ABSTRACT The following thesis documents the costume design process and execution for the staged production of Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? as adapted by David Ives. It was produced at the University of New Orleans as part of the Film, Theatre, and Communication Arts Department 2011-2012 season in collaboration with New Orleans theatre company, The NOLA Project. In conjunction with the director and the design team, it is the role of the costume designer to support the overall concept of the production. The documentation of this process begins with the textual, historical, and visual research pertaining to the design concept. The various aspects of the costume design process are presented leading up to the execution of the final designs and successful realization of the play, concluding with a final analysis of the work. Supporting visual documentation and sources used to illustrate the phases of design are contained within the subsequent appendices. Costume Design, Mark Twain, Is He Dead?, Theater Design

The following thesis is a brief view of the production process of Theatre UNO’s Spring 2014 production of the Tennessee William’s New Orleans Literary Festival One-Act play competition 2013 winner, Father. This thesis will include analysis, production book, documentation from the production, and an evaluation of the process of putting this production on stage. The play was performed in New Orleans, Louisiana at the University of New Orleans, Performing Arts Center Robert E Nims Lab Theatre on February 11th- 16th, 2014.

This thesis documents my rehearsal and performance of the role of Tiger in Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, including research, character analysis, role development, rehearsal journal, and an evaluation of my performance. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was produced by the UNO Department of Film and Theatre, under the direction of David W. Hoover. The play was performed at the Robert E. Nims Theatre of the Performing Arts October 2 - 4, 9 - 11 at 7:30pm, and October 12, 2014 at 2:30pm. The play was performed at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region 6 in San Angelo TX, February 23, 2015 at 8pm, February 24 at 11am and 8pm. It was awarded the Director’s Choice Trophy, receiving awards for Distinguished Director (David W. Hoover), Lighting Design (Diane Baas), Scenic Design (Kevin Griffith), and Actor in a Principal Role (John Neisler).

This thesis develops an ecological perspective devoted to the question of what, if anything, it means to speak of music ‘itself’. As such it seeks to enrich and further develop music-centred perspectives in the sociology of music. To this end, the thesis uses and develops a sociology of mediations designed to specify empirically the constituents of localized, emergent and performed configurations of “music” within the ‘classical’ music world. An ethnographically informed and practice-driven case study of viola and viola playing is used as a means to gain insight into the avant-garde of viola playing today and to follow the ways in which different protagonists constitute viola aesthetics. Considering the viola’s identity historically, in terms of both reproduction and change (specifically, the instrument’s shift from a marginal status to a position nearer the centre within ‘classical’ music), the study addresses instrument materiality and technologies, sound playing techniques, as well as, more globally, viola identities in relation to the instrument’s sonic features, repertoire, psycho-cultural and affective associations and meaning making in interpretation and performance. It is also shown how musicians deal with and ‘erase’ ‘limitations’ formerly attributed to the viola and make the instrument ‘work’ (through technological calibration in collaboration with instrument-makers as well as playing techniques) and thus correspond the requirements of contemporary music performance. Aiming to be a useful resource for violists, this thesis traces change but also identifies potential constraints produced by the past history of the viola upon the ways the instrument is seen, used and explored. The data for this study was collected through audio/video-recorded interviews with eight widely recognized highly-skilled violists, video-recorded performance and observations of viola lessons, and documentary analysis. This thesis highlights the importance of intermediate mediations that, situated in-between score and performance, affect how music comes to sound when played. It also outlines a grounded theory of the affordances of couplings made between players and instruments, so as to develop a performative idiom that considers representations, discourses and social construction, but also materiality, bodies and minds, internalization processes, practices. The thesis concludes by suggesting that a ‘strong’ cultural and musical sociology requires a relational and transdiciplinary approach and that this approach in turn helps to articulate an eclectic and hybrid sociology of imbrications, one that challenges intra-disciplinary divides.

Thesis advisor: Caroline Bicks / In the last ten years, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues has morphed from a successful off-Broadway production into an activist movement that fosters fundraising productions of the play by community and campus groups in almost every country. In this thesis, I examine how the ‘body stories’ told by actual women made it to community stages all over the world through a series of translations: first, how Ensler poetically/theatrically interprets their stories; second, how the monologic form (and the current multiple-actor form) of the play affects the meaning of those stories; third, projecting how the audience reacts to those stories; and last, suggesting possibilities for broadening the audience’s experience into community discussion and social change. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English Honors Program. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: English.

The thesis uses performance to elucidate the politics of sports commentary. In contrast to Williams' assertion that TV sports maintain a strong sense of their independence despite control and commodification by government or commerce (1989) and Kennedy's suggestion that the significance of sport is not tied to ideology (2001), the thesis argues that sports commentary, however implicitly, asserts neoliberal authority within sporting broadcasts. This written thesis and the Practice as Research articulates and critically contextualises the performance of sports commentary resulting in the production of a postdramatic theatre performance referred to as PhD Practice (2016), DVD documentation of the live event, a script and critical writing. Focusing on the commentary of the charity fun-runner in the Big City Marathon (BCM) the thesis uses Fischer-Lichte's notion of performance as event (2008) as a framework to examine how sports commentary changes the way an event is received and subsequently perceived. Through the creation of a performance event that renders the strategies of the sports commentator (Whannel, 1992) as an event of text (Turner, 2009), the research articulates a gap between the event and how that event is framed, reframed and enframed (Žižek, 2014) by the commentary. The thesis subsequently argues that the position taken by the commentator complicates Fischer-Lichte's autopoietic feedback loop (2008), enacting a degree of sovereignty (Agamben, 1995) over the event, contradicting the way in which the feedback loop purports to neutralise the sovereign position of the performer in postdramatic theatre (Lehmann, 2006). This partially sovereign position maintained by the commentator manipulates the audience into a pattern of consent that mirrors the enactment of neoliberal authority (Harvey, 2005). The commentator is thus able to reframe mass participation in the BCM, so that fun-runners and spectators are made to perform as neoliberal subjects, contextualised by capitalist charity (Livingstone, 2013), complicit with neoliberal ideology. This approach represents significant developments in two distinct areas. Firstly, considering sports commentary as an event of text (Turner, 2009) represents a distinctive contribution to the study of event based performance and provides a position from which to articulate a practical and political critique of the autopoietic feedback loop (Fischer-Lichte, 2008). Secondly, the use of performance to examine sports commentary, as an example of commentary as a broad cultural phenomenon, contributes to discourse around the performance of ideology.

This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

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I expanded a ten-minute play that I had written in my sophomore year, Bob and Carson on a Couch, into six ten-minute plays. Each play can stand on it's own to be performed, or they can be done in order to tell one story.

This thesis includes the journey of Michael Lee becoming a professional actor by performing several characters within two contrasting productions. The first, "The Trojan Women", by Euripides, Michael portrayed Poseidon, Talthybius, and The Guard in ETSU's very own Bud Frank Theatre. Michael's second production included the character of Charles in the modern drama "Race" by David Mamet, which was held in the newly renovated Studio 205. Michael documented his growth as an actor through daily journal entries and analyzing the final performances.