A research report submitted to the Drama for Life division of Wits School of Arts, Faculty of Humanities, for the award of the degree of Masters in Applied Drama at University of the Witwatersrand, 2015 / This research report evaluates an exploration of how Applied Drama methods can aid the pedagogy of Human Rights and encourage an attitude of responsibility towards human rights among young adult caregivers at the Rena la Lona Creative Centre in Soweto, South Africa. Human Rights are basic standards which inform the standard of living among people so that they live in dignity. In the context of this study, Human rights education through Applied Drama methods is the means through which people are empowered and are given a sense for responsibility. The study consisted of the use of Applied Drama methods to articulate the education of equality and Human rights. This was done through a practice-based research framework wherein the research is informed by collective practice and also relies on theoretical findings. The first chapter articulates the background and justification of study. Chapter two focuses on the literature and methodology that inform the study. Chapter three explores the research findings through an analysis of the methods used and the learning derived from the practice. Chapter four concludes with the reflection around the research results. The conclusion asserts that the explored Applied Drama methods can be used as a tool for holistic education of the South African Bill of Rights within an informal education setting such as the Rena la Lona Creative Centre.

This is a qualitative study exploring the use of workshop theatre in post-apartheid South Africa, with the objective of making a contribution to the knowledge-base regarding its use in current times. Workshop theatre is changing in response to a new socio-political reality and emerging trends in theatre practice. The case study, of developing a play on Oystercatchers with a Grahamstown group of artists, revealed the difficulties and challenges of using workshop theatre in this dynamic context. Data collection included a focus group, observation, reflective discussion and in-depth interviews that were analysed in relation to available literature on workshop theatre in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. It is proposed that workshop theatre has continued relevance in post -apartheid South Africa. The process of creating workshop theatre with diverse artists has great potential to transform relationships, address issues of personal identity and to provide an underlying purpose to a workshop theatre -making context.

Orientador(a): Alexandre Luiz Mate / Banca: Danilo Júnior de Oliveira / Banca: Dennis de Oliveira / Resumo: A dissertação analisa, com base em teóricos da comunicação, da linguagem e da cultura, a cobertura feita pelos jornais paulistanos de circulação nacional no Brasil O Estado de S. Paulo e Folha de S.Paulo, bem como seus respectivos discursos, sobre as peças Cacilda!!! Glória no TBC da Associação Teatro Oficina Uzyna Uzona e Édipo na Praça da Cia. de Teatro Os Satyros. As produções teatrais buscaram dialogar com as "Jornadas de Junho" no ano de 2013. Após apresentar o contexto histórico no qual tais peças surgiram, dois meses após a eclosão das grandes manifestações conhecidas como "Jornadas de Junho", desencadeadas por um aumento na tarifa do transporte público na cidade de São Paulo, a pesquisa apresenta e analisa o discurso dos jornais sobre tais espetáculos, descortinando seu viés ideológico e político na cobertura jornalístico-cultural de tais peças / Abstract: This dissertation analyzes, based on communication, language and culture theorists, the coverage done by the newspapers from São Paulo: O Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de S. Paulo, as well as their respective discourses, about the plays: Cacilda!!! Glória no TBC (Cacilda!!! Gloria in the TBC) of the group Oficina and Édipo na Praça (Édipo in the Square) of the group Satyros, productions that dialogued with the "Journeys of June" in 2013, triggered by an increase in the public transportation fare in the city of São Paulo. After presenting the historical context in which such pieces appeared, two months after the outbreak of the great manifestations known as "Journeys of June", the research presents and analyzes the discourse of the newspapers about such shows, revealing their ideological and political bias in jornalistic-cultural coverage of the plays of the two groups studied / Resumen: Esta disertación analiza, con base en teóricos de la comunicación, del lenguaje y de la cultura, la cobertura hecha por los diarios paulistanos de circulación nacional en Brasil O Estado de S. Paulo y Folha de S. Paulo, así como sus respectivos discursos sobre las obras Cacilda!!! Glória no TBC (Cacilda!!! Gloria en el TBC) de la Associação Teatro Oficina Uzyna Uzona e Édipo na Praça (Edipo en la Plaza) de la Cia. de Teatro Os Satyros. Las producciones teatrales buscaron dialogar con las "Jornadas de Junio" en el año 2013. Después de presentar el contexto histórico en lo cual dichas obras surgieron, dos meses después de la eclosión de las grandes manifestaciones conocidas como "Jornadas de Junio", desencadenadas por el aumento de la tarifa del transporte público en la ciudad de San Pablo, la pesquisa presenta y analiza el discurso de los diarios sobre tales obras teatrales, descortinando su mirada ideológica y política en la cobertura periodística-cultural de estas obras / Mestre

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This dissertation studies the interchange between political theatre and postwar political trials. I argue that to an extraordinary extent, theatre history in this period is inextricable from trial history. Through close archival study of mid-century theatre productions including Bertolt Brecht's 1954 production of "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" and the fifteen simultaneous premiere productions of Peter Weiss's "The Investigation" in 1965, I show how directors and playwrights looked to legal trials in order to develop and articulate theories of epic and documentary theatre, and how this new theatre in turn sought to effect justice in ways that trials alone could not.

In 1967 and 1968, members of the Youth International Party, also known as Yippies, created several mass street demonstrations to protest President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s handling of the United States’ military involvement in the war in Vietnam. The Yippies were a loose network of hippies, anti-war activists, and left-wing radicals committed to cultural and political change. This dissertation investigates how the Yippies used avant-garde theories of theatre and performance in their year of demonstrating against the Johnson administration. The Yippies receive little attention in most histories of American performance, and theatre remains on the margins of political and social histories of the 1960s; therefore this dissertation places performance and political archives side by side to create a new historical narrative of the Yippies and performance. The Yippies created their own networked participatory street performance form by drawing on the political philosophy of the New Left student movement, the organizational strategies of the anti-war movement, and the countercultural values of the hippies. They modified this performance form, which they termed “revolutionary actiontheater,” with performance theories drawn from New York’s avant-garde art world, the concept of guerrilla theatre outlined by R. G. Davis of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the notion of Theater of Cruelty created by Antonin Artaud. Using performance theory and cultural history as primary methodologies, this project traces the Yippies’ adoption of revolutionary action-theater with three examples: the 1967 “March on the Pentagon” where future Yippie leaders performed an exorcism ritual at the Pentagon; the 1968 “Grand Central Station Yip-In” event that advertised for the Yippie movement; and the 1968 “Festival of Life” at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago where the Yippies nominated a pig as presidential candidate. The final chapter on the recent phenomenon of flash mobs argues that the Yippies’ legacy lives on in this participatory street performance form, and suggests that revolutionary action-theater can still serve as a model for political action. / text

My dissertation examines mass movement and dancing choruses as forms that proliferated across national, political, and artistic boundaries during the interwar period. Bringing together diverse professional and amateur dance practices such as German movement choirs, American and Soviet pageantry, Busby Berkeley films, and early Martha Graham, I analyze how concepts of unity, precision, and futurity operated within the shared mass movement aesthetics but divergent politics of the United States, Germany, and Soviet Russia. While these forms have been examined by dance scholars as individual phenomena or in their national settings, there has been no full-length comparative study that encompasses this range of forms of dance and national and political ideologies. I argue that form does not predetermine a politics; rather, forms gain political significance through use and interpretation by artists and spectators with political and ideological perspectives—sometimes overt, sometimes implicit. Furthermore, the relationship among the individuals within a group and whether and how they relate to a leader is indicative of how the group participates in politics. I examine the development of German movement choirs and their association with political movements in Weimar and Nazi Germany; I pay special attention to the leftist movement choir activity of Martin Gleisner and Jenny Gertz, figures not well-known in English-language scholarship. I compare Soviet mass spectacles and American leftist dance, both of which were influenced by the Pageantry Movement, and argue that the artists’ political relation to the state impacted what kinds of futurity they could imagine. To argue that the precision chorus line was a site that produced and contested ideals of American womanhood, I bring together the Radio City Rockettes, the chorus in the all-Black film Harlem is Heaven (1932), and Busby Berkeley’s Dames (1934). Finally, I analyze Martha Graham’s all-female 1930s company alongside her political work Chronicle (1936) to discover connections between the company’s social visions and how the choreographed work implicated spectators in a collective future. My project contributes to the dance historical field by bringing together a broad range of artistic and cultural phenomena that are more often found within their national or genre boundaries. By connecting these sites of inquiry through archival research and analysis of textual and visual materials, I show that the political identity of a mass or chorus develops from the particular way that the individuals within the group relate to one another, to any leader present or imagined, and to the constituted outside of the group. In making these arguments, I seek to make dance history part of a larger social history of aesthetics and politics.

This project charts two tandem phenomena in late modern Britain: the emergence of a new mode of political theatre that I term “claustrophobic dramaturgy” and the growth of the carceral state. Through close textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and archival research, I demonstrate how two generations of feminist playwrights have honed and exchanged a complement of narrative and/or theatrical strategies which stage their dramatic protagonists as entrapped. These literal representations of confinement work to suggest more abstract, structural modes of confinement, including criminalized social identities, punitive public policies, and new carceral technologies. I draw together a surprising constellation of plays, produced since 1979, and united by a common investigation of the impacts of privatization and austerity on British state institutions. Chapter 1 identifies social housing plays as a distinct sub-genre of British social realism. This sub-genre reveals how, as social housing became increasingly residualized, social renters were subjected to increasing state surveillance. Chapter 2 extends overdue critical attention to Clean Break Theatre Company, which has, since 1979, dedicated its entire oeuvre to the topic of women’s incarceration. Chapter 3 investigates theatre’s surprising preoccupation with psychiatric hospitals in the midst of broadscale deinstitutionalization and funding cuts to the mental health sector. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the conjunction of Shakespeare adaptation and claustrophobic dramaturgy, both to reveal how carceral logics are embedded in the Shakespeare texts themselves and to demonstrate the new political dramaturgy’s saturation of British theatre culture. To the field of theatre studies, this project advances a critical reevaluation of late modern and contemporary British theatre history. While Socialist theatre often has been characterized as the province of a white boys’ club of the 1970s, I demonstrate how women playwrights take up this Socialist mantle to decry the carceral consequences of dismantling the welfare state. Case studies of plays by Black British playwrights are central to each chapter, weaving the history of Afrodiasporic theatre in the UK into the heart of my account of dramaturgical innovation. This project also offers one of the earliest examinations of professional theatre guided by questions and insights from the growing, multi-disciplinary field of carceral studies. If, as carceral studies scholars assert, the carceral is an ever moving and expanding target, we, as audiences and scholars, can look to claustrophobic dramaturgy to illuminate new carceral incursions on civic life and institutions.

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