. The silhouettes lend themselves well to the progression of the story of each character. My inspiration for this design was the artwork of Elizabeth McGrath, contemporary west-coast studio artist and sculptor. The nature of Elizabeth McGrath’s seriously macabre sculptural installations drew me immediately to her as a source of inspiration for this design.

This paper compares seemingly similar words from a variety of acting teachers, and shows how it is impossible to draw clear comparisons between words that are often used as synonyms. The paper is a reflection of the journey from believing in translation to recognizing its impossibility. In Chapter 1 we focus on one of the most common elements in actor training, Attention/focus/concentration, and analyze the shades of meaning in those words and the difficulty of talking about them in isolation. In Chapter 2 we look at the way in which semiotic analysis can explain the words resistance to equivalence. In Chapter 3 we look at one of the central terms in most collegiate actor training objective, and see how it reveals both the problems inherent in translation. In Chapter 4 we look at how this knowledge can influence the classroom in a positive way.

For children to enjoy theatre they must see a story played out physically. The same is true when children act. Young performers must be taught to act using a simplified version of the Stanislavski System that puts emphasis on playable action. This thesis evaluates current acting texts for youth based on whether or not the author is able to outline a method that is accessible for children, and highlights the importance of playable action in scene work. It also provides a guide to teaching theatre for youth based on a class of the author’s design where students developed curriculum, managed classes of students, and executed lessons that emphasized the importance of physicality in acting. It includes the process and script of a devised play based on Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky where the story was told through movement. The final section is results of these experiments and feedback from children.

The Richmond Printmaking Workshop (RPW) was in operation from 1978 to 1991 during a nationwide print revival. From the 1960s through the 1990s, hundreds of new printmaking workshops and cooperatives sprung up across the country. This newfound popularity in the medium led to a boom in the print market and resulted in widespread experimentation of the medium. The RPW, founded by artists Nancy David and Gail McKennis, began in response to these trends and demonstrates how the print resurgence operated on a local level. Like many other small printmaking workshops of the period, it provided printmaking equipment to artists and promoted the print medium through classes, lectures, and membership in a Print Club. The locally-oriented workshop was a place for artists to meet, work on art, and form a supportive printmaking community. The RPW provided artists with opportunities to create portfolios, mount exhibitions, and experiment with new printmaking techniques. The various programs sponsored by the RPW were meant to engage both the professional printmakers and amateur artists of Richmond. An extensive print collection was formed from the various activities of the organization. A portion of the collection was eventually donated to the University of Richmond Museum in 2001. This collection of 253 prints spans the duration of the RPW’s existence and demonstrates the wide variety of prints created at the workshop and the diverse programs they organized. Although the workshop closed in the early 1990s, the RPW’s significant influence on the artists involved, the Richmond art scene, and generations of printmakers to follow is evident. This thesis provides an institutional history of the organization to give context to the print collection and provide a sense of how the nationwide print revival operated on a local level.

The aim of this paper is to examine the Estill Voice Training System to explain how it may be used in tandem with widely accepted voice and speech methodologies such as those developed by Kristin Linklater, Patsy Rodenburg and Dudley Knight/Phil Thompson in order produce versatile performers able to meet the vocal gauntlet flung at the feet of the contemporary actor. Students must be able to effectively function as voice-over talent, sing musical theatre, rattle off classical text with aplomb and work in film, all with superior vocal health. Synthesizing proven techniques with the skills presented in the inter-disciplinary Estill Voice Training System, I hope to develop a new, anatomically specific, voice and speech training progression to efficiently assist the student actor discover the physical and emotional vocal ranges demanded of the contemporary actor.

Most scholarship regarding Shakespeare’s King Lear rests on the analysis of Lear and Cordelia, with the odd reference to the eldest daughter, Goneril, and brief homages to the Gloucester subplot. Lear’s middle daughter, Regan, is rarely mentioned at all, unless it is in conjunction with one of her more scholastically popular sisters. Within these marginalized moments of notice, Regan is routinely simplified as being just another sinful sister, fitting nicely into the accepted binaries of good and evil outlined within the play. Despite the fact that most binaries, like characters, are flawed, Regan has been given little to no chance to be absolved of her supposed offenses. By looking at Regan through the lenses of a theatrical character study and also as a subject of iconography within the realms of classical art, film, graphic novels, and the stage, I aim to prove that Regan, despite her consistent relegation to the shadows, is a three-dimensional character who has simply been dealt a difficult hand by her creator.

This thesis deconstructs the social, ecological, and colonial elements of the 1900-1910 Human African Trypanosomiasis (African Sleeping Sickness) epidemic which affected British Uganda and Belgian Congo. This paper investigates the epidemic’s medical history, and the subsequent social control policies which sought to govern the actions of the indigenous population. In addition, this paper argues that the failure to understand and respect the region’s ecological conditions and local knowledge led to disease outbreaks in epidemic proportions. Retroactive policies sought to inflict western medical practices on a non-western population, which resulted in conflict and unrest in the region. In the Belgian Congo, colonial authorities created a police state in which violence and stringent control measures were used to manage the local population. In Uganda, forced depopulation in infected regions destabilized local economies. This thesis compares and contrasts the methods used in these regions, and investigates the effects of Germ Theory on Sleeping Sickness policy and social perceptions during the colonial period in Africa.

This dissertation analyzes Life’s early coverage of the Cold War (1945-1954) in order to explicate this publication’s creation and reinforcement of prescriptive attitudes about this ideological engagement through photographically illustrated news. By uncovering Life’s editorial approach this project proposes a new diagnostic for evaluating documentary images by re-configuring Hayden White’s incisive theory of emplotment—the process of engendering historical narratives with meaning— through semiotic models proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Roland Barthes, thereby offering a useful tool for future scholars to re-examine modern media’s transition towards prizing visual immediacy over critical engagement. Life’s editors’ link narrative devices and rhetoric with photographs to make these images appear as first-hand experience and function as objective conclusions. Life characterizes the Cold War as an epic moral struggle between the US and USSR, and its 1943 special issue on Russia acts as the comedic prologue to this narrative by distinguishing these ideologically disparate wartime allies. After post-war agreements fail, this congenial atmosphere swiftly transitions into another battle between democracy and tyranny, defined through literary conventions. Life employs synecdoche and allegory to encode photographs of individuals as icons of valorous populations (Americans and Eastern Europeans) and to symbolize concepts (democracy and charity). Metonymy and irony transform photographs into direct signs of Communism and visual evidence of its degeneracy. Life’s comic presentation of Marshal Josip Tito contrasts with its satiric coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy to direct readers’ attention towards the best and worst possible courses of action regarding the Communist menace, at home and abroad.

In repositioning Beckett’s Not I in relation to Rushdie and Coetzee, I show that The Satanic Verses and Foe suggest approaches to language similar to Beckett’s play, insofar as each text interrogates the ability of the marginalized speaking subject to maintain control of his or her voice, finding that the speaking subject’s voice is constantly infused with the voices of others. Additionally, I demonstrate Beckett’s relevance to the postcolonial environment and delineate convergences and divergences in how Rushdie and Coetzee formulate the voices, bodies, and identities of marginalized and postcolonial speaking subjects.

Dinner For One, a hypermedia poetry thesis, explores the themes of aloneness, sexuality, independence, and journeys of discovery and distance. The Chinese zodiac stamps used as navigational elements in Dinner for One and the prose poems written as postcards to oneself an others reinforce the notion of travel. The fortunes from Chinese cookies give prophecies and horoscopes, reminding us of our fate, which is beyond our conrol. Dinner For One means to question, through poetry and interactive, hypertextual reading techniques, how much faith and trust we should hold in influences outside of our lives. The poems in this thesis are meant to be an examination of what we tell ourselves and, sometimes, make ourselves believe.This multimedia, interactive presentation is written with Macromedia 2000. To view the executable file, you must first download it to your computer. It compatible with PC Windows 95/98/NT and best viewed with 800x600 high color resolution on a 17" or larger monitor. To close the document, press the ESC key. The Chinese Zodiac stamps are courtesy of http://www.post.gov.tw/estamp/