This thesis explores theatrical intimacy choreography and coordination during current significant social shifts. Covid restrictions, keen awareness of "correctness", and a desire to "do better" have allowed protective practices like theatrical intimacy to become not only generally accepted but expected in rehearsal spaces. Using techniques such as consent-based spaces, actor disclosures, and common language acquired through training with Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard, the founders of Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), I explore choreographing close relationship moments through high school productions of Jane Eyre and Footloose presented in 2021-22 at Lake Highland Preparatory in Orlando and with older BFA/MFA student actors in Indecent, Welcome to the Moon, and First Date at the University of Central Florida (UCF). Within these different spaces, questions arose that guided my investigations and process. When is the practice an appropriate tool for establishing personal boundaries and preferences? Moving across the age groups, how does or how should the process change? How can prescribed techniques be modified to assist student actors in storytelling when the technique appears to fall short? How can the practice of theatrical intimacy be adapted to the social distancing and masking requirements caused by Covid? And finally, how does one maneuver within the boundaries established by those creating new standards and popular practices such as "Theatrical Intimacy"? During my process, I rely on training sessions with TIE and on Chelsea Pace's Staging Sex. To assist in storytelling and establish actor process, I adapt methods from Actioning and How to Do It by Nick Moseley. As I reflect upon the spaces we create and the work we do in them, I investigate various publications that include the thoughts of Elise Ahenkorah, Holly Derr, Beth Strano, Keith Morant, Michael Roth, and Nina Power. In searching how we might live in those spaces peaceably and productively, I explore adrienne maree brown's We Will Not Cancel Us, And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice."

What does it look like to have youth embody activism through theatre, and how do they take what they learned through theatre and implement it in their everyday lives? Many enter the field of Theatre for Young Audiences because they believe young people (that is, youth that are 18 and younger) have the power to change the world. While the Theatre for Young Audiences field often produces plays that teach young people about the power of change, it is also important to consider how we center and amplify youth voices in the conversations about societal change. As a teaching artist and director of youth theatre, I have led two projects meant to teach young people about how they can create social change and to give them the tools to hone their own activist voices. In the first project, I directed Guns in Dragonland, a ten-minute play written by a youth playwright, with youth actors, that addressed gun violence; in the second project, I taught playwriting in school residencies to high school drama students with the intention of the students producing ten-minute plays about social change. This thesis explores these two projects compared to similar programs that explore gender and racial injustice through theatre with young people. I then ask the following questions: How much focus should be given to the process and the product? What is the role of the adult in a space of theatre for social change? What is the scope of theatre for social change that I am teaching, and how do I navigate student wellness throughout the process? This thesis will gather the best practices for teaching artist pedagogy as it applies to creating theatre for social change with young people.

¿Dónde están los Latinos? As a Latina theatre practitioner born and raised in Venezuela now studying Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) in the United States, I perceive a generalization and oversimplification of Latin American culture or culturally specific pieces across available TYA dramatic literature and other forms of children's entertainment, with Mexican culture as a monolith for all Hispanics and Latin Americans. My thesis asks: What tropes exist within the representation of Latin American cultures? What might those tropes offer about authentic representation, and opportunities for broadened representation, within the field of TYA? My research pulls from two formative experiences in my development as a TYA practitioner: serving as a co-playwright and the director of the new musical Sombra del Sol, and the release and success of Disney's animated film Encanto. I couple my analysis of these new works with the investigation of twenty plays within the United States' TYA canon by Hispanic authors such as Karen Zacarías, José Cruz González, José Casas, as well as non-Hispanic playwrights including Roxanne Schroeder-Arce, Lisa Loomer, and Gabriel Jason Dean. By examining these works, I identify five tropes present in media about/for Latin Americans: Location Tropes, Celebrations, Ethereality, Spontaneous Bilingualism, and Character Tropes. These trope help to articulate the need for richer cultural specificity and diversity of content in Latino/a TYA literature, while guiding my self-reflection as an artist and audience member in response to Sombra del Sol and Encanto.

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A Summer Experience as a Paid Actor: It’s Not All Broken Legs Thesis Statement: Finding out that you are going to be paid to act sounds like a dream come true, but there is a lot more to it than just the glitz and glam of the final product.

This study presents the term Participation Cartography as an overarching category of analysis for a wide range of artistic practices that, in one way or another, enable participants to position themselves subjectively in relation to a given performed space. By re-defining cartography from a discipline concerned with the visual representation of the observable world into a performance praxis that requires audience participation, enabling participants to position themselves in relation to a given performed space, I expand the range of practices considered by previous literature. Further, I raise issues in relation to the connections of subjectivity, space, performance, and cartography. My argument is that Participation Cartography describes a type of practice in and through which the Subject who moves in space is both mapped and positioned. By linking Felix Guattari’s (1995) term ‘cartography of subjectivity’ with Deirdre Heddon’s (2008) investigation on autobiographical tours made by artists (‘autotopographies’), Participation Cartography locates the practices here under study within a terrain that blurs everyday life and art, autobiography and representation of subjects-in-movement. In so doing, Participation Cartography expands previous notions such as ‘psychogeography’ (Kanarinka, 2006, McDonough, 2002), ‘collaborative mapping’ (Sant, 2004), ‘locative media’ (Hemment, 2006) and ‘autotopography’ (Heddon, 2008). Participation Cartography describes a type of social activity or, in Allan Kaprow’s terms, a kind of ‘participation performance’ (Kaprow, 2003) that enables participants to present the self (Goffman, 1990) as a being-in-motion within the public arena of performance. Michel De Certeau’s (1984) ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ is used as a theoretical model to analyse the tensions raised by Participation Cartography between the artists’ strategies, the participants’ performances, and the representations of those performances that remain. Positioning, as used within a field in social psychology called ‘Positioning Theory’ (Harre and Van Langenhove, 1999) is applied to the analysis of the practices here under study. Participation Cartography turns the spectator into a participant. More concretely, participants are turned into both producers and users of cartographies of the Subject they co-produce with others. As a self-reflexive practice that creates agency, it enables participants to fabricate interconnections between performance, space, and subjectivity, blurring the boundaries between art and therapy. Key practices that are discussed in this thesis include a locative media project by Jen Southern (UK) and Jen Hamilton (Canada) titled Running Stitch (2006), Untitled Action for the Arches (2005), a live art work by Kira O’Reilly (Ireland), and my own collaborative pieces, The Shoemakers’ Ball (2006) and We the Colombia National Team (2003)

The research focused on the identification and ranking of critical success factors that contribute most significantly towards the training of a cello student. The empirical study was based on a sample of cello teachers in four countries selected for the study, namely Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. A literature study, identifying a broad category of factors that could contribute towards successful cello training, formed the basis of the questionnaire. These critical success factors included the quality of the teacher, acquired skills, the talent and giftedness of the student, support rendered to the student, and the curriculum. Each of these factors comprised five sub factors. The respondents were required to rank these factors in order of importance. In the final analysis, they were requested to rank the five main factors. A statistical process of ranking (forced ranking) and Kruskal-Wallis was applied to rank and analyse the responses of the cello teachers in the survey. The critical success factors that contribute the most significantly towards successful cello training were identified and compared.

This thesis explores a performance practice within free improvisation. This is not a theory based improvisation – performances do not require specific preparation and the music refrains from repetition of musical structures. It engages in investigative and experimental approaches emerging from holistic considerations of acoustics, interaction and instrument, and also philosophy, psychology, sociopolitics and technology. The performance practice explores modes and approaches to working with the given potentiality of an electronically augmented acoustic instrument and involves the development of a suitably flexible computerised performance system, the piano+, combining extended techniques and real-time electroacoustic processes, which has the acoustic piano at its core. Contingencies of acoustic events and performance gestures – captured by audio analysis and sensors and combined to control the parameter space of computer processes – manipulate the fundamental properties of sound, timbre and time. Spherical abstractions, developed under consideration of Agamben’s potentiality and Sloterdijk’s philosophical theory of spheres, allow a shared metaphor for technical, instrumental, personal, and interpersonal concerns. This facilitates a theoretical approach for heuristic and investigative improvisation where performance is considered ‘Ereignis’ (an event) for sociopolitically aware activities that draw on the situational potentiality and present themselves in fragile and context dependent forms. Ever new relationships can be found and developed, but can equally be lost. Sloterdijk supplied the concept of knowledge resulting from equipping our ‘inner space’, an image suiting non-linearity of thought that transpires from Kuhl’s psychological PSI-theory to explain human motivation and behaviour. The role of technology – diversion and subversion of sound and activity – creates a space between performer and instrument that retains a fundamental pianism but defies expectation and anticipation. Responsibility for one’s actions is required to deal with the unexpected without resorting to preliminary strategies restricting potential discourses, particularly within ensemble situations. This type of performance embraces the ‘Ereignis’.

This thesis serves as an examination of the process I underwent to arrive at answers to those questions. Chapter I examines differences between Pierre Corneille's seventeenth century L'Illusion Comique and Kushner's modern-day adaptation. Chapter II takes a closer look at textual analysis specific to Kushner's adaptation. Chapter III documents pre-rehearsal and designer collaboration. Chapter IV follows the production process from casting to performances. This chapter also includes many of the problems encountered and solutions reached. Chapter V, the summary, includes an assessment of the entire process, including; rehearsals, production, and my role as director. A summary of audience evaluations also is included in this chapter. The appendixes follow with a transcription of the audience discussion, backward analysis, floor plan, photos, and the playbill.

A playwright is confronted with a barrage of problems each time he attempts to write a playscript. As each problem is either solved, eliminated, or worked out on its own, the play grows closer to its life upon the stage. In writing The Invalid, I was spared not one of the many problems a playwright faces when he writes a play. am certain that I not only encountered, but solved many of the same problems that other writers encounter, in a manner not unlike their own. In fact, in this introduction, I present a few thoughts by other playwrights who have inspired much of my own work in the theatre. The problem I discovered to be central in the creation of The Invalid is that of creating character.