This thesis investigates how “performance” can enhance the urban fabric of Dartmouth NS, and assist in the revitalization of the area, creating a “new community image”. In past decades Dartmouth has struggled to maintain its identity separate from Halifax in the social imagination of its inhabitants. Dartmouth has succumbed to urban sprawl, an aging population, and A lack of renewal in the downtown core, having fallen under the shadow of neighboring Halifax, as a destination for habitation, business and entertainment. In recent years, an urban renaissance led by new downtown businesses has begun, but there are still a great deal of under utilized spaces and vacant lots within the urban fabric and the incentive for redevelopment is low. This thesis asks can notions of “performance”, such as visual connections and focus be used to spatially and pragmatically activate under utilized areas within the urban core to foster revitalization and promote a positive social image, supporting Dartmouth in becoming a desired destination.

We depend on our collective senses in order to rationalize and negotiate space. Unfortunately, sound and acoustics has become a secondary concern to that of the visual perception in architecture. The initial design intent for many modern performance spaces and music education space, for about the past one-hundred years, has not been driven by sound or acoustics, as a consequence the visual perception has become the major infl uence. Prior to modern acoustical applications, performance spaces have been designed for the essence of sound and the form and function had no divisible lines, but with amplifi cation of sound and the technology to reproduce and manipulate sound, form over took acoustics as a design based idea. This thesis is a direct reaction to the way acoustics and sound, in performance spaces, has evolved over the past hundred years with the advent of modern acoustical technology. This thesis will ask the question of how can sound and acoustics be the main inspiration for the design intent and a formal determinate of space. By using sound and acoustics as a design based method of space making, architecture can achieve a visualization of space through the aural perception of sound. Reexamining how sound reacts to the geometric shapes and forms in architecture can unveil a solution to poor acoustics in many performance spaces, and result in a method of visualizing sound and acoustics in space and not merely a visual experience of the built form. This document will analyze the principals and the application of acoustical design in performance and musical education spaces and reestablish the connection of music, acoustics and architecture. The outcome for this thesis will result in the holistic approach to an acoustically designed performance center inter-connected with scholastic spaces for musical education.

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Appréhender l’oeuvre de Luchino Visconti à partir de la notion d’espace, alors même que l’homme et le corps de l’acteur semblent être au centre de l’art du metteur en scène, permet de dégager aussi bien les correspondances existant entre théâtre, cinéma et opéra et les spécificités de chacun de ces arts que le dialogue qui s’établit entre les éléments et les influences de chaque création. La polysémie du terme “espace” autorisera en outre à l’envisager tant d’un point de vue matériel (espace scénique, espace(s) cinématographique(s))que temporel (inscription dans un espace-temps caractérisable d’un point de vue historique et/ou social, imbrications de temporalités multiples), tant sous l’angle philosophique(spatialité relative à la perception et à l’idée de finitude, espace mental) qu’artistique(influences littéraires, picturales, musicales notamment). L’espace apparaît ainsi comme une donnée sensible à partir et à l’intérieur de laquelle naît la représentation : il permet alors non seulement de contextualiser l’intrigue à travers des lieux réels se référant à un espace-temps déterminé mais encore de poser une atmosphère propice à l’apparition du personnage et au surgissement d’un monde imaginaire dont l’intensité favorise l’explosion de “vérité”. De cet ensemble se dégagera une esthétique faite de jeux de reflets et d’interpénétration visant à l’établissement d’un spectacle total, en un dialogue des arts toujours renouvelé. / The apprehension of the oeuvre of Luchino Visconti from the perspective of the concept of space –when the actor as man and his corporal presence would seem to lie at the very heart of the director’sart – throws light on both the relations which obtain between theater, cinema and opera and the factors specific to each of these arts, as well as the dialogue which is established between the elements and the influences of each creation. The polysemic nature of the term “space” moreover justifies an approach considering it from both a material point of view (stage space, cinematographic space(s)) and a temporal perspective (as an component part of a space-time identifiable from an historical and/orsocial point of view, the interweaving of multiple temporalities), from both a philosophic angle (a spaciality relative to perception and to the idea of finiteness, mental space) and an artistic perspective(notably literary, pictorial and musical influences). Space thus appears as a perceptible factor ordonnée out of which, and inside which, the performance is born: it allows not only the contextualization of the plot through the real settings referring to a given space-time, but equally thecreation of an atmosphere conducive to the appearance of the character and to the bringing intoexistence of an imaginary world whose intensity furthers the explosion of “truth”. Out of this composite whole emerges an esthetic vision composed of the play of reflections and interpenetrationaspiring to the creation of a total spectacle, in a constantly renewed dialogue of the arts.

This project aims to take the investigation of food in early modern drama, in itself a relatively new field, in a new direction. It does this by shifting the critical focus from food-based metaphors to food-based properties and food-producing cook characters. This shift reveals exciting, unexpected, and hitherto unnoticed contexts. In The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, which were written during William Shakespeare’s inn-yard playhouse period, the playwright exploits these exceptionally aromatic venues in order to trigger site-specific responses to food-based scenes in these plays. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair brings fair-appropriate gingerbread properties onstage. When we look beneath the surface of this food effect to its bread and wine ingredients, however, it reveals a subtext that satirizes the theory of transubstantiation. Jonson expands on this theme by using Ursula’s cooking fire (a property staged in Jonson’s representation of Smithfield’s Bartholomew Fair) to engage with the prison narrative of Anne Askew, who was burned to death in front of Bartholomew Priory on the historic Smithfield for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. This thesis also investigates water, which, for early moderns, was a complex and quasi-mystical liquid: it was a primary element, it washed sin from the world during the Great Flood, it was a marker of status, it was a medicine, and it was a cookery ingredient. Christopher Marlowe not only uses dirty water to humiliate his doomed monarch in Edward II, but he also uses it to apportion blame to the king for his own downfall. In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare draws on the theory of the elements to cast Timon as a man of water, who, Jesus-like, breaks up and divides (or splashes around) his body at his “last” supper. Fully-fledged cook characters were a relative rarity on the early modern stage. This project looks at two exceptions: Furnace in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts and the unnamed master cook in John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Both playwrights use their respective gastronomic geniuses to demonstrate the danger that lower-order expertise poses to the upper classes when society is in flux. Finally, this project demonstrates that a link existed between ornate domestic food effects and alchemy. It shows how Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women use food properties associated with alchemy to satirize notions of perfection in their play-worlds.