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A Research Report submitted towards a MAAD by Course Work and Research Report / This is an auto ethnographic project in which I explore how my personal and cultural narratives can be used for healing and transformation through a theatre making process. I look at performance as an object of making meaning while placing myself at the centre of the study as the subject of this research. During this process, I was looking at discovering a personal theatre making language with an aim of finding my voice. The outcome of my journey was an experimental creative project titled Eenganga which was performed in an alternative and nontraditional form in terms of space, text and the overall theatre making process. This study is an account of a journey that initially began as a performance ethnography project which collected cultural narratives of black urban traditional healers from Katutura, Windhoek, Namibia. There was an internal and an external data collection process. My body as a site of knowledge was the main research instrument.

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My critical essay maps out the relationship between verbal and non-verbal information in contemporary theatrical writing. It uses Lehmann's theory of a post-dramatic theatre and Pfister's analytical input to investigate different configurations of the information given by the characters' speech and the information given by their physical actions. The ways in which these variables interrelate define the type of affiliation between theatre and drama in any given text. My essay contends that the verbal and the non-verbal represent the two ends of the spectrum of possibilities of any written theatre text. The predominance of one over the other will determine the extent to which the 'presence' of the dramatist intervenes in the staging of the work. Using Old Times as a case study, I examine the way in which Pinter stretches the gap between the verbal and the non-verbal; by using his knowledge of the stage, he confronts the remoteness of the literary in theatrical writing. My play Southern Quest recognizes the minds of the readers and of the spectators as the place where the closure of the gap occurs. Its stage directions make of the stage, the properties and actions a creation that is parallel to the fictional one (only present in the dialogue of the characters). There is a permanent discrepancy, not a contradiction, between what is said and what and where it is done that demands that the actual assembly of the possible fiction takes place in the receiver's mind. The creative component draws on numerous elements analysed in the critical work, such as the discordance between the verbal and the non-verbal and the use of narrative monologues in theatrical writing. The lack of agreement between the verbal and the non-verbal-a heightened discordance at the beginning and the end of the play, with a minimal discrepancy towards the centre-mirrors the characters' journey throughout the play: from existential doubt to physical agony and back. The theoretical concerns addressed in the essay are explored in the writing of the play and my main formal drive in the creative piece is to explore the division between theatre and drama from within the text.

Thesis (DTech. degree in Drama) -- Tshwane University of technology, 2011. / The central theoretical statement of this study is that if one wishes to teach dramatic narrative structure, then an instructivist instrument such as an AVA would be useful, while one takes care of teaching the application of such a structure in a constructivist fashion. The purpose of the study was to design an effective teaching and learning (T&L) instrument (DVD AVA), justify the design through a literature study, and test the efficacy of the AVA through approved quantitative research methods. The research results showed a significant increase (12.6%) in the students construction of knowledge and a more skillful application of screenplay structure when they were trained by way of the AVA intervention as opposed to the traditional method.

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The subject of this dissertation is John Arden's dramaturgy. It covers the stage plays written by Arden (alone or with Margaretta D'Arcy) during their career in the "professional" theatre--that is, from The Waters of Babylon to and including The Island of the Mighty. It approaches them as one dramaturgically coherent opus and identifies and examines the basic artistic and cognitive emphases immanent to it. / The study explores two fundamental and related constitutive features of Arden's dramaturgy: diachronically, its adherence to the forms, conventions, and techniques of popular or traditional theatres, and synchronically, its radical political emphasis as expressed in a categorically plebeian and collectivistic bias. It begins by situating Arden in his time and his tradition, and then discusses how other significant choices of his--the emphasis on story-telling (Part 2), the supra-individual approach to dramaturgic agents (Part 3), and his ludic theatricality (Part 4)--flow out of and contribute to the consistency of his dramaturgy. Part 5 focuses on a detailed analysis of The Island of the Mighty. / Arden's rejection of the established bourgeois theatre with its illusionist character and individualist ideology and his orientation towards a dialectical show distinguishes his work from that of his English contemporaries. It can be linked to that radical alternative tradition in modern dramaturgy which culminates in Bertolt Brecht.

The thesis is divided in two sections; the first section consists in a critical document while the second presents my own creative writing, a play intitled Le Foyer. My use of theatrical writing in Le Foyer sought to privilege certain litterary techniques and dramatic processes elaborated by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) in his manifesto The Theatre and his Double (1938). The thesis' theoretical section explores various issues at stake in my creative writing exercise: the link between the play Les Cenci and Artaud's metaphysic is questionned. I aimed to demonstrate how Les Cenci is an improbable example of the concept of Theatre of Cruelty. I stressed the liberties the playwright has taken with his theory when putting it into practice in a first attempt to create total theatre.

My critical essay maps out the relationship between verbal and non-verbal information in contemporary theatrical writing. It uses Lehmann's theory of a post-dramatic theatre and Pfister's analytical input to investigate different configurations of the information given by the characters' speech and the information given by their physical actions. The ways in which these variables interrelate define the type of affiliation between theatre and drama in any given text. My essay contends that the verbal and the non-verbal represent the two ends of the spectrum of possibilities of any written theatre text. The predominance of one over the other will determine the extent to which the 'presence' of the dramatist intervenes in the staging of the work. Using Old Times as a case study, I examine the way in which Pinter stretches the gap between the verbal and the non-verbal; by using his knowledge of the stage, he confronts the remoteness of the literary in theatrical writing. My play Southern Quest recognizes the minds of the readers and of the spectators as the place where the closure of the gap occurs. Its stage directions make of the stage, the properties and actions a creation that is parallel to the fictional one (only present in the dialogue of the characters). There is a permanent discrepancy, not a contradiction, between what is said and what and where it is done that demands that the actual assembly of the possible fiction takes place in the receiver's mind. The creative component draws on numerous elements analysed in the critical work, such as the discordance between the verbal and the non-verbal and the use of narrative monologues in theatrical writing. The lack of agreement between the verbal and the non-verbal-a heightened discordance at the beginning and the end of the play, with a minimal discrepancy towards the centre-mirrors the characters' journey throughout the play: from existential doubt to physical agony and back. The theoretical concerns addressed in the essay are explored in the writing of the play and my main formal drive in the creative piece is to explore the division between theatre and drama from within the text.

No description available.