This thesis is a multi-sited survey providing insight into integral performing arts institutions and how they engage in the distribution of cosmopolitan cultural capital to middlebrow audiences. It additionally provides a taxonomy of the different types of performances present across three sites: MSC OPAS, Arts Midwest, and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ Annual Conference in New York (APAP/NYC). My research methods include ethnography, interviewing, and textual analysis, but my investigation of these sites began with several leading questions: How do audiences read live performances for cosmopolitanism? How is that cosmopolitanism produced in key performing arts organizations? How is performance both a product that is marketed to venues and audiences and the means of marketing itself? Cosmopolitanism is an integral component to marketing, delivering, and enjoying live touring commercial performances. Performing arts presenters like OPAS, and presenting organizations, including Arts Midwest and APAP, engage cosmopolitanism on multiple levels as they work to provide regional audiences with otherwise unattainable “world-class” performances. Cosmopolitanism is present and presented every step of the way and the industry continues to advance cosmopolitan goals. This works shifts from analyzing cosmopolitan tourists to understanding touring cosmopolitanism because touring performances provide cosmopolitan cultural capital to community audiences located outside these urban centers. Touring performances provide opportunities for residents outside large metropolitan areas to engage in a global culture of performance and insert themselves into an imagined community of cosmopolitans. This is due in part to touring artists who deliver “world-class” performances to audiences that would otherwise entirely lack a connection to arts opportunities that accompany metropolitan centers and cosmopolitan communities. Cosmopolitanism is operationalized in performances of rurality, organizational culture and sociability, and exoticizing marketing strategies. I not only explore how cosmopolitanism is operationalized across these sites, but also how performance, in several of its variations, is operationalized, negotiated, and, of course, presented. More specifically, I examine artistic, interpersonal, organizational, and economic performances, as they are present across the three sites.

Mgr. Tomáš Vokáč Engaged Drama of Everyday Life (Socially Engaged French Drama of the late 19th and 20th Century) Abstract This thesis describes the fundamental ontological change in the character of the French drama of the 19th and 20th century which became the basis for the modern French drama of the 20th century. The thesis is based on the analysis of the selected plays with the focus on socially engaged and socio-critical themes. This thesis defines the basic line of development of the socially engaged drama that begins with the work of naturalistic writers Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers, continues in the form of Henry Becque's playwrights and the authors grouped around Andre Antoine's Théâtre Libre, especially Jean Jullien and his theory of "live theatre", and results in the definition of Eugène Brieux's, François de Curel's and partly Octava Mirbeaua's drama. The opposite character of French theatre and drama at the turn of the 19th and 20th century is described as the counterpart to this line. The thesis provides comparison with the contemporary influences of commercial and subsidized theatres, refers to the symbolist theatre and to the work of late Parnassians. It also closely describes Neo- Romanticism Drama in verse represented by the works of Edmond Rostand, Jean Richepina and, partially,...