Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first discovered in 1981 and consequently changed United States history. Initially, it affected the gay community, and the United States Government did not actively combat the spread of the disease for the first four years of the epidemic. In response to a need for education, the theatre community took it upon itself to raise awareness about the disease. Artists such as Robert Chesley and Larry Kramer created pieces of theatre that helped society deal with AIDS. This thesis explores the AIDS theatre canon while focusing on two major works: Robert Chesley’s Night Sweat: A Romantic Comedy in Two Acts and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. I also created a class on AIDS theatre that I taught in the fall semester of 2008 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Information on the process of teaching the class as well as the class outcome is also addressed.

Applied theatre is an umbrella term describing the practice of borrowing concepts from the conventional theatre and applying them to different disciplines. This thesis focuses on the use of applied theatre in teaching effective communication skills. Using the work of the Ariel Group and personal experiences working with the VCU da Vinci Center as examples, this paper demonstrates ways that underlying theatre concepts are used to teach communication skills. Additionally, this paper argues that there are many advantages for using theatre professors to teach communication skills to non-theatre students in other disciplines through the use of applied theatre methods. To support this argument examples are taken from the Critical Communications Group and my experiences teaching Public Speaking.

THE DOUBTFUL HERO: AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY By Heather N. Falks, MFA A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015 Director: Noreen Barnes Graduate Studies Director, Department of Theatre This thesis documents my role as director of Time Tells, an ensemble based, multi-media, devised theatre piece. I address my specific responsibilities when leading an ensemble to create new work and produce it for the public. I identify the problems the ensemble faced and account how I mediated when dealing with conflict. Additionally, I include important professional influences such as, director and author, Anne Bogart and her nine Viewpoints; and the work of director and activist, Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed. I explain how exercises from Viewpoints and Theatre of the Oppressed aided my approach to team building and helped the ensemble establish a common language for communication. A shared vocabulary and sense of community allowed the ensemble to freely explore character and relationships, which led to formation of the Time Tells story.

The role of a costume designer in a theatrical production is influential in creating character, time, and space. Costumes are the way in which a costume designer expresses a character’s personality, emotions, social status, and other personal idiosyncrasies. The job of a costume designer is to know how a character’s identity influences how they dress themselves. As a character develops throughout the performance, so must their clothing. Costumes show how a character ages, transforms, or regresses over the arc of a production. Not only do costumes show character details, they help clue the audience into time of day, season of the year, and whether the scene takes place indoors or out of doors. Costume designers draw inspiration from period images, paintings, writings, artwork, and fashion. A costume designer understands how small details within clothing can assist an audience’s understanding of character, time, and space. This thesis portfolio includes images and descriptions of my costume designs at the University of Iowa. This portfolio contains both realized productions and renderings from class work to show the evolution of my design work over the course of my Master of Fine Arts education. The entire breadth of my thesis portfolio can be found at the link: http://ir.uiowa.edu/theatre_d_folio/.

A comprehensive portfolio of the MFA Costume Designs of Emily (Ruiz) Bushà.

This is William Miles' Gatrell's relatively short diatribe about the inherent flaws in theatre academia followed by an examination of how fear stifles art. It concludes with a cliffhanger.

“Violence and Performance on the Latin American Stage” investigates Latin American theatre of the 1960s. It focuses on violence as an inherently formal element that intersects multiple contexts. My purpose is to develop a reading that challenges traditional interpretations of Latin American avant-garde theatre. I argue that this theatre does not apply European forms to Latin American realities, but rather juxtaposes local with foreign elements in multiple domains. It connects aesthetic, philosophic, social, and political contexts through the use of violent theatrical forms. The playwrights José Triana, Virgilio Piñera, Griselda Gambaro, and Jorge Díaz develop an aesthetics of violence that examines the ontological effects of crisis and revolution. Their characters confront questions of agency, subjectivity, historical perception, and consciousness that speak to their audiences’ experience in the sixties –I focus specifically on the Cuban revolution, Argentina’s growing socio-political violence, and Chile’s changing social demographics. I aim to show that the plays demand a simultaneous textual and contextual reading that dialogues with the multiple contexts and domains the plays intersect. My analysis focuses on the concepts of violence and performance in order to emphasize the plays’ modernizing role within their national theatrical scenes. I examine the challenges of theatrical writing and practice in times of conflict and social transformation, commenting on the disparaged reception of the plays’ innovative forms. I contend that this problem of reception accounts for the plays’ highly sophisticated structures of violence, which, in most cases, confused and distanced their audiences. This dissertation ultimately seeks to reveal the power of this theatre’s violent aesthetics to synthesize and critically engage with its cultural and socio- political surroundings.

“Violence and Performance on the Latin American Stage” investigates Latin American theatre of the 1960s. It focuses on violence as an inherently formal element that intersects multiple contexts. My purpose is to develop a reading that challenges traditional interpretations of Latin American avant-garde theatre. I argue that this theatre does not apply European forms to Latin American realities, but rather juxtaposes local with foreign elements in multiple domains. It connects aesthetic, philosophic, social, and political contexts through the use of violent theatrical forms. The playwrights José Triana, Virgilio Piñera, Griselda Gambaro, and Jorge Díaz develop an aesthetics of violence that examines the ontological effects of crisis and revolution. Their characters confront questions of agency, subjectivity, historical perception, and consciousness that speak to their audiences’ experience in the sixties –I focus specifically on the Cuban revolution, Argentina’s growing socio-political violence, and Chile’s changing social demographics. I aim to show that the plays demand a simultaneous textual and contextual reading that dialogues with the multiple contexts and domains the plays intersect. My analysis focuses on the concepts of violence and performance in order to emphasize the plays’ modernizing role within their national theatrical scenes. I examine the challenges of theatrical writing and practice in times of conflict and social transformation, commenting on the disparaged reception of the plays’ innovative forms. I contend that this problem of reception accounts for the plays’ highly sophisticated structures of violence, which, in most cases, confused and distanced their audiences. This dissertation ultimately seeks to reveal the power of this theatre’s violent aesthetics to synthesize and critically engage with its cultural and socio- political surroundings.

The journey into theatre-made places offered here is both analytical and creative. It is comprised of case studies analysing three theatre productions that occurred in Perth between 2004 and 2006 and two of my own creative works, forming the Prologue and Conclusion to the thesis. Throughout, I am informed by Edward Casey’s philosophy of place as I work to develop both a poetics and a dramaturgy of place in theatre. I draw upon of a range of thinkers in order to interrogate the limits of theatrical representation and to suggest that an active engagement in the process of place-making in theatre offers a touchstone and paradigm that can release both thought and the body from totalizing and foreclosing cultural imperatives. This dramaturgical and poetical journey into place works, I hope, toward creating an open and dynamic field from which to experience the ‘here and now’ of being in place in theatre, and in the world. I argue that the notion of place as embodied meaning frames the body and the mind in contexts that are personal, emotional, historical, ethical, and political; that to be in place, to be aware that one’s body is a particular place, suggests that the body and mind are listening to each other. This conscious connection, I believe, offers a radical challenge to the bifurcation of body and mind that runs as a consistent theme throughout the history of Western thought. More particularly, I aim to demonstrate that a voyage into place, in theatre, conveys the body and mind together in ways that allow us to “resume the direction, and regain the depth, of our individual and collective life once again – and know it for the first time” (Casey, 1993: 314).

My premise in this dissertation is that the tradition of independent theatre for young audiences created in Córdoba, Argentina is a worthy community of practice for Applied Theatre study. To provide the much needed documentation of and exposure to this community of practice, and to defend the hypothesis that this community of theatre practice represents a valuable contribution to the Applied Theatre canon, this research project focuses on the following questions: What are the key characteristics of independent theatre for young audiences practice in Córdoba, Argentina between 2001 and 2016? What are the recurring themes and ideas emerging from this community of practice and in circulation among its artists? How are these characteristics, themes and ideas similar to and different from the overall community of independent theatre practice in Córdoba, Argentina during the same period? / Graduate