In this thesis the notion of a theoretical approach to the beginning stages of designing lighting for a theatrical production will be discussed. The topic being researched is: How a theoretical approach to entering the design process will enhance the final lighting design. The target audience for this study is theatrical lighting designers. A theoretical approach, in this case to the beginning of the design process, could be described as utilizing current dramatic theories to develop a better understanding for the design of this production. In order to better understand this topic one would need to know how the process of lighting design is typically created and where the theoretical approach is implemented. An issue with this approach is that the short period allowed for the design process does not allow sufficient time to utilize a theoretical approach in a real world setting. A way of determining if this process is effective is through personal self review. Journaling and discussion with my advisor for this production will be the method of data collection. The method of validation will be a self reflection at the end of the final performance. An issue with the collection process is its reliance on personal opinions, including the author’s. There are no ethical issues relating to this study. When applied, a theoretical approach to the design process will enhance the quality of the final lighting design through allowing the designer to be better prepared for a specific scene that he/she is struggling with.

The purpose of this thesis is to showcase the importance of God-inspired Theatre and to manifest the transformative effects of living in accordance to the Word of God. In order to share my vision for theatre such as this, I will examine the biblical elements in Zora Neale Hurston's short story Sweat (1926). I will write a stage adaptation of the story, while placing emphasis on the biblical lessons that can be used for God-inspired Theatre. When viewing the stage adaptation based on Sweat, the audience members will understand how God-inspired Theatre aims to help members of society utilize their gifts and abilities to assist others in achieving spiritual stability. The members of the audience will also be informed of my vision to use this piece to inspire others to embrace cultural awareness and sensitivity. This is my vision--helping others to walk in their God-ordained destiny. With this in mind, I am using Sweat as a proposed play because it is closely related to the creation account as recorded in the Old Testament Book of Genesis. In this play, Adam and Eve are replaced with the characters Sykes and Delia Jones. The creation account is a very influential testimony because it is known throughout humanity. Its popularity is due to the fact that the Old Testament is the commencement of the Christian Bible. For those of the Jewish faith, the collection encompasses the Torah, the first five books of the bible--the law for everyday living-- as well as the history of God's promise to them. For Christians, the Old Testament is just as sacred, but they view its religious meaning as incomplete without the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ detailed in the New Testament. Also, Muslims trace their religious roots to some of the figures in the Old Testament although they deny the religious significance of the work as a whole. In essence, the Old Testament is crucial to Western Civilization. This is why Sweat is so powerful. It takes an extremely familiar testimony and shares pertinent messages that help people to become productive members of society. In order to show how effective Sweat is in helping others to live spirit-filled lives, I will use creative staging that will place the characters in the personal space of the audience members. I will achieve this by: having the actors enter and exit from the audience; allowing certain scenes to take place within the audience; and having the actors deliver some lines to various audience members. I feel that by making the audience a part of the production, it will cause them to see that they are not any different from the characters in the play. At some point in their lives, theatergoers have encountered--or been intimate with--an Adam, an Eve, a Sykes or a Delia. This will cause them to not see Sweat as just a play, but as a valuable life lesson, triggering self-examination and initiating renovated thinking that helps people to become culturally aware and spiritually sound. It is imperative that the biblical messages in Sweat are conspicuous. Whereas the narrator normally describes Delia's facial expression or feelings, I plan to write in scenes where her thoughts are audible. Some of her thoughts will include moments when she is praising and worshipping God. This is apparent because she starts to emerge as a woman of strength as the story progresses. Her relationship with God is cultivated on a daily basis. This is why she is able to tolerate her husband's foolishness. Her husband, Sykes, does not commune with God. To demonstrate his lack of communion with God, I will stage him being resistant to her times of worship--as he normally is according to the narrator. Clearly, the marriage is unbalanced. One partner is trying to please God, and the other is trying to please self. This is not how God intended marriage to be. In the New Testament Book First Peter, it states in the third chapter and seventh verse "husbands are to dwell with them in understanding, giving honor to the wife... being heirs together of the grace of life." Showing the burdensome consequences of destructing God's original design will pull on the hearts of audience members because they have encountered or known someone who is presently dealing with the consequences of this disobedient act. I will further reiterate the need for living a spirit-filled life by using costumes, scenic devices, and lighting to convey the godly and ungodly character traits that are embodied within the story. Through the use of colors and patterns, I will project the internal state of the character as in relation to God's instructions. I will work with a lighting designer in order to help convey the moods of the various scenes. The lighting techniques we choose will help to establish the thoughts and personalities of the characters. These feelings will transcend the minds of the audience and cause them to take the biblical messages into very deep consideration. The actors are the final ingredients in making Sweat an awe-inspiring, informative piece. Words are what they are, what one perceives them to be, while on paper. It is the job of the actor to give life to these words, cause them to live in the atmosphere, and to make the character come alive. Until the actor embodies the very heart of a character, the message in God-inspired Theatre will not be able to come forth and propel audience members to have a spiritual awakening. This is why people cannot just read Sweat. They must see the trials and journeys in order to receive life-changing revelations from the testimonies within the play.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, English Dept., 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

This dissertation seeks to contribute to recent scholarship by demonstrating that an African-American utopian tradition persists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the works of African-American women writers. If liberation remains a fundamental theme in African-American literature – a definitive stance espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois and a host of other prominent African-American scholars, but also upheld by this dissertation – then such a consistently recurring goal has only been marginally completed, at best, in the United States. Despite proclamations of a universally attainable American Dream, African Americans remain disenfranchised by prison, education, and court systems as well as other integral institutions found within the United States.With this dilemma in mind and given the potentially subversive power of literature, this dissertation argues that the African-American utopian tradition in particular functions as a useful critical lens through which one can examine the often-elusive goal of revolutionary change. This lens raises the pertinent questions that one must answer in order to strive towards one’s utopia, and also exposes the systemic and thus conventional parameters latent in the too-familiar antithetical dystopias about which so many African-American narratives admonish their audiences to confront or, if they are lucky enough, avoid altogether. By focusing on a thematic continuum represented by the utopian small towns found in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), this dissertation encapsulates a utopian tradition that inscribes race, gender, and sexuality, onto the African-American literary tradition. / English

This essay analyzes the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston, 1937. The main focus is how the protagonist Janie uses her voice to subvert patriarchal oppression. In this essay my hypothesis is that she has a voice all along. However, it evolves due to her ability to engage in activities that are subversive to patriarchy. Her journey throughout the novel is a journey where the oppression from her relationships only makes her grow stronger as a woman. During her journey towards self-revelation as an empowered woman, she gradually gains her freedom and her own authentic voice by asserting control over her body and thoughts. The main theoretical terms of this essay are used in direct link to the struggles and achievements of formulating the self in a male dominated society. What I aim to achieve with this essay is to show how Janie emerges as a subject with a voice of her own in Hurston’s novel.

This dissertation examines black writers' appropriations of blackface minstrelsy as central to the construction of a New Negro image in the early twentieth century U.S. Examining the work of artists who were both fiction writers and pioneers of the black stage, I argue that blackface, along with other popular, late-nineteenth century performance traditions like the cakewalk and ragtime, plays a surprising and paradoxical role in the self-consciously “new” narratives that come to characterize black cultural production in the first decades of the twentieth century. Rather than rejecting minstrelsy as antithetical to the New Negro project of forging black modernity, the novelists and playwrights I consider in this study—Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson—adapted blackface and other popular performance traditions in order to experiment with narrative and dramatic form. In addition to rethinking the relationship between print and performance as modes of refashioning blackness, my project also charts an alternative genealogy of black cultural production that emphasizes the New Negro Movement as a cultural formation that precedes the Harlem Renaissance and anticipates its concerns.

La recherche présentée dans le cadre du présent mémoire porte sur la traduction vers le français de trois romans écrits - partiellement ou complètement - en vernaculaire noir américain (VNA), un sociolecte propre à la communauté formée par les Afro-Américains issus de l'esclavage. Les romans à l'étude sont : Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), de Zora Neale Hurston, traduit en 1993 par Françoise Brodsky sous le titre Une femme noire; The Color Purple (1982), d'Alice Walker, traduit en 1984 par Mimi Perrin sous le titre La couleur pourpre; et Push (1996), de Sapphire, traduit en 1997 par Jean-Pierre Carasso sous le titre homonyme Push. Ces œuvres littéraires partagent, en plus de l'usage intensif du VNA, de nombreuses caractéristiques : il s'agit dans tous les cas de la quête émancipatoire d'une femme afro-américaine, qui s'accomplit grâce au langage - récit, écriture, alphabétisation. Les revendications culturelle, politique et féministe de ces textes sont-elles rendues fidèlement dans la traduction? La méthodologie et la grille d'analyse que j'utiliserai sont inspirées de l'œuvre d'Antoine Berman, un théoricien de la traduction littéraire qui s'est penché sur le phénomène de la traduction ethnocentrique, dans le cadre de laquelle les normes culturelles, littéraires et linguistiques de la culture d'arrivée sont privilégiées au détriment de la spécificité étrangère du texte. Les critères que Berman propose pour l'évaluation des traductions sont l'éthique et la poétique, qui concernent, pour l'un, la valeur du projet de traduction, et pour l'autre, la présence ou non de tendances déformantes propres à la traduction ethnocentrique. Puisque l'interprétation - quelquefois biaisée ou inexacte, ou bien heureuse - du traducteur l'influence sans conteste dans son travail, je pourrai déterminer par l'analyse la position idéologique des traducteurs et les associer aux courants théoriques identifiés par Inês Oseki-Dépré. Enfin, rassemblant les données obtenues lors de l'analyse des différentes traductions, je me prononcerai sur les conditions de possibilité de la traduction du VNA, un sociolecte fortement ancré culturellement et politiquement dans la communauté d'où il émerge. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Traduction littéraire, vernaculaire noir américain, littérature afro-américaine, féminisme noir (womanism), littérature américaine, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Sapphire, Françoise Brodsky.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 410-441). Also available on the Internet.