A Comparative Analysis of Theatre and Film Direction

This examination focuses on an investigation of playwright Maria Irene Fornes repertoire, in the context of her style, through producing and directing her 1983 play Mud. Included in this exploration is a critical analysis of Fornes literary work through a sampling of plays within her vast expanse of literature: The Conduct of Life, Sarita, Fefu and Her Friends, and Mud. With a focus on directing Mud as a means to understanding her larger canon of work, I examine Fornes thematic elements, stylistic conventions, and representationsspecifically seen through gender, ethnicity, and class. The influences of Fornes Hispanic ethnicity and gender are manifest in her work and often challenge the gender roles within Hispanic culture. From these complexities stem the dramatic tension and exploration that her writing generates through her characters, settings, and dialogue. Relying on my own experience as a Hispanic female, I engage with her repertoire in a way that identifies the influences of Fornes cultural and genetic background within the narrative structure and theme of her plays. My investigation, experienced primarily through the vehicle of directing Mud, illuminates many aspects of Fornes workripe with nuances, complexities, and symbolisms. With specific attention to gender and ethnic influences on the artistic product, my exploration in directing provides an opportunity to expand the study of this specific playwright in an active context. The first-hand experience gained in understanding, dissecting, and enacting Fornes play, Mud, is the foundation of this thesis project.

Abstract The Photographic and Spatial Survey Method for Video Projection Jeffrey Paul Kurihara, M.F.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Richard M. Isackes The process and practices that are described in this document were used in several realized video installation projects over the course of 2011-2013. These installations all encompassed the use of Architectural Video Projection Mapping techniques to create transformative animated video projections upon the pre-existing architecture of multiple locations. The process used to achieve this required the integration of multiple practices to obtain and translate specific spatial data to be used in the artistic content creation process. Particular to this method uses a photographic and spatial survey to map the video content accordingly to the architecture of the space. The projects included an installation on a building facade for the Art Alliance Austin’s Holiday Stroll in 2011, another installation on the architecture of an interior wall of a museum space for an event at the Austin Museum of Art in 2013, a site-specific musical theater piece called Almost Invincible in the University of Texas Co-op’s Cohen New Works Festival 2013, and multiple stages of a live music venue named Cheer-up Charlie’s in Austin, Texas form 2011 to 2013. / text

This thesis examines the work of director Nikos Psacharopoulos on the plays of Anton Chekhov while Executive Director at The Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. Components of Psacharopoulos' productions are contextualized within an American tradition of producing Chekhov and elements identified in previous research by Laurence Senelick. Using the constituents of Senelick's analysis, Psacharopoulos' work is examined in two general areas: his teaching, directing, and rehearsal techniques with the Chekhov texts, and the qualities in production of the plays at The Williamstown Theatre Festival between 1962 and 1986. This study offers, for the first time, a scholarly examination of Psacharopoulos' work and considers the director's position as an American producer of Chekhov's plays. As one of the most prolific directors of Chekhov in North America, Nikos Psacharopoulos emerges from this study as an essential component in any future consideration of Chekhov production in the United States.

This study examines men's masculine performance in LaBute's major works and demonstrates how his men oppress themselves and others by trying to live up to the ideals of traditional masculinity. Using the writings of profeminist sociologist Michael Kimmel and other scholars of masculinities, as well as theoretical considerations of Laura Mulvey's gaze theory, the thesis specifically explores the attempts of LaBute's men to repudiate the femininity within themselves through homophobia and the suppression of emotions. Additionally, it examines the sexism that stems from his men's anti-femininity. Overall, the prevalence of such harmful men in LaBute's works and the mostly negative effects of their masculine performance prove that LaBute is critiquing traditional masculinity in order to promote change.

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Over the last 20 years, Canadian puppeteer/playwright Ronnie Burkett has garnered an international following for his provocative, text-driven, solo puppet shows. Still, as one of Canada’s foremost theatre artists, he has received very little scholarly recognition for his unique and important work. My thesis seeks to fill this academic void by offering ways to define and explain Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes as metatheatre. I investigate the ways in which Burkett pushes the use of metatheatrics, inherent to puppetry, to bold extremes in his plays in an attempt to render his audiences receptive to honest, felt emotion and, at other times, to draw attention to the ideas being presented by deconstructing ideologies related to the binaries of creator/created, actor/character and subject/object. I turn my focus to the specificity of Burkett’s medium—the puppet and puppeteer, respectively—and examine his performance texts through the lens of puppet, semiotic and reception theories. Doing so allows me to reveal how the many styles of his “living objects” stage a diametric tension between empathy and detachment, life and non-life, and, as such, how his puppet plays offer adult theatregoers both highly emotionally affecting and thought-provoking experiences unlike any other in the modern (puppet) theatre.

The GeriActors and Friends is a company of intergenerational actors that is directed by Professor David Barnet of the University of Alberta. The GeriActors was a senior’s theatre group creating original theatre since 2001 in Edmonton. The GeriActors and Friends was created as a result of Barnet’s course Intergenerational Theatre 407/507, first offered in the fall 2006. The company is made up of two groups: university students and senior citizens. This thesis is an exploratory analysis of the GeriActors and Friends’ 2006/07 and 2007/08 seasons. Using these seasons as a case study, the theories of specific cultural theorists are used to analyze play and playfulness as it exists in the rehearsals and performances of the company. The analysis of playfulness is presented using autoethnographic research techniques that analyze the personal history of the researcher and a variety of qualitative methods which consider the two seasons of the community-based theatre company

ABSTRACT A detailed account of the working life and achievements of the English actress/manager, Lena Ashwell, between the years 1891 and 1929, set in the context of the theatrical and social environment of these four decades. The thesis presents a chronological record of Ashwell's stage career, her development as a theatrical manager and her contributions to progress in her profession as well as to the changing perception of the role of women in society. It also records Ashwell's contribution during the First World War, taking entertainment to the war zones to boost the morale of soldiers and to provide employment for actors and musicians. It continues with an account of the post-war pursuit of her aim of making theatre accessible to the whole community through dedicated commitment to the British Drama League and the idea of a National Theatre and the creation and management of the Lena Ashwell Players. The thesis proposes that Ashwell has been unjustly neglected in histories of this period and that her considerable achievements are worthy of recognition and inclusion in accounts not only of the acting profession and the achievements of women playwrights, but also of the Suffrage and women's movement, the First World War, the National Theatre of Great Britain and the municipal or regional theatres established throughout the country, state subsidy and public support for the arts, actor training and the study of drama and theatre within the education system. Five chapters give a narrative account of Ashwell's work from her first stage appearance in March 1891 to the closure of the Lena Ashwell Players in August 1929. Each chapter adds to the cumulative impact of Ashwell's achievements, while identifying areas where she has left a lasting legacy. The Postscript provides a brief account of the last twenty-seven years of her long life, when she was less able to play an active role in society, but never lost her indomitable spirit or ambition for a better world. The Appendices provide a chronological list of her stage appearances and details of the members of the Lena Ashwell Players and the company's repertoire during the 1920s.

Master of Philosophy / This single case study examines the way that Johnstone’s (1981) Impro ‘Poetics’ are being used in the contemporary practice of Open Scene Additive Improvisation (OSAI). Johnstone’s Poetics have become a ubiquitous part of contemporary drama improvisation parlance, yet they have never themselves been the subject of any academic examination. This study attempts to fill that void by looking at their use in Open Scene Impro, the purest form of theatre improvisation (since OSAI relies on no structures other than the audience suggestion around which to improvise a ‘Scene’.) To do this, the research analysed seven OSAI Scenes performed by 3 undergraduate student improvisers at the University of Sydney in July 2003, and looked at the ways in which the actions that Johnstone’s Poetics describe are actually being used. Looking closely at Scene segments, the study identifies a number of features: the ways that Offers are used to initiate, re-initiate, confirm or redirect meaning across five identified fields; the ways that Accepts temper these meanings; the productive use of Blocking in a Scene; and many other functions. It was also found that in-Scene negotiations about definition of situation became a subtextually enmeshed part of the Scene’s meaning (often in Phases of improvisers’ conflicting Endowments), while the predictive and framing control of narrative-indexing Offers ensured that character roles became defined early on in all Scenes. Overall, the study’s analysis dissects each of the Poetics to show that improvisers use them for a number of major purposes crucial for the reality, forward-movement and coherence of a Scene to obtain. The study concludes by elucidating how the nine main Poetics (Offer, Endow, Justify, Advance, Extend, Reincorporate, Accept, Block and Yield) serve these purposes. These purposes are then abstracted into the TOE Model, which in turn forms the basis of a proposed dynamic and holistic model for understanding OSAI at each moment of its (re-)creation. The ultimate aim, beyond the reach of the present study, is to be able to understand an Open Scene’s every moment, and each moment’s reference historically backwards, and, to some degree, predictively forwards in time. To this end, the fundamental dynamic of contextualised giving and receiving in OSAI is morphed into a Taoist energetic model, a “Tao of Impro”, along with the notion, derived from Mandelbrot, of ‘cybernetic semantic iteration’, by which information seems to get processed in Open Scenes. The educational implications of these models are then sketched, and future directions for research in OSAI pointed to.