Thesis (M.A. (Drama))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, Wits School of Arts, 2016 / This report is the final piece of a performance as research project exploring what it means to be white and English-speaking at the southern tip of Africa. The report is coupled with an autobiographical one man play about myself. The play explores, through a series of monologues, what it means for me to be a white South African. It moves from the specifics of my life to more general assumptions about whiteness and back again. This report runs parallel to the play almost as an extension of it working in dialogue to explore complicity and identity. As an extension of the creative project I have chosen to negate traditional chapters and style for more poetic language intertwined with analytical thinking, which links into the style of the play. The idea behind this is that every world, be it, performance onstage or analytical report writing is merely a part of the continuum called life and by blurring the lines between these it is easier to fuse the learning and the living into a cohesive whole. The creative research shows how the rehearsal and performance process of theatre-making helps to strip away the deceptions that people tell themselves making them complicit in the injustice of post-apartheid white privilege but in doing this it also creates a space where people can feel safe to dialogue about this complicity. / GR2017

The East Cape Opera Company was founded by Gwyneth Lloyd in 1995 and has performed in various Eastern Cape venues and festivals as well as conducting a tour of the Netherlands. The Company has performed well known operas and operettas such as Mozart's The Magic Flute, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado as well as their own original isiXhosa operas such as Temba and Seliba, The Moon Prince - Inkosana Yenyanga and The Clay Flute. This thesis is situated within the context of apartheid and post-apartheid, and an emerging post-1994 South African’s operatic culture that embraces multiculturalism. The aim of this research is to explore and raise awareness regarding intercultural communication in relation to isiXhosa operas and examine the linguistic and dramatic characteristics of the construction of these operas. This involves an analysis of the integration of African cultural practices (dramatic and musical) within an essentially western art form. The thesis makes use of intercultural and literary theory as a point of departure to analyse not only the literary qualities of the isiXhosa operas performed by the East Cape Opera Company, but it also seeks to show how these operas reflect an emerging intercultural reality within the South African context. The thesis explores the mixing of genres, including African genres such as the folktale and oral poetry as part of Opera, which has previously been seen as a Western domain. It is argued that this mixing of genres and languages allows for the success of African Opera

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Performing arts centers have been touted as a strategy for revitalizing downtowns by increasing activities that bring in residents with higher incomes, tourists, arts employees, educated workers, and housing. Despite their popularity, civic leaders have encountered complexity in these projects, from financial challenges, to delayed openings and operating deficits. Previous downtown studies examine public facilities, such as stadiums and cultural institutions, through essays, surveys, case studies, or by quantifying transactions exchanged between the public and the facility. This dissertation focuses solely on performing arts centers, excluding all other forms of public facilities and cultural venues, by examining self-collected data on literature-based characteristics of 218 downtowns with and without performing arts centers, all over a seven-year period of time. It was hypothesized that the presence of a performing arts center would contribute to increases in the values of all downtown revitalization characteristics, and community characteristics, as well as organizational attributes of the performing arts center itself (age, size, and revenue types) would in turn, increase the values of the overall health of the performing arts center. Through the use of multiple linear regressions, this research shows that performing arts centers can play a role in revitalizing downtowns. This research also shows that a single characteristic is not solely responsible for revitalizing downtowns; rather, the increased vitality results from a confluence of the characteristics. Endogeneity tests show that a performing arts center is less likely to enter a deserted downtown bereft of vitality. Instead, performing arts centers serve as harbingers of revitalization, confirming the presence of downtown vitality, before they proceed to activate vitality further. Finally, through the use of binary logistic regressions, community characteristics are identified in order to determine the conditions of downtowns that would be most equipped to open a performing arts center, as compared with downtowns that could not.