The subjects of grief and of the afterlife are ones that have been discussed and analyzed for centuries, with no conclusive answers as to where we go or how we should go on. In “Alchemy of Desire/ Dead Man’s Blues”, Caridad Svich continues this discussion through a narrative, centered around a group of women dealing with the aftermath of a loss. She uses the term alchemy as an allegory for one’s ability to transcend and transform, and in turn, come to know the meaning of life…and death. This paper serves as a documentation of the SIUC Theater Department’s process and results in bringing this conversation to the stage, and this story to life.

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If not ignored completely, the body has been under theorized in literacy research. However, recent research in cultural studies, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, education, and the arts suggests that the body is implicated in thinking and knowing as well as doing. In this dissertation I examine high school technical theater. In this robustly embodied activity students build sets, rig lights, and paint backdrops in preparation for a theatrical production, as well as run sound and lighting and perform scene changes during the production. I use data from high school technical theater to explore the body in literacy, embodied learning, collaboration, composition processes, and experiential learning. I gathered data primarily during out of school work sessions over the multi-week production cycles of six plays produced at one high school over two school years. As an experienced theater technician, I used participant observation as the primary method of data collection, supplemented with semi-structured interviews with the technical director, artistic director, and four students. I collected data and analyzed data through iterative processes in which analysis began during data collection, emerging analyses influenced data collection, and constant comparisons to new data influenced emerging analyses. Observations of student work revealed that student theater technicians employed literacy skills including speaking, reading, writing, drawing, calculating, and interpreting the written text of plays as necessary elements of the normal course of technical theater work. Observations of teaching and learning showed that little explicit instruction was used but that mini-lessons, individual and collective problem solving, and multiple configurations of collaboration among more and less experienced technicians led to the development of critical thinking and physical skills, as well as proficiency in the creation of props through the evaluation and application of building techniques and materials. I used theories from art making and multimodal literacy to examine technical theater building projects as examples of composition. My findings show that the design of technical theater texts - e.g. props, scenery, lighting - emerges through a recursive process of creation and interpretation and is mediated by the technicians' knowledge of building techniques and materials. Situated learning and activity theory were used to analyze learning in the technical theater community. Results demonstrate that the structure of the community allows for learning through experience, apprenticeship, and collaboration as well as through the creation of texts that balance personal expression with collaborative enterprise.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OFZachary Alley, for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Technical Direction, presented on March 27, 2022, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: I HAVE A FEVER FOR MORE PEACOCKS: TECHNICAL DIRECTION FOR HAY FEVER MAJOR PROFESSOR: Thomas FagerholmThe Hay Fever production was produced on December 2, 2021 at Southern IllinoisUniversity Carbondale’s School of Theater and Dance. This thesis will pull the reader through the ideas, planning, and construction of the realized scenic design that composed the work of the technical director on this production. Focuses on how the technical director maintained open communication between the production team throughout the process. The technical director strived to bring clear interpretations of the scenic elements into their drafting to be used by the build crews to make the set a reality within the time and budget. Hopefully by presenting this thesis to the reader they can have a more extensive understanding that the work of technical direction is even more involved than just the material world of set construction.