This thesis is a 'practice-led' project that uses observational documentation methods, a long-term collaboration with three live artists, and a narrative analysis to encourage a visual display of 'knowing' the person who makes live art, the performance work itself and the reality of producing and archiving live art. My practice of documenting live performances produces digital representations of the three artists I collaborated with. The fragmented and non-linear expressions of the live performances, which can be viewed in the video documents, also find echo in the life history interviews of the artists. Triangulated with an examination of the artists' websites, these diverse texts provide insight into how the live artists make sense of their embodied autobiographical experiences in a virtual environment. A post-structuralist narrative analysis proposes that the live and online performance-narratives constitute the artists' self as 'an artist' and examines these texts for ideas of the 'self-portrait' and of 'life as experienced'. The research suggests this is especially helpful to the audience's meaning-making processes when engaging with Live Art. The thesis investigates the three artists' representations of the body, specifically their strategies to compel a disruptive reading of nudity, femininity and motherhood. Other performative strategies found in these artists' work lead to discussions on ritual enfleshed in performance, based on Richard Schechner's (1995) understanding of iterative practices, and of participatory incantations that integrate narratives found in myths into narratives of selfhood and community. This thesis aims to develop the understanding of contemporary performance art pratice through examples of three artists' autobiographical performativity in live and online environments. The thesis advances narrative theory beyond its literary framework through a visual and practice-based approach. By linking narrative theory with visual methods this project seeks to demonstrate that experiential approaches could be relevant to narrtaive researches, visual anthropologists, performance ethnographers, as well as live artists, all faced with the inevitability of mediatisation. It contributes to ideas on the digital dispersions of the live artists' identity as not a fracturing of the unified body experienced in live performance but instead as a place for the artists to exercise agency through virtual performativity. The thesis consists of two parts, a website (http://bsdroth.wix.com/thesis2013) and a written text. The online videos and the written text, when read together, form a performative analysis towards the 'knowing who' of the artists. It contributes to the growing interest in methodologies that investigate, document and present cultural experiences and their perceived value. The online presentation of my practice also demonstrates the digital and virtual environment the live artists' work operates in, as exemplified in this thesis. The website is a physical manifestation of integral ideas in this project, around authenticity, ownership and virtual experiences.

This practice-as-research project discusses modes, processes and aesthetics of contemporary dramaturgy, as practiced in experimental theatre and dance works in Europe from the 1990s onwards. In order to do this, the project draws particularly on discourses around ‘drama’ and suggests that the term can be redefined and usefully rehabilitated for both analysis and the creation of experimental performances. More specifically, this project defines drama (deriving from the Greek dro=act) as stage action, and dramaturgy (deriving from the Greek drama + ergo= work) as a practice that works endlessly for the creation of this drama/action on stage and is therefore always connected with it. In order to approach the newly proposed notion of ‘experimental drama’, this research uses the six main dramatic elements offered by Aristotle in his Poetics: plot, character, language, thought, the visual and music. Furthermore, it adds a seventh element: the spectator and contemporary understandings around the conditions of spectatorship. It then offers an analysis of dramaturgical processes and aesthetics of experimental stage works through these elements. Given that this is a practice-as-research project, it is accordingly multi-modal and offers its perspectives on dramaturgy and experimental drama through both critical and performance texts, documentation traces (photographs and video recordings) of artistic practice – all present in this thesis – and a live event; all these modes complement each other and move constantly between the stage and the page to proceed with the research’s inquiries. The current thesis has borrowed the dramaturgical structure of two artistic projects, created within the frame of this research practice, to generate its writings. The introductory parts of this text place the work within the discourse on practice-as-research and discuss the project’s proposal for an analysis of contemporary dramaturgy through drama. The Short (Research) Stories that follow analyze experimental works, created both within the frame of this research practice and outside it, by other artists, following the Aristotelian model. The element of spectatorship intervenes in this analysis instead of standing separately in the thesis. The project’s closing live event returns from the page to the stage to continue and add to discussions around central issues of the work, in its various distinct modes.

The outward form of the text in which the spiritual search is housed is 'performance-ritual', that is, performed 'ritual'. This genre has its 'performance' roots in the dance pioneers and its 'ritual' roots in the Christian church. The contents of this performed text is influenced by an emerging ecofeminist consciousness. In this way, the thesis has a grassroots inspiration as well as crossing academic areas of performance studies, ritual studies, and feminist spirituality. The project begins by an examination of 20th Century feminist and ecofeminist writing on spirituality, which evokes the subjective, embodied and historically contextualised, with particular focus on body and nature. Additional concepts of place, holding and letting go are introduced. Particular performance-rituals are introduced under the overall heading 'the spiralling journey of exorcism and ecstacy'. They include earlier work, as well as work performed specifically for this thesis, Centre of the Storm. The study re-situates 'ritual' as a subjective, embodied and contextualised performed event. It challenges ritual discourse to incorporate 'spirit', and feminist spirituality to incorporate the material world, through 'place', 'family', and the ritual actions of 'holding' and 'letting go'. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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

This dissertation explores experimentation--across experimental music, experimental theatre, and experimental film, in addition to the term's etymology, scientific usage, and colloquial deployment--in order to derive a deeper understanding of what we mean when we say an artwork is experimental, and how this term can help us understand current artistic praxes and products emerging from performance studies contexts. In this document, I advocate for the term experimental performance as both an umbrella term and as a specific genre name for the artistic activity of contemporary artists working between experimental theatre and performance art, often within performance studies contexts. Ultimately, citing the historical richness of experimental art and its long-standing relationship to the academy as evidence, I advocate for the further academic acknowledgement of experimental performance.

This thesis presents my original contribution to knowledge, a combination of critical media and performance theories to analyse the production and augmentation of postdigital experiential spaces in Punchdrunk Theatre Company. Distributed agency is key to Punchdrunk's work, with makers within the company and audiences both being active participants in meaning-making, across complex and detailed interfaces. In order to investigate the making cultures on ‘both sides' of the interface, I undertook a two-year participant study as a researching designer within the company during the build of the productions The House Where Winter Lives and The Drowned Man in 2011-2014, gathering field data in the form of extensive interviews with members of the company and audience participants, supported by diary notations and photographs. I studied the processes and methods that extend, distribute and regulate agency to both audiences and makers within the company, and identified devices and features of the interaction design of the company that produce the immanent subject-event relationships that support immersion in their work. A core aspect of this research concerns the relationship between immersion and the sublime, and how subject-event relationships (immanent vs. transcendent) contribute to engendering sublime interactive experiences. I have analysed the consequences of this for the modelling of participation in interaction design, and how it influences conditions of possibility within interactive systems across physical, digital and blended media. The conclusion of this research includes the definition of a postdigital sublime, and proposes a delinquent system aesthetic that integrates proxies for gravity through articulation of the ‘shadow side' of interaction design.

Un pan représentatif de la scène performative contemporain, en France, comme en Angleterre, se distingue par un intérêt commun pour la question du corps quotidien. Faisant fi des principes de représentation, de logique narrative ou de personnage, les praticiens d’aujourd’hui investissent des corporéités ordinaires et faillibles produisant des état de présence diffractés ainsi qu’un régime de spectateur fondé sur la reconnaissance d’une commune incompétence. Au moyen de temporalités scéniques suspendues, d’un ralentissement du mouvement et d’une inflexion des logiques de représentation et de perception, ils modélisent des outils de résistance à l’encontre des dynamiques accélérées d’une production intensifiée imposées par les institutions et l’économie culturelles. Renonçant à la séduction du spectaculaire et au fétiche de la technique, ils décident de produire moins. Inventant de nouvelles modalités d’un travail solidaire (collaborations éphémères, rencontres nouées selon une logique de projet, micro-communautés), ils dessinent, sur le plateau, un espace d’entente qui puisse reposer sur une égalité de condition entre performers et spectateurs. Loin de s’inscrire dans un geste de rupture ou de souscrire à un quelconque idéal utopiste, les artistes de la scène performative contemporaine actualisent une praxis critique de la scène qui tâche de créer, dans le temps de l’événement théâtral, une nouvelle façon d’être ensemble. / The contemporary performance scene, in both France and England, can be distinguished by a common interest in the ‘everyday body.’ Discarding principles of representation, narrative logic, and characterisation, many of today’s practitioners choose instead to reflect a deliberately fallible and ordinary sense of their own corporality. This results in a notion of presence in which the presented body can somehow disappear and where a certain complicity with the audience is founded on a sense of common incompetence. The use of real time (as opposed to theatrical time) the restriction of movement, and a questioning and dismantling of the traditional ideas of theatrical presentation and reception, all form ways of resisting the accelerated and intensified production cycle imposed by the cultural economy in which the work is produced. Refusing to be seduced by notions of grand spectacle or perfect technique, these performers produce less within their performance and therefore embrace an “anti-productive” creative pattern. At the same time, inventing new ways of working together (ephemeral collaborations, meetings happening upon a project-based logic, micro-communities), they create, in the theatre, a democratic space based on an equality of status between performers and spectators. Without seeking revolution or utopia, they enable a critical investigation of the theatrical space that can, for the duration of an event, create new ways for all those present to experience being together within that space.

The subject of this diploma thesis is the location and design of a theater building in the body of a regional center - the town of Uherské Hradiště. The existing theater building is housed in a rented Sokolovna (sport-cultural building) on Tyršovo Square. There is also a small stage in a house on Mariánské náměstí. The capacity of the auditorium of the large scene is 370 spectators, corresponding to the needs of the city and the region. However the size of the stage is completely inadequate, the height of the flytower, the absence of back and side stages, Also, the workshops and warehouses are currently located away from the theater. The project addresses the current unfavorable situation of the theater, which is, in the long-term, interest to the city of Uherské Hradiště itself. My intention is to create an open-air theater complex outside the building - a city living room - following the building of a former prison. Object visible from the main road, clearly recognizable, welcoming visitors. Theater composed of three masses created not only for actors, but primarily for its visitors. The object works with the motif of the way through it (possibly around a tranquil pedestrian zone, for example, by shopping, walking, but it provides the opportunity not to be primarily on the way but also on the target.) The current form of the place is unacceptable to the city.

No description available.

This dissertation seeks to formulate guidelines for the construction of a Let's Pretend game in order for a group to create a collaborative narrative through pretend play. A Let's Pretend game would provide a system for a performance event in which players are able to enter an imaginary world, take on roles in such a world and take actions in these roles. For this a Let's Pretend game should have a structured system of play; the structure for narrative in an imaginary environment; the means for participants to collaborate; and the means for participants to direct themselves. The practical component of this research, The Foreshadowing workshop, combines the role-playing game and a devised theatre workshop into one process. In this process the elements of games of make-believe can be identified. Bernard Suits' theory on games of make-believe identifies the prelusory goal, lusory means, constitutive rules, and the lusory attitude as the basic elements of a game. The guidelines for a Let's Pretend game can be derived from the conventions of the role-playing game and devised theatre workshop. These guidelines would address all the requirements of a Let's Pretend game, except self-direction, which is not available in the role-playing game, or devised theatre workshop. For self-direction, guidelines are derived from Bernard Suits' notion of the game as institution through the process of rules clarification. The primary guidelines for constructing a Let's Pretend game then are: that the game structure should foster fidelity to game world specifically through the imaginary roles. The character creation process should allow these roles to be the focus for action resolution. These roles should be able to develop through interactions and these interactions, as dramatic moves, would determine the plot. The structure of the game should further foster collaboration, be easily learnt and transferred, allow for the negotiating of rules and most importantly afford all players access to the directorial function. This dissertation, however, does not attempt the construction of such a Let's Pretend game. This would be the subject of future study. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2005.