abstract: Double bass drumming is a genre of drum set performance that utilizes a bass drum pedal for both the right and left feet. This allows the feet to function much like the hands, and provides the ability to play faster rhythmic passages on the bass drum that would otherwise be impossible in the classic single-pedal arrangement. The feet are then elevated to new levels of importance, which creates new challenges in four-limb coordination. This double bass drumming tradition has been in use since the mid-20th century, and it has become extremely popular since that time. Today, virtually every drum set retailer offers the double bass pedal as part of their inventory. Many large drum solo competitions, such as the Guitar Center Drum-Off, also include a double bass pedal as part of the provided drum set. However, even with this recent growth in popularity of double bass drumming, there remains a significant lack of scholarly research on the topic. This could be due to the popularity of double bass drumming remaining fairly new, and that the primary implementation of this drumming style remains outside of the art music tradition. This document will help further bring this complex drumming tradition to light by providing an in-depth analysis of the double-bass drumming style through historical overview, explanation of various technical approaches and considerations, and an analysis of common double bass drumming performance practice. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2019

abstract: This dissertation investigates how Yuan zaju drama reshaped Chinese culture by bridging the gap between an inherently oral tradition of popular performance and the written tradition of literati, when traditional Chinese political, social, cultural structures underwent remarkable transformation under alien rule in the Yuan. It focuses on texts dated from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century by literati writers about playwrights and performers that have been treated by most scholars merely as sources of bio-bibliographical information. I interpret them, however, as cultural artifacts that reveal how Yuan drama caused a shift in the mentality of the elite. My study demonstrates that Yuan drama stimulated literati thought, redefined literati self-identity, and introduced a new significance to the act of writing and the function of text. Moreover, the emergence of a great number of successful female performers challenged the gendered roles of women that had been standardized by the traditional Confucian patriarchal system. This careful uncovering of overlooked materials contributes to a better understanding of the social and cultural world of early modern China. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2019

Kristin Clippard's MFA Thesis Project: A Director's Mash-up of She Stoops to Conquer or the Mistakes of a Night by Oliver Goldsmith

The significance of brands within our media-intensive culture can hardly be overstated. Having emerged in the mid-20th century as platforms for the distribution of commodities, brands have since become, as scholar Celia Lury argues, “the logos of the global economy.” Brand interfaces not only differentiate mass production, but produce cultural assemblages that rewrite social and political relations. This dissertation concerns itself with the meaning of theatrical production within brand performance, with a specific focus on the Walt Disney Company. Although there are many corporate producers in commercial theatre today — Warner Brothers, MGM, Universal, and Cirque du Soleil, to name a few — Disney has the distinction of being the first to make live theatre a cornerstone of its brand relationships. Disney has also had, in branding terms, the most depth, breadth and consistency of any global entertainment brand. Using the concept of assemblage as an applied framework, I consider how Disney’s brand theatre functions as a form of communicative/affective capitalism, as an interface for consumer interactivity and exchange. Following Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda and Lury, I argue that Disney’s theatre assemblages are heterogeneous, contingent, emergent and most of all generative. At the heart of this project is the question of how Disney’s theatre assemblages cohere – the question of identifiable, intensive continuities. What kinds of historical contingencies are replicated in Disney’s texts and territories? How does the company code cultural flows? In what ways are Disney’s theatre assemblages networked to social formations like childhood, gender, race, sexuality, and nation? What kinds of consumer interactions and socio-technical conditions are most important to the ongoing process of developing brand relations? Although Disney’s multi-modal theatre assemblages are a function of neoliberal logic and labor norms, and sustain dominant modes of production, they are also highly mutable, often supporting contested claims of intelligibility and citizenship. The company produces a vast range of theatre experiences. This dissertation focuses on character encounters, children’s theatre, Broadway musicals, a re-creation of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and animal/safari performance. The chapters are composed as a nested set of assemblages, starting with theatre for Disney’s most important demographic: children. I then move into larger social fields/assemblages, considering theatre that addresses the nation, theatre that reframes transnational/global space, and finally, animal/ecological theatre. Taken together, the chapters present an argument for the significance of brand theatre as a localized, expressive, collaborative and extremely flexible site of cultural affiliation, agency and assembly.

A terminal project report featuring the work of Margaret Shirley submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.

Hip hop culture is redefining public space. The use of hip hop as public performance has been the most recent occurrence in reclaiming a sense of free cultural expression and immediate communication and interactions with the public. Historically, U.S. hip hop, and the development of its four elements, DJ, breaking, MC, and graffiti, have encouraged street culture and public street performances as a way to reclaim public space, and inform on-lookers to the social inequalities produced with a spatial-temporal awareness (Baker, p. 218). Non-U.S. hip hop has not deviated from this phenomenon, and in many cases has significant, politicized hip hop movements that have flourished. Many Cuban and Brazilian rappers and artists are creating more provocative, street displays of expression that elucidate the contradictions of daily existence in marginalized, neglected communities. For this reason, Cuban and Brazilian hip hop both have the uniqueness of these incorporations and contradictions in hip hop expression, based on the fact that both Cuban and Brazilian governments are promoting hip hop culture This dissertation examines the use of hip hop inspired street performance as both hidden and public transcript. James C. Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance defines these two terms as methods that are employed by power entities exercising control over discourse through cultural manifestation. The dissertation will be contextualized in this framework What is of concern for this dissertation is how Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian youth and other hip hop-influenced youth in these countries exert public spatial control under specific historic and contemporary circumstances where social contradictions are growing between whites and non-Whites, artists and governing bodies. I will utilize hip hop street culture and spoken word, performance art as a performative, corporal expression that has received financial support from the Cuban and Brazilian government, while at the same time has remained community-based in both countries. Nongovernmentally-supported hip hop street performance has allowed some artists the liberty to bypass cultural institutions and other avenues of official and national artistic recognition, for instance, seeking other benefactors to support their work. Despite this, artists, participators, and rappers are 'playing' various political alliances and employing both hidden and public transcripts to benefit from the increasing support of the art form, and in the case of Alamar, Cuba and Salvador, Brazil performers, are producing socially 'conscious' artistic manifestations in public places for specific audiences with specific intentions and objectives. In many cases these performers seek not only to produce personal art that usually has an activist intent that also benefits the government sponsored financial support of 'rebel' music culture, but to also allay hidden transcripts to the communities in the audience who pick up on its subtleties I will contextualize these ideas through an analysis of national identity and history, and how culture and identity have historically informed social justice and values in the racially and socially polarized societies of Havana/Alamar and Salvador. Hip hop will then be analyzed as a public resource (Yudice, p. 9). Hip hop culture allows participating communities to share in the global public discourse of social transcendence and power (Pardue, Ideologies, p. 24). Public performance also arms artists with a wider arsenal of material. It also gives a sense to audience members that they are participating in a resource of social integration and increasing political momentum (Baker, p. 240) This dissertation will describe how Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban communities use hip hop to publicly and creatively express their local concerns through a politics of culture in the commercial arena of 'the street'. This cultural politics is then incorporated into other affiliations with the state or socio-political movements and used for specific purposes within these two countries. Many artists negotiate with these institutions, while maintaining a cultural autonomy and a critical quality to their work. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / acase@tulane.edu

My artistic process as an actor is ever changing--always in flux and adjusting to the needs and dominant rhythms of the character and imaginary world of the play. While there may be some overlap, every role is different from the next role and therefore the artistic process serves to help the actor find a way into the life of the character. Actor training in movement, voice, and acting technique provides me with a variety of tools to choose from when developing a character for performance. My artistic process is the exploration and play that goes into picking and choosing which tools suit me best to approach the development of a character. It is my work to use these tools to discover the many connections and themes between the character and the imaginary world of the play as well as how they interact with each other. A significant part of this exploration is doing the character research to answer specific questions such as: Is my character's interaction with others mostly negative or positive? What want, need, or desire lures my character from the beginning of the play through to the end? What is my characters internal rhythm...heavy and lethargic or light and erratic? Moreover, the artistic process is crucial to giving me the freedom to release into the character so that I can successfully make the jump from playing at a character to truly embodying the character.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om hur några gymnasieelever som studerar dans på estetiska programmet upplever kreativitet och eget skapande. Syftet med studien var att undersöka elevernas upplevelse av kreativt skapande inom skolans ramar med fokus på kurserna Dansgestaltning 1 och Koreografi. Det som undersöktes var vilka faktorer som bidrar till att skapa en kreativ miljö och vilka som kan hindra det egna skapandet. Insamlade data bygger på kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer. Sammanlagt gjordes fem enskilda intervjuer med elever från årskurs två och tre på en gymnasieskola i Sverige. Dessa intervjuer transkriberades sedan och analyserades för att hitta olika teman. Temana kodades sedan i olika undergrupper som analyserades. Det som kom fram i resultatet var att eleverna upplevde skapande av dans i skolan som något positivt. När de skapande uppkom känslor som glädje, entusiasm och lugn. Det framkom även vad eleverna behövde för hjälpmedel för att kunna skapa dans. De behövde ha en förförståelse för olika danssteg, en stor lokal med speglar, musik och rätt sinnesstämning. Faktorer som kunde hindra dem var liten yta, klasskamrater, dålig självkänsla, och höga krav på sig själv. Min slutsats var att eleverna ser skapandet som något positivt och de flesta hjälpmedel de behöver finns redan i skolan. Det framkom även att faktorer som hindrar vissa elever i deras skapande kan ha en positiv effekt på andra elevers skapande. Något som också framkom var att eleverna påverkades ytterst lite av betygen.

This qualitative study critically examines the researcher’s music therapy clinical practice with a preschool child with global developmental delay. The researcher/student music therapist critically examined and refined her clinical practice using an action research model. Each cycle consisted of a plan, action, data collection, reflection, and analysis. The researcher was the main participant. The child, his mother and a speech-language therapist were co-participants with different roles. The child and his mother participated in the sessions. The speech-language therapist observed three sessions through a window. Feedback from the child’s mother and the speech-language therapist contributed to the reflective data. Important issues that developed through the cycles related to early intervention techniques (having fun, being playful and spontaneous, and being in close proximity). Other important issues that developed were, the use of the voice and guitar; confidence; professionalism with parents and other health professionals; self-awareness; and the understanding of early childhood development (especially in the area of communication). Related literature on aspects of music therapy practice, music therapy in early intervention, music therapy and communication, and action research are described. These results cannot be generalised. However, they may firstly, illustrate relevant trends in early intervention, and secondly, enable the researcher to adapt skills learnt to use in future practice in early intervention

This arts-based research thesis sought to understand two children with special needs, through their musical offerings within the context of their music therapy sessions. The process of understanding the children came through firstly listening to and extracting meaningful musical data from recordings of their sessions. This data included both actual excerpts of the musical interplays between the child and music therapist (myself), and more broadly, underlying themes drawn from the recorded session material. The data was then creatively ‘melded’, resulting in two original instrumental works, herein referred to as 'songs'. Before, during and after writing the songs, rigorous analyses were undertaken utilising both a formal approach, via the use of a contextual question framework, and two creative approaches: free-form narration and data-led imagery. The contextual question framework, involving the repetitive use of two key questions - where? and why? - sought to understand the data’s context, its purpose for inclusion, and its influence on the respective song. One of the creative approaches, that of free-form narration, sought to, rather than analysing the song through formal structures, instead ‘tell the song’s story’, narratively conveying the experience of being with the child in his music. The other creative approach, that of data-led imagery, involved creating images during and after being ‘immersed’ in the musical data, employing instinctive or subconscious means to further develop the therapist’s understanding of the child’s musical offerings, and moreover, the child himself. Upon completion of the two songs, it was discovered that clinical themes present from the sessions strongly influenced the song creation process. Results also strongly supported the validity of arts-based research as a viable means of analysing music created with children with special needs.