This doctoral project is concerned with gender and the way that transgender masculinities are manifested, articulated and debated through drama, theatre and performance. The central question of the research is how `performance' contributes to the process of constituting individual identities and communities, specifically transgender masculinities. The research engages with the multiple ways that the concepts or categories of the individual, of community and of performance are defined, and how they function and are experienced when transgender identities or transgender masculinities are central to a `performance event'. The particular individuals and groups of transgender-identified people, or people who might be described in relation to a trans framework of identity, are those for whom gender is not a fixed state rooted in a binary system, but a state that can be bent, moved or made malleable in order to fit according to individual need. The individuals and groups on whom I focus tend to have had their sex assigned female at birth and at some point in their lives have identified themselves as male rather than female. There are also individuals who do not self-identify as male but refute gender categorisation, thereby not identifying as female either. Moreover, there are people who still self-identify as female but have developed or produced markers of masculinity on their body that have a significant impact on their day-to-day living and in their performance work. In this thesis I will be referring to this range of varied identities as transgender masculinities. This research will be of relevance to contemporary theatre scholars, particularly those with an interest in the creation of avant-garde and community-generated practices. The research will also be of use to those interested in queer and non-normative identities as manifested through drama, theatre and performance, whether this is by solo artists or within project work with groups of people who identify as transgender, genderqueer or have an otherwise complex relationship to gender.

Playing the Cancer Card: Illness, Performance and Spectatorship investigates the experience of spectatorship in relation to illness, an area that has received comparatively little attention in Performance Studies. The thesis interrogates these concerns through original interviews, archival research, close textual readings of performances and performance documentation and draws on critical frameworks, primarily from performance, literary and cultural studies concerning spectatorship, illness, disability, documentation and narrative. The project analyses both my performances that exemplify being an object of spectatorship and my experiences as a spectator to the performance of illness. ! Playing the Cancer Card argues that performance, through the experiences of spectatorship that it invites, works to broker the chasm between embodied experience of illness and discourses of that experience. The Introduction reviews academic literature and examines relationships between illness and models of disability. In Chapter 1, readings of work by Sontag, Spence and Baker demonstrate how individuals may strategically reject public production of, and spectatorship to, their work. Chapter 2 analyses interviews with Baker and Marcalo, demonstrating how performance can generate tensions between artists and advocacy groups when modes of spectatorship — regarding propriety and community politics — are policed. In Chapter 3, an analysis of cancer blogs elucidates how they may redress limitations imposed by traditional narrative structures around illness, forging new relationships between the ill and their spectators. Here I also consider my performances that respond to the pervasiveness of traditional narratives. Chapter 4 examines Fun with Cancer Patients, my practice-based research project, and argues that by addressing constructions of cancer, one may create work that productively addresses spectators who both have and have not experienced cancer. In the Conclusion, I evaluate two of my projects that address illness tangentially, arguing that understanding ourselves as spectators and objects of spectatorship can expand discourses surrounding embodied experience, especially of illness.

This thesis is based on a practice based research project with women in prison led by Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw and myself. The project, Staging Human Rights II, took place in two prisons in England, HMP Highpoint and HMP and YOI Bullwood Hall, and two prisons in Brazil, Presidio Nelson Hungria and Penetenciaria Talavera Bruce. The research was conducted between September 2001 and June 2003. The project was part of a larger, umbrella programme, Staging Human Rights, which sought to find ways, through performance methodologies, in which the language of human rights could incorporate the everyday lives and experiences of people within the criminal justice system. Within this context, Weaver and Shaw called upon non-cognitive, postmodern performance strategies through which the women in prison witnessed their own lives through the testimony of performance. Theoretical considerations of witness and testimony frame the thesis, situating performance as an act of witness, and positioning testimony as an urgent and critical epistemological act in the field of Applied Performance. My research was guided by two questions: what can be known of the possibilities of performance by working with women in prison? What can be known of the context of women's prisons through performance? The thesis is structured into two sections. Section I, made up of Chapters 1-5, considers the theoretical and practical contexts in which the practice based research was undertaken. Section II, Chapter 6, considers each of the five performance residencies and In The House, the performance event in which the research culminated on 23 June 2003. This section calls upon performative writing to both describe and reflect upon the practice and its context. Through writing this thesis, I am bearing witness to what I have come to understand of the possibilities of performance and the experiences of women in prison through performance practice with women in prison.

Although theatre and performance photographs often illustrate scholarly works on theatre and performance, and despite recent interest in links between theatre and the still image from both theatre practitioners and theorists, there remains relatively little critical work on theatre photography. This thesis examines theatre photography, implementing approaches that are a departure from habitual conceptions of the photograph as document. Taking the intersection of theatre and photography as a vantage point, this thesis considers how photography might shape theatre rather than recording it, and how this might challenge notions of theatre's constitution, summoning theatre's own stillness, its citation, and its spectrality. This consideration takes place via analysis of a series of instances of theatre photography, interrogating the specific operation of photography and photographs in each. Following the introduction, Chapter 1 gives an overview of existing writing about theatre photography, from questions of archiving to reflection on 'performance documentation'. Chapter 2 concerns photographic studies of the corporeal mime of Etienne Decroux, examining how photographic stillness relates to mime practice. Chapter 3 concerns the theatre photographs of Josef Koudelka, and considers how this work documents disappearance. Chapter 4 focuses on Martine Franck, photographer at the Theatre du Soleil, and examines how theatre photographs correspond to the photographer's other work. The work of this same company is the subject of Chapter 5, where I consider Sophie Moscoso's use of photography as part of a working process, and the ways in which images affect stage practice. Chapter 6 concerns the work of New York performance photographer Dona Ann McAdams, and considers the how photographs perform. The conclusion considers the wider implications of this work, and signals future research that might draw on my findings.

The history of art and religion is intricately linked in Western culture. This thesis focuses on one strand of this relationship and is concerned with the role of performance practices in relation to spirituality in the West. Contemporary performance practice and theory are at the centre of this research. Case studies on the Roman Catholic Liturgy and the performance artist Marina Abramovi! are used to show how traditional analyses of spiritual performance have not accounted for the effects and affects of metaphysics in how we understand belief. I argue that examinations of spiritual performance are needed which do not try to understand such performances in terms of their representative meaning, but rather, seek to account for their performative qualities as practices that both instantiate and manifest belief. Performative theory has been used extensively to analyse language and human action, specifically the performance of gender. Here belief is taken as the subject of performative action and rituals are examined as performance practices which perform belief. Starting with Jacques Derrida, I begin a discussion of metaphysics and representation, tracing the nature of Western understandings of belief from Plato, to Friedrich Nietzsche, to Derrida, and to contemporary theological investigations into the nature of the human soul. This establishes the metaphysical history of the treatment of belief as well as various theoretical attempts to move past this model. The work of J.L. Austin, John R. Searle, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood is employed to examine belief through speech act theory as a verb and finally through performative theory as an action. The first half of the thesis contextualises Western belief as a culturally specific entity that has not been analysed or understood in relation to its physical and material aspects, as well as developing an analysis of performative action. The second half applies the performative approach to the case studies.

The rehearsal processes of theatre companies are an oft-neglected area of research in Drama and Performance Studies. My study of the Catalan devising collective Els Joglars and the Madrid producing venue Teatro de la Abadía seeks to redress the balance with a close analysis of methodologies employed in rehearsal. In both cases I have witnessed rehearsals first-hand; with Els Joglars observing preparations for En un lugar de Manhattan (2005); in the case of the Abadía working as assistant director on El burlador de Sevilla (2008). These observations are fundamental to a thesis where I have sought to place both companies in a local, national and international context. The thesis examines Els Joglars’ roots in mime and how they have generated a practice-based methodology by means of a hands-on exploration of ideas derived from practitioners as varied as Etienne Decroux and Peter Brook. With Teatro de la Abadía, the focus shifts to how the founder and Artistic Director José Luis Gómez developed exercises drawn from European practitioners such as Jacques Lecoq and Michael Chekhov in order to create his own actor-training centre in Madrid. In effect, both companies have created distinctive rehearsal processes by applying ideas and techniques from a wider European context to a Spanish theatre scene which had been seen to follow rather than develop trends and techniques visible in theatre across France, Italy and Germany. Critically, their hybrid rehearsal processes generate heightened theatrical results for the audience. This could be described as an experiential engagement, where the creative process has been consciously geared towards placing the audience in a ‘distinct situation’ and requiring them to respond accordingly. Thus the thesis shifts the focus of academic study away from product and towards process, demonstrating how an understanding of process assists in the reading of the theatrical product.

This thesis is constructed in three parts. Each one of them offers a reflection on the common ideas disseminated about Live Art, conceptual dance and postdramatic theatre, i.e. that these practices reject the notion of mimesis as it is supposed to represent reality, they reject text in favour of a phenomenological language and they produce a form of non-sense which should be translated into meaning. Each of these statements will be problematized. I will argue that Live Art is producing mimesis even if it works against representation and although its actions are performed for real. It does not represent reality, but neither does it present the Real. It is producing a version of the "Real", which is the definition of mimesis. I will then argue that if these practices create a phenomenological language, it relies on a form of writing that is being produced live by the work. Finally, I will propose that the non-sense constructed by this writing process should not be forced into a meaning, but should be read as a fluid linguistics, which in some instances will be concretely a linguistics of fluids. By this I intend to point out that the meaning of the constructed non-sense will never be fixed nor unique. The work only becomes meaningful because it remains permeable to meanings. These three steps all participate in the "undoing of meaning"; relying on a process involving destruction within construction to then allow reconstruction. Mimesis, logos and sense need to be taken apart before these concepts can be thought anew. It is the rigidity of the conventional systems of apprehension which has to become permeable to allow a fluid multiplicity of meanings. In conclusion I will draw some parallels between performance art and feminism in their appropriation of the concept of mimesis and their approach to language outside the structure of logos and I will suggest that the performances which explore and expose these concepts adopt a feminist philosophical strategy. 1 I chose to use this spelling closer to the French spelling of “non-sens”, which does not have in French the colloquial use it has in English and is more directly related to the philosophical concept. The hyphenated word better translates the idea of a reverse image of the word “sense”.

The aim of this thesis is to critically examine Weill‘s negotiation of American cultural industries and his collaborative practice in making musicals there. It addresses the influence of the earlier, now discredited, concept of ‗Two Weills‘, which has engendered an emphasis on identity within the current literature. It proposes that Weill scholarship has been further constrained by problematic perceptions of Weill‘s position as both a European modernist composer and an exile in America. Each of these contexts suggests romanticised notions of appropriate behaviour, for a composer, and of autonomy and separation from popular culture. This thesis examines how Weill troubles those notions by engaging with the musical, a so-called ‗middlebrow‘ form, with a disputed cultural value. It traces the reconsideration of the musical as a location for sociocultural analysis, highlighting David Savran‘s requirement that approaches to the musical recognise the form‘s material conditions of production. The thesis establishes its methodology built on Ric Knowles‘s cultural materialist approach to contemporary performance. This enables Weill‘s activities to be seen in their proper context: Weill‘s negotiation of entry into American art worlds, and the subsequent exchange of economic assets and Weill‘s active management of his cultural capital through the media are followed for the first time, clearly revealing the composer‘s working practices. The thesis suggests that Weill is a practitioner who consciously engages with American cultural industries. It addresses questions of authorship, demonstrating how Weill‘s contribution can be understood within complex sets of agencies. It establishes how Weill can be seen through his own model of the ‗composer as dramatist‘ and through Adorno‘s depiction of the composer as a Musikregisseur.

Play in 2 acts. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Online access to this thesis has been removed at the request of the author (12/8/2014) / Department: English.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University.