Imagined Geographies: Women's Negotiation of Space in Contemporary Australian Cinema is an exploration of the nexus between gender and locale in films from the last decade, 1988-98. This thesis examines the way meaning is made through the negotiation of diverse geographies by central female protagonists in a selection of recent Australian feature films. The films I analyse were predominantly produced by female writers and/or directors. In the context of Australian Cinema, locale is an area much talked about but little theorised. It is an issue which remains in the background of much scholarship and is often tangential to many arguments but rarely constructed as a central concern. Where it is foregrounded, as in Ross Gibson's work, it is reduced to the significance of landscape or 'natural locations' rather than examining the diversity of its manifestations. Two notable but related spatial shifts have occurred in Australian cinema of the 1990s. The first is a change in industrial practice. Female artists are now creating spaces for themselves in mainstream feature filmmaking - spaces traditionally occupied by men. This trend is away from constructions of a distinctly feminist cinema or counter-cinema which was identifiable in the 1970s. Second, there is a shift in the character of on-screen space. The presence of growing numbers of women writers, directors and producers in the Australian film industry is shifting the cinema's focus away from traditional 'masculine' topographies - the pub, the prison and the outback - thus allowing explorations of other spaces and visions to develop. I am arguing therefore that there is a feminization ofspace occurring in Australian cinema. In this thesis I investigate representations of so-called traditional 'feminine' or domestic domains. The place of the gendered body and embodiment in films is a central concern and is theorised in the first chapter. As we move through the thesis chapters, sexed bodies enacting gender in a variety of ways and in different zones - the car, the house, the suburb and the country town - will be explored. Through these analyses I examine the methods some film directors employ to problematize space in such a way that their work overcomes the limitations of its previously dominant representations. This thesis is primarily an attempt to open up the field of criticism to acknowledge the diversity of locales which exist within the rich tapestry of Australian Cinema.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-168).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-241).

Between 2000 and 2015 twelve of the UK’s leading producing theatres premiered twenty three plays by British playwrights where the action was set between 1882-1928. This historical period is significant; in 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act was passed and in 1928 equal enfranchisement for men and women was granted in the United Kingdom, hence, the historical period traces a shift in women’s rights from property ownership to the vote. This thesis investigates narratives within these plays and explores the development of a normative historiography that is drawn on, but predominantly left unquestioned, by playwrights as Britain’s past is reimagined. It is this normative historiography, operating in a theatrical context, which the thesis problematises and interrogates through the lens of contemporary British playwriting. This lens facilitates an exploration of the manner in which the representation of the past mirrors and/or challenges current feminist discourse and considers the cultural implications of the structures and techniques employed to retell women their history through this medium. Scholarship from the fields of academic and popular feminism, theatre studies, history and historiography shape the analytical framework of the thesis. Drawing on literature from these fields, this study conducts historically informed performance analysis that seeks to discover the sociocultural work done by contemporary plays that engage with the past. Archives of thirty British theatres have been surveyed to produce a database of plays that fall within the project boundaries; working with this data, trends and recurring themes have been identified, and subsequently chapters have been shaped to investigate dramaturgical questions in response to the field research. The dramaturgical questions explore: recurring modes of representation in plays that reimagine World War One; the representation of opposition in depictions of historical conflict; the retelling of specific historical narratives in relation to the challenge of staging ideas; and the recurrence of the heteronormative romantic plot. This thesis argues that when the playwright interrogates the normative dramaturgies and tropes they have inherited for historical representation, they assumes the role of historiographer and from this self-reflexive position recurring theatrical conventions for retelling the past are challenged. This perspective shifts attention beyond central patriarchal narratives of the past and facilitates engagement with the multiple avenues of enquiry regarding a historical moment. Engagement with the work of playwrights who foreground a historiographic awareness in their process, further illuminates the dialogue between representations of women in a historical context and contemporary feminist debate.

Over the past decade, scholarly works have examined the plurality and diversity of men in relation to social practices of Arab cultures, while also examining discourses of violence, militarization and hegemonic masculinity in times of war and conflict. However, there has been little discussion and critical literature concerning non- heterosexual (or queer) representations of masculinities in the Arab world. Within such context, this dissertation addresses the emerging and shifting visual representations of ‘queer’ masculinities as they are artistically performed in the contemporary lens-based artworks of internationally recognized Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. Much of the research on queerness in the Arab region risks falling into a colonialist and liberatory framework that seeks to discover an ‘authentic’ queer identity. Contrary to such approaches, I argue for the fluidity of a local queer Arab model of disidentification underpinning Zaatari’s artworks, which questions our perceived realities of both queerness and hegemonic masculinity in Post-Civil War Lebanon. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that integrates cross-cultural comparative and queer visual analysis, I locate Zaatari’s artworks within a larger sociocultural context, as well as within and in tension with existing feminist and contemporary art discourses on the body, identity, and performativity. By examining visual and textual representations of local queer masculinities, this dissertation engages in dynamic discussions on the process of masculinization and elaborates on its future cultural and artistic trends both in the Arab world and in Western countries.

Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.

REBOUÇAS, Diego Soares. Amontoado de destroços: reflexões sobre comunicação e arte contemporânea à partir da instalação Entre os olhos, o deserto, de Miguel Rio Branco. 2015. 137f. – Dissertação (Mestrado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-graduação em Comunicação Social, Fortaleza (CE), 2015. / Submitted by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-04-08T14:41:13Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_dis_dsrebouças.pdf: 2529260 bytes, checksum: 2257bda0b015d59ae4b9c14771e2df51 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo(marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-04-08T15:12:21Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_dis_dsrebouças.pdf: 2529260 bytes, checksum: 2257bda0b015d59ae4b9c14771e2df51 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-08T15:12:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_dis_dsrebouças.pdf: 2529260 bytes, checksum: 2257bda0b015d59ae4b9c14771e2df51 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015 / This is a text that organizes the issues that I have been researching about the images and their bifurcations, starting from the immersion experience in the installation Between the eyes, the desert, the work of Miguel Rio Branco on display in the pavilion that bears the name of the artist at the Institute INHOTIM - Brumadinho / MG. At from the thought of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, George Didi-Huberman, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Milton Santos, Stéphane Huchet, among others, propose thinking categories as: communication, contemporary, community. The guiding reflections of this research are: the tangency between communication and art; the definition of what constitutes contemporary category; the materiality of contemporary art images; problematizations about the experiences of looking at art installations as experiences of the body in space. Such issues arising from the immersive experiment of the work in question leads to the conclusion that the exhibition space is made possible by the construction of links that go beyond space, constituting an aesthetic encounters and relationships. / Este é um texto que organiza as questões que venho pesquisando acerca das imagens e das suas bifurcações, partindo da experiência de imersão na instalação Entre os olhos, o deserto, obra de Miguel Rio Branco em exposição no pavilhão que leva o nome do artista no Instituto INHOTIM - Brumadinho/MG. À partir do pensamento de autores como Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, George Didi-Huberman, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Milton Santos, Stéphane Huchet, dentre outros, proponho pensar categorias como: comunicação, contemporâneo, comunidade. As reflexões balizadoras dessa pesquisa são: o tangenciamento entre comunicação e arte; a delimitação do que vem a ser a categoria contemporâneo; a materialidade das imagens de arte contemporânea; problematizações sobre as experiências do olhar em instalações de arte como sendo experiências do corpo no espaço. Tais questões levantadas à partir do experimento imersivo da obra em questão, levam a considerar que o espaço de exposição torna-se possível pela construção de elos que vão além do espacial, constituindo uma estética do encontro e das relações.

Orientador: Florivaldo Menezes Filho / Resumo: O presente trabalho de pesquisa teve como objetivo fornecer subsídios para o melhor entendimento do pensamento melódico na música contemporânea. Por meio da análise descritiva e comparativa da estruturação melódica de quatro importantes peças do repertório pós-1945, verificou-se a hipótese de que elas preservam caracteríticas de épocas anteriores, assim como apresentam semelhanças entre si, o que permite que sejam relacionadas estilisticamente. As peças escolhids foram: Madrigal I, de Henri Pousseur; In Freundschaft, de Karlheinz Stockhausen; Sequenza IXa, de Luciano Berio; e Dialogue de l'ombre double, de Pierre Boulez. Elas foram escolhidas pela sua relevância no repertório e pelo fato de terem sido compostas para instrumento monódico solo, formação que força o discurso musical a se focar em aspectos melódicos. Os métodos analíticos aqui presentes baseiam-se principalmente em modelos propostos por Schoenberg (1996), Toch(1994) e De la Motte (1993). Os resultados das análises demonstraram que grande parte da construção melódica das peças analisadas é composta por estruturas e procedimentos que já se faziam presentes no repertório tradicional modal ou tonal. Ao mesmo tempo, os resultados destacam contribuições criativas enriquecedoras por parte dos compositores na utilização destes mesmos procedimentos e estruturas. / Abstract: The presente reseach aimed the better understanding of the melodic thinking in contemporary music. Through desciptive and comparative analysis of the melodic structure of four important plays of the post-1945 repertoire, it was verified the hypothesis that they preserve the characteristics of previous periods, as well as present similarities among each other, wich allows them to be styliscally related. The chosen works were: Madrigal I, of Henri Pousseur; In Freundschaft, of Karlheinz Stockhausen; Sequenza IXa, of Luciano Berio; and Dialogue de l'ombre double, of Pierre Boulez. They were chosen according to their relevance in the repertoire and because they were composed for solo monodic instrument a formation which induces the musical spreech to focus on melodic aspects. The analytical methods here presented are based mainly on propossed by Schoenberg (1996), Toch(1994) and De la Motte (1993). The results of the analysis demonstrated that most of the melodic construction of the pieces mentioned above is formed by structures and procedures that were already present in the traditional modal or tonal repertoire. At the same time, the results highligted enriching creative contributions by the composers in the use of these same procedures and structures. / Mestre

Currently, across dance studies, choreographies are usually discussed as representational of the choreographer, with little attention focused on the dancers who also bring the work into being. As well as devaluing the contribution that the dancer makes to the choreographic process, the dancer’s elision from mainstream discourse deprives the art form of a rich source of insight into the incorporating practices of dance. This practice-based research offers a new perspective on choreographic process through the experiential viewpoint of the participating dancer. It involves encounters with contemporary choreographers Rosemary Butcher (UK), John Jasperse (US), Jodi Melnick (US) and Liz Roche (Ire). Utilizing a mixed-mode research structure, it covers the creative process and performance of three solo dance pieces in Dublin in 2008, as well as an especially composed movement treatise, all of which are documented on the attached DVD. The main hypothesis presented is that the dancer possesses a moving identity which is a composite of past dance experience, anatomical structures and conditioned human movement. This is supported by explorations into critical theory on embodiment, including Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the habitus’. The moving identity is identified as accumulative, altering through encounters with new choreographic movement patterns in independent contemporary dance practice. The interior space of the dancer’s embodied experience is made explicit in chapter 3, through four discussions that outline the dancer’s creative labour in producing each choreographic work. Through adopting a postmodern critical perspective on human subjectivity, supported by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Alain Badiou, among others, the thesis addresses the inherent challenges which face independent contemporary dancers within their multiple embodiments as they move between different choreographic processes. In identifying an emergent paradigmatic shift in the role of dancer within dance- making practices, this research forges a new direction that invites further dancer-led initiatives in practice-based research.

Who you are! Who are you? was originally commissioned by the Juventas New Music Ensemble for their Spring 2019 concert celebrating the freedom of speech. Even before the premiere of the chamber ensemble version of this piece with Juventas I had already expanded it into an orchestral work which was read by the Boston University Symphony Orchestra during the Fall 2018 reading sessions. Following the chamber ensemble premiere I again revised the piece and it won the Boston University CFA Composition Department Prize for Performance with Orchestra and was given its orchestral premiere by the BUSO under the direction of Maestro Bramwell Tovey. When I received the initial commission I instantly knew that this piece must include text, considering that the premiere would be on a program celebrating the freedom of speech. I spent a long time looking for texts and finally settled on this one by the 12th century Benedictine Abbas, composer, and philosopher Hildegard von Bingen. Her words are an exhortation to unapologetic self-expression and inspired me to be more personal in my writing of this piece than ever before. As a young composer it is easy to be influenced by what you think audiences, teachers, and performers want to hear and not use your own authentic voice. It was frightening at first to be so honest and personal with my writing however, it was what the text demanded and has led to a finished work of which I am proud.