abstract: Guided by Clifford Geertz's notion of culture as symbolic stories people tell themselves about themselves, the purpose of this study is to examine how youth in an urban area of Phoenix, AZ experience collectively creating and performing original documentary theatre. I pay attention to the ways youth participants--also known as artist-researchers--construct, perform, and/or perceive their identities as they practice drama techniques including improvisation, physical theatre, and Theatre of the Oppressed for the purposes of making docutheatre for social justice. First the artist-researchers chose the topics for their play. Next, they learned and applied drama and research skills to gather and examine data sources used to construct a script that explores hiding and exposure. In the process of sharing and gathering true stories our unique docutheatre-making culture was created. This multimodal qualitative research case study draws upon the genres of arts-based research and visual ethnography as primary modes of data collection and interpretation. Narrative description and the ethnodramatic mode of representation are used in conjunction with still images and this study's companion website (www.meant2see.com) to report research findings. Primary data sources include participant observation fieldnotes, over twenty hours of recorded video footage, photographs, and the project's original script and performance of To Be What's Not Meant to See . Further data include journal entries, drawings, and social media. All data were coded using In Vivo and Process Coding methods and analyzed through a cultural studies lens. Codes were sorted into phenomenological categories representative of recurring ideas and themes. Assertions were then solidified once specific key linkages were constructed. This study's key assertions are: Key Assertion 1: Participation in devising documentary social justice theatre influences and affects the construction, perception, and/or performance of urban youth identities through profound connections made with interviewees during the interview process and through the collection of true stories that provide new information and rare opportunities for self-reflection and self-realization; Key Assertion 2: Portions of the roles urban youth play in their identity narratives are disguised or hidden--purposefully, reluctantly, and/or subconsciously--in order to appeal to friends, families, or the codes of dominant culture. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Theatre 2014

This research explores the validity and value of ‘solo devising’ as a means for specifying a category of theatre-making that has been little discussed, compared to group devising, in existing literature on devising and postdramatic theatre. Primary source material was obtained through carrying out extended interviews with five experienced British theatre practitioners who have made work that could be described as solo devised performance: Tim Etchells, Bobby Baker, Mike Pearson, Nigel Charnock and Wendy Houstoun. In analysing these interviews, referred to in detail but not reproduced in full, the enquiry draws on a range of writings, including Oddey, Heddon, Harvie, Alexander and George, on devising and making performance and in particular on Melrose’s concept of practitioner-centred expert knowledge, Lehmann’s notion of the postdramatic and Sennett’s specification of expertise in craftsmanship. Chapter One considers solo practice in relation to the idea of a solo devising economy, the interviewees’ professional work and other experimental solo practices within theatre, performance, dance and art. Chapter Two explores how the interviewees create multiple performance personae, doing and undoing notions of individuality and autobiography through strategies of working ‘about’, ‘from’ and ‘beyond’ the self. Chapter Three explores solo devising processes, involving research, generation of material, composition, performance and ‘orchestration’. Chapter Four scrutinises different kinds of collaboration, including ‘audiencing’, as both enabling and productively confounding activities occurring within solo devising. Chapter five specifies some findings about solo devising: that it both involves expert, crafted, individual working, requiring orchestration of a high number of activities and skills, and, simultaneously, practices of negotiated authorship with other artists and audiences, enabling a potentially political reading of its distinctly ambiguous working. An additional finding is that close attention to what expert practitioners say about their work can yield rich information about a specific practice.