The central problem of this thesis is how a teacher may engage with risk. I offer a reconsideration of the term and suggest that risk is individual, perceptual and experientially driven. I use a Heideggerian (1962) frame when I suggest that, when taking a risk, a person is potentially encountering existential death. Using my own practice as a trapeze artist, I reveal how risk is manifested for the students I teach - how it can profoundly challenge and unsettle them- and how I as a teacher am charged with ensuring that they are empowered rather than stultified or domesticated by the risk. I call this enacted skill ‘pedagogic tact’. By combining Jacques Rancière’s notion of Universal Education (1991) with Martin Heidegger’s ontological appreciation of being-towards-death (1962), I propose that what teachers awaken within students is knowledge of the possibility of death and of not-death within certain pedagogic encounters. I cannot know, measure or prove whether this knowledge has been achieved. However, I can document and describe the students’ relationship with the teacher within these moments. This document therefore becomes a description of student-teacher encounters when the teacher attends towards the emancipation of the student. The combination of reflective research methods from David Tripp (1993), Max Van Manen (1990), Della Pollock (Pollock in Phelan and Lane, 1998) and Jonathan Smith et al (2009) provides a means for phenomenological hermeneutic analysis. I have reflected upon my work with five students over the course of five days of trapeze training, extracted what Tripp would call ‘critical incidents’ between teacher and student and considered their meaning (1993:3). This research is a documentation of engaged pedagogy. It is a performative thesis that ruminates upon how I teach aerial work. There are many findings that seem apparent at the time of writing up. I repetitively circulate around the notion of death, failure, rupture, domestication, entrapment, sacrifice, vulnerability, sobriety and pain as significant elements that describe my work with risk. These concepts are balanced with words such as poetry, liberation, love, strength, glory, resolution and joy. There appears to be a second paradox of teaching that sits alongside and dialogues with the Kantian ‘freedom through coercion’ (1960:699); it is summed up by aerialist and teacher Matilda Leyser in her description of aerial work as ‘strength through vulnerability’ (2007). In order to enable the students’ strength to be challenged, witnessed and supported, there needs to be vulnerability from them, from their carers, from the teacher and from the institution. This vulnerability is not imposed, or bestowed, but is ‘owned’ by the student and teacher in their anxiety and in their choice to, in a Heideggerian sense, comport themselves to that which matters most (Heidegger, 1962). In these moments, anxiety reminds the student that they might die; it also reminds them that they can be strong in the face of possible death. This paradox of vulnerability and strength is synthesised or ‘held’ by the teacher’s tact. The new knowledge that I assert, therefore, is a description and mapping of pedagogic tact. Through this new knowledge, I explore the possibility of becoming a better teacher.

This thesis was an endeavor to find the drama available for the elementary children of Portland, Oregon. In deciding what drama was for children two different forms were first researched. Children’s theatre done by adults such as in community services, educational programs and professional and commercial theatres were studied. Drama by children, referred to as the less formalized drama, creative dramatics was also investigated. To further examine the background of children’s theatre in the United States, various children’s theatres around the country were studied including the University Children’s Theatre at Northwestern under the direction of Winifred Ward and Goodman Memorial Children’s Theatre in Chicago under the direction of Charlotte Chorpenning. With the advent of the educational field into children’s theatre culminating with the Children’s Theatre Conference the movement became wide spread throughout the United States. A great deal has been done to spark children’s drama not only in the viewing of children’s plays in production but affording children actual participation in creative drama workshops and children’s productions. More and more community theatres, commercial groups and universities are doing children’s drama throughout the nation. In an effort to find what was being offered to the Portland children in drama, the Portland Public Grade Schools were first approached. With the help of the Language Arts Supervisor five areas of drama for children were researched through reading and interviews. Although the Portland Public Grade Schools have no drama courses instructed by specific drama teachers they do encourage drama to be correlated into the classroom program and taught in “in service” courses for their teachers. The “model school program” has drama as a definite course and the Portland schools offer a summer school which has a creative drama course available to the elementary school children. The University of Portland, a Catholic university in Portland, has achieved the most definite progress in the Portland area in children’s theatre. They not only produce children’s plays during the school year but offer creative drama and playwriting in their course of study. Under the instruction and production of Mrs. Catherine Roberts for the last six years they are striving to bring children’s theatre to the Portland children and their teachers. Portland does offer some excellent theatre for children in the community. The Portland Junior League, a service group, has nationally been involved throughout the years with their children’s play productions by their groups for the school children of their communities. Now, after turning their productions over to Portland University they still maintain a very worthwhile program of puppetry for the school children of Portland. Portland Junior Civic Theatre, one of the oldest children’s theatre groups in Portland, not only produces children’s productions by children but conducts a children’s drama school throughout the year. The Portland Park Bureau also takes an active part particularly during the summer in children’s drama and training. The newest to Portland is the Playmaker’s Group, relatively young but eager in its endeavor for the children of the area. Their efforts include both productions and schooling on a creative drama promise, with improvisational plays by the adult Playmaker casts. Children’s theatre in Portland is developing but has faced many problems and has many more to surmount. The progress of the active workers in this movement show hope for the future for the children of Portland. The appendix of the thesis is devoted to several programs involved with the teaching of drama. First is a course in creative drama offered to college students in the colleges and universities having such courses in their curriculum. A creative drama course correlated with the regular classroom subjects in the Portland Grade School Curriculum is also included. Last, a summer school plan for community theatre is shown. All the arts combine in the theatre, decor, the dance, impersonation, effective speech, the song, pantomime, the projection of personality, the art of suppressing self and even ill will, for the unity of effort. Hundreds of other arts could be listed including the art of living together and the art of creative imagination. That is why the play can never be omitted from child education.

Samuel Beckett’s writing stalks the progress of twentieth century art and culture. Seen as both symptomatic of the practices of high Modernism, as well as influential within the fragmented tropes of postmodernity, his drama is often referred to as exploring the limits of an incrementally reductive approach to performance in which fine margins – through time and space; sound and image – are used in the determination of an authentic rendering of his work. This study argues that it is the figure of the actor, in all its rich signifying complexity, which provides us with a lens through which we can evaluate Beckett’s work for theatre and other media. In considering the Beckettian actor, the study grounds a poetics of performance in a principally phenomenological discourse in which theatre history and popular culture throughout the twentieth century is seen as a key factor both in Beckett’s writing and theatre directing, as well as in the often contested development of the actor’s craft. Throughout, it is the theme of music and musicality that provides the actor with a starting point, or modus vivendi, in which the individual self or personality of the actor is valorized alongside other practices based on acquired technique and its application. This study does not propose instruction or a range of techniques for the actor to pursue in furthering their understanding of Beckett’s canon. Instead, this work establishes an understanding of the Beckettian actor in which strategies of implication, born out of sometimes paradoxical representations of silence, absence and abstraction, subordinate acting pedagogies based on programmed curricula. This examination of an implied actor illustrates the various ways in which notable, as well as relatively unknown, actors have sought to reconcile some of these issues. In doing so, the study also interrogates my own creative practice as a director and performer of Beckett’s drama over a fifteen-year period.

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No description available.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Boston University.

This dissertation examines the relation between ‘risk’ and ‘performance’ through analysis of examples of contemporary theatre and performance practice commissioned, developed and produced under the New Labour government. The project is multidisciplinary and materialist. It problematises constructions of risk in theatre and performance studies as either inhering in the identity of the artist, as a dynamic specific to genre or indeed a discipline-specific value. In view of the explosion of social scientific interest in ‘risk’ which gathered momentum in the early 1990s, it follows work by theorists of neoliberal governmentality, geography and cultural studies to suggest that a more productive and historically specific treatment of the concept is one informed by political economy. Neoliberal policy rejects the welfare state’s collectivisation of risk and characteristically redistributes risk to individual, entrepreneurialised subjects. New Labour, seeking to produce ‘inclusion’, has deployed a managerial cultural policy in the service of this aim, the chief concerns of which are the ‘ethical training’ of social subjects and the economic regeneration of post- industrial sites. I analyse closely the mediation of four figures of contemporary political economic concern in theatre and performance: the asylum seeker, the young person ‘at risk’, the sex worker and the entrepreneur. On the basis of these analyses, I make two key claims. Firstly, that culture’s supplementary role to the state manifests in these works in a preoccupation with ‘value’. Secondly, that their strategies of, or concerns with aesthetic realism and immersion correlate to the delegation of risk to individuals imagined to operate in a ‘community’ space. The necessary implication of social subjects not in unproblematically communal relations but in systems of production and exchange will burst through in performance in the form of theatricality – a cognizance not of an immersive ‘community’ space, but of agonistic, dialectical relations.

The thesis focuses on the concept of neutrality in the works of contemporary European (post 1990s) choreographers. While broad ideas around neutrality are considered, the thesis primarily engages with Roland Barthes’ definition of neutrality as a structural term: 'every inflection that, dodging or baffling the paradigmatic, oppositional structure of meaning, aims at the suspension of the conflictual basis of discourse'. I argue that the minimalist work of Judson Church, New York City, is anticipating the interest in the neutral that will more strongly formulate itself in dance theatre after the 1990s. In the first chapter on Jérôme Bel, the concept of neutrality is introduced as a general idea, together with its inherent problem. The 'problem' is not that this or that element that Bel chooses cannot be perceived as neutral, but that neutral or stage zero can never be neutral enough. The second chapter, dedicated to the work of Thomas Lehmen, explores the idea of 'neutralization' in relation to the notion of the self in Lehmen's performance, where 'It is not I or you who lives: 'one' (une vie) lives in us' (P. Hallward). In the third chapter I argue that in Raimund Hoghe’s performances, love is conceived essentially as a balance between narcissism and pure object-love – as a neutral state. The fourth chapter, on Croatia’s BADco., gravitates around the ways in which group processes function, arguing that the idea of the neutral is located in the ‘invisible hand’ of emergence. The thesis shifts academic performance analysis towards a more concept-based approach, unpicking and/or constructing timeless, abstract and broad concepts and ideas that the work of these choreographers resonates with.

Theatre, Theatricality, and Resistance is concerned with how certain elements of contemporary Western - mainly British and Hungarian - culture are manifested through theatrical activity, both on and off stage. In so doing, the thesis asks the extent to which resistance is pc'ssible in contemporary theatre and theatricality. The thesis argues that conventional Western theatre is grounded in escapism and nostalgia. Restricted by its own institutional system, ideological function, and commercial aims, conventional theatre reaffirms the spectators' psychological and emotional desires, and confirms the hegemonic views and assumptions of contemporary postindustrial societies. In so doing, it silences the various voices available in society and erases even the possibility of resistance. Then the thesis proposes that while theatre is regarded as a marginalized commodity on the cultural market, theatricality has now produced a number of new practices in postindustrial societies. As the everyday appears as representation in various, constantly evolving and continuously improvised, collective and individual cultural perfor'nances, theatricality is not only thoroughly utilised by dominant social groups, but is also open to resistant voices left out of public discourses. These voices express their resistance by rewriting the means, practices, and strategies that the dominant culture employs. Finally, the thesis investigates those theatre practices (labelled `resistant') that are alert to recent changes in theatricalised society. These practices reconsider social, political, and cultural boundaries; confront logocentricity; and place equal emphasis on 2 visual, oral, textual, and proximal elements, as well as the audience's creative-interactive participation. Theatre can thus reflect on the anomalies of the theatricalised society, social and sexual (in)difference, gender assumptions, and ethnic stereotyping, and resist the lure of power. Through these practices, theatre may attain complexity, endangering institutions, hierarchies and power, and offer alternatives to the dominant ideology by fusing popular and high culture, and giving visual, textual, intellectual and sensual pleasure to its participants.

Centring on Peer Gynt's onion as a symbol of modern man's "dissolved" self, this thesis is a study of the changing concept of "self" and its effect on the development of dramatic technique from Ibsen's Brand and Peer Gynt, through Strindberg's "dream plays, " to the plays of the three most influential post-war British playwrights, Beckett, Osborne, and Pinter. The aim of this comparative study is not to "prove" direct influence, but to demonstrate affinities and to trace the continuing process of the "dissolving self" from Brand's monumental concept of man as a being essentially divine, to Beckett's tramps picturing themselves as worms in a God-forsaken universe, and from Peer Gynt's uncentred onion self, which still adds up to a tremendous personality, to Pinter's "classic female figure" who is divested of personality as well as of self. The philosophical dissolution of man's essential Godgiven self and the redefinition of the human personality in existentialist terms as simply the sum of one's actions, habits, or roles, has its corollary in dramatic technique, of which the most radical example is Strindberg's A Dream Play, where the Dreamer's self is projected on stage, not as one indelible personality, which is still the case in Peer Gynt, but as a motley gallery of "dream characters, " each representing one aspect of the Dreamer's (the poet's) discontinuous self. Beckett's Krapp, spooling back the tapes of his former selves in search of his quintessential "I" and discovering that the "self" is merely a string of discarded habits; Osborne's Archie Rice playing for time against the inevitable annihilation of his inauthentic comedian's mask by "the man with the hook"; and Pinter's stupefied Stanley Webber being "crowned" by his persecutors with a bowler hat, the symbol of conformity, and hence of non-identity, are all modern counterparts of Peer Gynt, the "Emperor of Self. "