”Problems for the HIgh School Actor” has been prepared so that the teacher and the student have been given a certain degree of flexibility in its use. The order of presentation of the various problems, the amount of time spent on any one time, and the focusing on the major amount of emphasis may vary from class to class and from year to year as the interests, needs, and skills of the enrollee vary. The most educationally worthwhile method can be used to meet these varying situations. This study has been developed so as to make possible further study of the problems herein presented. The resources unit that has been included will be found most helpful. It should be a stimulus for a continued analysis of the great plays. It would be well to consider the objectives involved in “Problems for the High School Actor”: (1) To enable the student to realize the communicative possibilities of bodily action and facial expression; (2) To enable the student to realize the possibilities of emotional expression through the voice.; (3) To help the student acquire grace of movement.; (4) To help the student develop a pleasing, expressive voice.; (5) To make the student aware of the world and the people around him as a source of characterizations.; (6) To develop powers of observation in the student so that he may find in the world around him the inspiration and materials of characterization.; (7) To enable the student to acquire memorization techniques.; (8) To give the student practice in memorizing and characterization.; (9) To give the students practice in working with others in dramatic scenes.; (10) To develop the student’s sense of responsibility in self-organized, self-directed scenes.; (11) To develop the ability to sacrifice personal ambitions to the welfare of the group.; (12) To give the student a knowledge of stage directions and acting techniques.; (13) To develop a critical sense in the student in evaluating his own and other’s work.; (14) To give poise and confidence to the student. The over-all plan in “Problems for the High School Actor’ has been to give the student a chance to act. It has long been the belief of the investigator that the average, serious-minded high school actor can best learn how to act by working on excerpts from the World’s great dramatic literature. When the actor is told exactly what is expected of him in playing his role. He will most appreciably grow, and he soon senses the importance of a well-motivated characterization, and sometimes he will have the techniques so ingrained, he can attack the more complicated problems in acting with sincerity and understanding.

It was the purpose of this study (1) to discover the similarities and dissimilarities in three ancient Greek plays that used the legend of the house of Atreus as the basis for their plots; (2) to discover how these similarities and dissimilarities illustrate separate points of view concerning man, the universe and man’s place in that universe; and (3) to discover what relationship if any exists between the points of view expressed and the particular moment in history at which each playwright wrote. The plays considered were the Oresteia, a trilogy by Aeschylus first presented about 458 B.C.; Electra by Sophocles; probably presented first sometime before 413 B.C.; and Electra by Euripides, first presented in 413 B.C. SInce the purpose of the study was to compare ideas and points of view expressed by the three great tragic dramatists of Greece, no attempt was made to justify the plays selected as works of art nor their authors as master craftsmen. However, in cases where translators disagree or left out portions of the manuscript which seemed to be mistakes in copying or lapses in artistry on the part of the playwright, the investigator adopted the attitude expressed by H.D.F. Kitto. All the plays were read in translation, but where more than one translation was available at least two translations were read, one literal and one poetic; in some cases as many as three were read in an effort to insure accuracy.

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 dissertation project seeks to answer questions at the intersection of performance and new media with special attention to aesthetic practice. Primarily, the central issue at stake is the issue of material relationships between bodies and technologies as put into practice in a variety of aesthetic forms, including net art, staged performance, and internet memes. After an introduction, the second chapter discusses the method of analysis, schizoanalysis, in depth, drawing from the work of both Deleuze and Guattari as collaborators and Guattari’s extensive solo work. The next chapter addresses the new materialist paradigm that acts as the foundational commitment for seeing staged performances and digital performances as overlapping categories of phenomena. From there, the analysis shifts to questions of ontology, including the impact of naming certain behaviors on the understanding of those behaviors as well as the nature of performance itself. Just as Peggy Phelan asserts that performance is ephemeral, immediate, and nonreproducible, one can see encounters with new media under this same framework. The following three chapters act as specific case studies, using screen theory to understand staged performances, sequential art theory to explain the relationships between disparate parts of both new mediated and staged performance, and theories of identity and gender to understand selfies as constructive digital performances. Though this project offers no guarantees or certitudes, certain themes did emerge through the analysis, such as the place of the body in discourses of technology; connections between the audience and the art object, the art object and its environment, and the audience and the environment; and the impact of time, especially immediacy, on the understanding of both staged and mediated works. The hope of this project is necessarily one of offering answer, but instead of point to new questions and offering some starting points for further consideration.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine the effects of narrative conversational storytelling on affective empathy and relational bonding. This correlational-comparative quantitative research study intends to correlate variations of structured storytelling activity scenarios with affective empathy and self-reports of relational bonding. The overall proposed approach to determine this correlation or disassociation is to conduct pre- and post- intervention empathy testing as well as a relational bonding scale survey. The intervention was a series of narrative conversational storytelling activities that ranged from face-to-face structured exchange, written and read structured exchange, and no structured exchange. This study consisted of 12 adult participants, ranging in age, gender, and cultural background. These participants were divided evenly between scenarios, each scenario consisting of four participants. Study result data was analyzed to reveal that those who participated in the structured storytelling activity, face-to-face, scored the greatest average increase in affective empathy and had the most growth in perceived relational bonding with their intervention partners. These findings imply that a structured storytelling activity with an active perspective-taking component, in person, may be used as a tool for the improvement of affective empathy and relational bonding.

A DESIGN CONCEPT FOR THE LIGHTING OF HELL IN HIGH WATER BY MARCUS GARDLEY MAY 2012 JESSICA GREENBERG, B.A., HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE M.F.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Penny Remsen I designed the lighting for this new play with music HELL IN HIGH WATER by Marcus Gardley, produced by the UMass Amherst Theater Department. In this thesis paper I discuss the creative process from start to finish. I include relevant lighting paperwork and images from the production.

A reflection of the lighting artist’s approach for the lighting design of The Twenty-fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Department of Theater’s Fall 2010 production used as a research ground for the experimentation of lighting design through the cueing process.

In this thesis, I take the reader through the process and particular challenges of directing The House of Bernarda Alba, from choosing a translation, to casting from a pool of mostly undergraduate actors, to staging a show in-the-round. More particularly, I compare my previous work with adaptation to this process of treating the script as a fixed entity. I also offer a detailed explanation of the exploratory work I did with the actors in building the physicality of the play-world and exploring the relationships of the characters. For this, I drew heavily on Anne Bogart’s composition exercises, found in The Viewpoints Book. In this thesis, I transcribe and analyze some of the material generated through these exercises. Finally, I endeavor to prove that a certain freedom can be found through structure, and that the challenge of this production - which was assigned to me rather than a personal choice - helped me develop a more subtle creative voice than I had previously possessed.

This essay describes tools for unlocking accessibility in theatre, specifically for those within the disabled community. Throughout my own research in accessible theatre, and the research reviewed within this paper, it is seen that inclusive theatre yields a multitude of positive benefits for those involved, both emotionally and socially. Throughout my experience with OpenSpot Theatre, an accessible theatre company that teaches drama classes in areas throughout the United States, I learn methods to implement accessibility in theatrical settings using devised theatre, affinity therapy, and applied theatre techniques. Within this thesis, I describe my experience with accessible theatre, OpenSpot theatre, and take a look into how the brilliant realms of theatre and psychology collide.

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