This dissertation is a production history and reception study of the Market Theatres controversial presentation of Shakespeares Titus Andronicus in 1995. Although directed by Gregory Doran, the star attraction and creative force behind this event was Antony Sher, a celebrity actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a luminary in the United Kingdoms South African expatriate community. Johannesburg theatre audiences initially welcomed Shers self-described homecoming and the prestige his performance of Shakespeare would bestow upon that citys traditional Anglophile elite. For his part, Sher saw this event as a stepping stone towards repatriation and the beginning of a more ambitious career as a South African public intellectual. These mutual expectations were disappointed, however, when Johannesburg critics and audiences responded unfavorably to the actual staging of Titus, which featured South African stage accents instead of traditional Received Pronunciation. After Sher publicly countered public antipathy by writing a column accusing Johannesburgers of philistinism, a bitter quarrel erupted on editorial pages of both South African and British newspapers. It reignited two years later with the release of Sher and Dorans apologia Woza Shakespeare! Titus Andronicus in South Africa. To date, this polemical work has served as the primary history of this affair. Drawing on communitarian philosopher Michael Walzers theory of connected criticism, this dissertation offers an alternative reception narrative that locates the failure of this production in the rhetorical mismatch between Shers advertised intention to celebrate the achievement of racial reconciliation in that country and the aesthetic formation of relevance, (as theorized by Alan Sinfield) that governed Sher and Dorans conceptual efforts to make Titus more accessible to a contemporary South African audience. I argue that Shers professional immersion in the working methods of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and belated local knowledge of controversial new African National Congress cultural policies (such as the restructuring of the English-language radio station SAfm) diminished his ability to gauge the critical force of his production concept. The result was an inadvertent act of bait-and-switch that subsequent rancor over Shers support for the apartheid-era cultural boycott and defensive appeals to post-colonial Shakespeare did little to illuminate.

The Spoleto Festival U.S.A. is a seventeen day international arts festival held annually in Charleston, South Carolina. While the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. perpetuates many of the cultural practices of the hegemonic community of Charleston, it also participates in negotiations of culture on the contemporary global stage. The Festival and the City rely on one another to constitute an identity that is consumable for a tourist and/or festival audience, and this relationship became even more urgent after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Hurricane Hugo serves as a peripeteia of the self-fashioning and self-reflexive narrative shaped by the Charleston elite since the 18th century, and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. serves as the agent of its denouement. This function of the festival impulse in the contemporary urban setting of Charleston, South Carolina will be the focus of this dissertation, which will examine the relationship between the placedness of the historical city and the placelessness of the festival atmosphere. This study will identify the features of the festival impulse that engage history, memory, and community and negotiate the territory between place and space. It will compare the historical imaginary of the city with its contemporary identity as an international tourist destination and identify the strategies employed by the festival to destabilize homogenous worldviews and remap the geography of memory in Charlestons past and present.

Percy MacKaye has been mostly ignored by theatre historians and dramatic critics despite the large numbers of spectators, participants, and readers who encountered his work during the first third of the twentieth century. The fifth son of nineteenth-century theatre impresario, Steele MacKaye, Percy first embarked on a career in the commercial theatre, writing for established stars such as Julia Marlowe. However, MacKaye garnered much more public attention for his endeavors into community performance, what he termed civic theatre. He wrote several treatises and delivered countless speeches advocating for the civic theatre. In 1914, at the peak of his career, MacKaye wrote and produced The Masque of Saint Louis, which incorporated thousands of community performers and drew nightly audiences that averaged nearly 100,000. This investigation of MacKayes works relies heavily on spatial analysis, looking at how contemporary American spaces related to the scenographic spaces in these plays and masques. Specifically, this dissertation investigates how immigration and settlement house activities, worlds fairs, the City Beautiful movement, and national parks and monuments presented idealized versions of the American landscape and how these activities affected both MacKaye and participants and spectators. Throughout his symbiotic relationship with these cultural components, MacKaye continually asserted the importance of an American theatrical tradition distinct from its European influences. MacKaye yearned to forge a national character through community performances that tied American identity to its landscape.

This dissertation applies current thinking in cognitive science to elements of the actors process of preparing and performing a role. Findings in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and linguistics radically challenge the dualistic concepts that have dominated acting theory since the early twentieth century, and suggest more holistic models of the actors cognitive and expressive activities. Chapter 1 suggests how a vocabulary for nonverbal communication (nvc) drawn from social psychology can be used to analyze and describe actors communicative behavior. Chapter 2 examines the relationship of thought, language and gesture by considering Lakoff and Johnsons (L & J) analysis of how conceptual thought is metaphorically shaped by the bodys experiences in the physical world. This assessment is combined with David McNeills theory that gestures are key ingredients in an imagery-language dialectic that fuels both speech and thought. Elements of both analyses are applied to Jacques Lecoqs actor training exercises. Chapter 3 investigates the actors concepts of self and of character. This is supported by L & Js analysis of the metaphorical construction of self and of different selves, a description of the connectionist view of mind, Merlin Donalds proposition that mimesis is central to cognition, and Fauconnier and Turners theory of conceptual blending. Aspects of Michael Chekhovs approach to character are considered in the light of theses findings and theories. Chapter 4 addresses the actors sense of identification with a character. I refer to work on proprioception, LeDouxs exploration of the neural foundations of self, and Gallese and others work on mirror mechanisms in the brain that provide an experiential dimension to action and emotion understanding. I suggest that these findings validate the effectiveness of Stanislavskis Method of Physical Actions. Chapter 5 describes the findings of Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux and psychologist Paul Ekman on emotion, and applies them to exercises created by Stanislavski, Strasberg, Jerzy Grotowski, Jacques Lecoq, and Susana Bloch. The Conclusion proposes a model of the theatrical act, and suggests ways in which actor training can be remodeled in the light of the information described.

Shakespeare's Hamlet emerged at a moment of social transition between Catholic England and Protestant England. The accidents and entailments of this particular culture emerge in the text through images, metaphors, polysemy, ideational conceits, as well as in unique forms of linguistic expression and dramatic signification. Reading the theological disputes, architecture, discursive encryption, and public performances of the day as another form of historical and expressive text, and informing that reading with the latest theories in post-Whig English history, this dissertation uses the information so-gathered to perform a close re-reading of Hamlet and explore the way a cognitive primitivethe schema INSIDE/OUTSIDEis expressed multiply in the text in a polysemic web of signification. It is suggested that Hamlet emerged not only at the turning point between Catholic England and Protestant England, but at the strongly figured turning point between the homo religiosus of Medieval Europe and the modern European subject. This transition is marked by a split between a private and a public self correlated with the creation of a secular, social culture in Western European cordoned off from the increasingly complex and pluralistic religious culture.

Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian society as critically as suffering (or witnessing a loved one suffering) from illness. Boasting both a material reality of pathologies, morbidities, and symptoms and a metaphorical life of stigmas, icons, and sentiments, the cultural construct of illness was an indisputable staple on the late-nineteenth-century stage. This dissertation analyzes popular performances of illness (both somatic and psychological) to determine how such embodiments confirmed or counteracted salient medical, cultural, and individualized expressions of illness. I also locate within general nineteenth-century acting practices an embodied lexicon of performed illness (comprised of readily identifiable physical and vocal signs) that traversed generic divides and aesthetic movements. Performances of contagious disease are evaluated using over sixty years of consumptive Camilles; William Gillettes embodiment of the cocaine-injecting Sherlock Holmes and Richard Mansfields fiendishly grotesque transformations in the double role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are employed in an investigation of performances of drug addiction; and the psychological disorders enacted by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum Theatre serve as the centerpiece of an exploration of performances of mental illness. Each performance type is further illuminated using a dominant identity category: I contend that contagion was subtly tethered to notions of nationality and boundary crossings, Victorian class strata informed performances of addiction, and prevailing understandings of the masculine and feminine inspired the gendering of mental illness categories. In an age in which the expansion of physician authority and the publics faith in the findings of medical science encouraged a gradual decentralization of the patient from her own diagnosis and treatment, I see Victorian performances of illness as potentially curative. Even on the popular stage, where the primary objective was to entertain, performances of illness crucially restored the patient and his illness (both figuratively and literally) to center stage in ways unsurpassed by the periods novelists, painters, social reformers, and journalists. The difficulty of articulating experiential suffering with words or brushstrokes was partially ameliorated in theatrical enactments of illness. After all, theatres very nature guarantees that when words fail, bodies take up the cause.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2008

No description available.