This research-creation thesis describes and analyzes the dramaturgical methodologies of verbatim theatre – a form of documentary theatre that uses transcripts as the dominant source of its dialogue – through the practical exercise of play writing. This paper marks the theoretical component of my thesis, which analyzes both the dramaturgical process and the historical context of my play Exhibit A. Using verbatim transcripts from legal evidence for its dialogue, the play examines the psychology of two teenage boys responsible for the brutal rape and murder of an 18-year-old Canadian woman in 2010. As documentary theatre emphasizes socio-political themes, this thesis considers the dramaturgical, aesthetic, and ethical considerations of verbatim theatre through my experience as a playwright and researcher. Acknowledging both the historical antecedents of documentary theatre and its contemporary examples, this thesis will define an original typology of verbatim theatre entitled the “Subcategories of Verbatim Theatre”. These subcategories are identified as Tribunal, Literary, Historical Drama, Expository and Participatory. Each privileges different types and usages of documents, which are further defined as being primarily related to “text” or “aural” based testimony. The thesis relates the dramaturgical principles of each subcategory to artistic choices made in Exhibit A. A description of the various incarnations of verbatim and documentary theatre, as well as an analysis of my experience as a documentary playwright examines the dramatic representation of reality as highly constructed in this form of theatre where the selection and editing of a documentary play's archive is a creative process that is not dissimilar from the creation of fictional drama. In that sense, the documentary genre can be said to present a dramatic representation of the playwright's subjective version of the truth. Exhibit A thus stands as my creative reconstruction of the evidence presented in the Kimberly Proctor murder trial.

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-creation thesis describes and analyzes the dramaturgical methodologies of verbatim theatre – a form of documentary theatre that uses transcripts as the dominant source of its dialogue – through the practical exercise of play writing. This paper marks the theoretical component of my thesis, which analyzes both the dramaturgical process and the historical context of my play Exhibit A. Using verbatim transcripts from legal evidence for its dialogue, the play examines the psychology of two teenage boys responsible for the brutal rape and murder of an 18-year-old Canadian woman in 2010. As documentary theatre emphasizes socio-political themes, this thesis considers the dramaturgical, aesthetic, and ethical considerations of verbatim theatre through my experience as a playwright and researcher. Acknowledging both the historical antecedents of documentary theatre and its contemporary examples, this thesis will define an original typology of verbatim theatre entitled the “Subcategories of Verbatim Theatre”. These subcategories are identified as Tribunal, Literary, Historical Drama, Expository and Participatory. Each privileges different types and usages of documents, which are further defined as being primarily related to “text” or “aural” based testimony. The thesis relates the dramaturgical principles of each subcategory to artistic choices made in Exhibit A. A description of the various incarnations of verbatim and documentary theatre, as well as an analysis of my experience as a documentary playwright examines the dramatic representation of reality as highly constructed in this form of theatre where the selection and editing of a documentary play's archive is a creative process that is not dissimilar from the creation of fictional drama. In that sense, the documentary genre can be said to present a dramatic representation of the playwright's subjective version of the truth. Exhibit A thus stands as my creative reconstruction of the evidence presented in the Kimberly Proctor murder trial.

One-Third of a Nation, the Second Amendment, a Living Newspaper Play Thesis By Linda Ann Watt for a MFA Degree in Theatre Pedagogy Documentary theatre, including living newspapers and verbatim theatre, use socio-political commentary at critical moments in history to disseminate facts and offer ideological critique dramatizing the crisis through the lens of emotion, which can incite societal change. This thesis explores this didactic medium with a written play about the second Amendment and gun violence.

Despite the upsurge in fact-based and verbatim theatre in recent years (Fogarth and Megson 2009: 1), engagement with the form as a technique equally suitable for poetry has been especially limited. This thesis examines the deployment of verbatim methods in a series of poems which constitute the creative element, written in order to (re)present expressions of identity and ideas of imagined community during the 2011 riots in Birmingham. Located in the context of this particular disorder, United We Stand explores both individual and group experiences of the events that took place in Birmingham. The series of verbatim poems draws on data extracted from 25 semi-structured, life-story interviews with participants who lived or worked in the city during these incidents. In doing so, both the thesis and the creative practice that informs it critique Benedict Anderson s earlier model of the nation as an imagined community (1983; 1991; 2006). While quantitative network analysis is deployed to establish the ties between media channels and ordinary citizens that were maintained online through social networking, creative and reported responses published by these same media sources are analysed in relation to national narrative conventions (Billig 2001; Mihelj 2011). This demonstrates that new and popular media played a significant role in (re)presenting imagined communities in this setting. By providing evidence for the existence of these shifting imagined communities across various geographical, social and cultural scales, the thesis suggests that Anderson s decision to focus on the nation is problematic. It argues that his framework is partial and that a new definition of imagined community as both fluid and emergent is necessary. Literary context for the thesis is found in the origins and developments of verbatim; exploring early documentary theatre practice and contemporary verbatim productions by Richard Norton-Taylor, Alecky Blythe, and Gillian Slovo. Through an analysis of Bhanu Kapil Rider s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001), the thesis illustrates how existing poets have organised comparable methods in their own work. This culminates in a demonstration of practice as research by producing a ground-breaking body of work: United We Stand is a series of poems crafted through the deployment of verbatim methods. The thesis demonstrates that deploying verbatim methods in poetry is suitable for (re)presenting expressions of identity and ideas of imagined community in this context. By transforming the voices of ordinary people of Birmingham, United We Stand reflects the media narratives that precede it: the poems are a direct engagement with the same fluid and emergent imagined communities that they argue existed. More importantly, though, this thesis goes beyond contemporary techniques of verbatim and establishes the evolutionary nature of it as a poetic practice. The combination of verbatim methods and visual-digital tools that I deploy throughout United We Stand results in a new creative process which I have termed Digital Poetic Mimesis.

No description available.

No description available.

Projektet bygger på åtta veckors fältarbete på en oberoende teater i Peking våren 2017,baserat på antropologisk och konstnärlig metod. Det är ett försök att utveckla begreppet konstnärlig etnografi, samt tillämpa det praktiskt. I detta är konsten inte huvudsakligen en produkt eller en presentationsform, utan ett sätt att tänka, att förhålla sig till världen. Materialet består av fältanteckningar, video, foto, rörelsematerial, personliga berättelser, minnen av dofter, ljud och smaker och någonting så vagt som stämning – stadens tempo, känslan i en repsituation… Hur kan scenen förmedla en plats och dess människor? Kan jag levandegöra mina upplevelser så att de blir angelägna för någon annan än mig själv? Det praktiska arbetet utgör ett försök att besvara dessa frågor. Vilka bilder har vi, och vad ser vi när vi speglar oss i varandra? Vad betyder det att våra världar redan är sammanflätade? Spegeln som bild och lek, träder fram både som tema och metod. Begrepp som exotism, representation och mötet med den andre diskuteras, liksom växlingen mellan identifikation och främmandegörande (”othering”) som en grund för förståelse. Hur påverkas människors liv av Kinas snabba samhällsförändringar, balansgången mellan socialism och kapitalism? Och vilken roll har scenkonsten i detta? Här diskuteras frågor om yttrandefrihet, liksom relationen mellan politik och spelstil, så kallad ”fejk realism”. Frågorna knyts samman genom en diskussion om autenticitet, följd av en betraktelse om utanförskap, för att slutligen återvända till det personliga mötet, till en berättelse om kontaktsökande – om vänskap. / This project is based on eight weeks of fieldwork at an independent theatre in Beijing in the spring of 2017, based on anthropological and artistic methods. It is an attempt to develop the concept artistic ethnography, and apply it practically. In this, art is seen not mainly as a product or a form of presentation, but as a way of thinking, of relating to the world. The material consists of field notes, video, pictures, movement material, personal stories, the memories of smells, sounds and tastes and of something as vague as atmosphere – the pace of the city, the feeling of a rehearsal situation... How can the stage render a place and its people? Can I bring my experiences to life, making them relevant for anybody else? The practical artistic work with an exposition is an attempt to answer these questions. What images do we have, and what do we see when we mirror each other? What does it mean that our worlds are already intertwined? The mirror as image and play appear both as a theme and a method. Concepts like exoticism, representation and the encounter with the other are discussed, as well as the movement between identification and othering, contributing to understanding. How are people’s lives affected by China’s rapid social changes, balancing between socialism and capitalism? What role do the performing arts have in this? Questions about freedom of expression are discussed, along with the relation between politics and styles of acting, the so called “fake realism”. The research questions are tied together in a discussion of authenticity, to finally return to the personal encounter and a story of seeking contact, of friendship. / <p>Sinnlig - the movie finns länkad dels i dokumentet och dels som egen fil</p> / Movit –Direction and Dramaturgy of movement based Performing Arts