En lärare som var väldigt viktig för mig i ett visst skede under studietiden, var Thomas Lander. Han introducerade de sångtekniska fördelar man kan hämta från talet, eller som han kallar det, det patetiska talet. Betydelsen, och lärdomarna som kunde hämtas, av talet stannade dock inte här, det breddades till att vara det centrala i hela min filosofi kring kommunikation på scen.Från de rent sångtekniska verktygen som fanns att hämta, kom senare diktionen, och textens hörbarhet. Därefter kom talet i dess mest övergripande form, likt skådespeleri. Vad fanns det egentligen överhuvudtaget för skillnader mellan tal och operasång? Fascinationen uppstod ur det faktum att vi genom trial and error har övat hela livet på att tala, på att till att börja med rent taltekniskt göra oss tillräckligt förstådda, att man hör vad som sägs, och för det andra att vilja uppnå något med vad man säger. Det verkade inte mer än rimligt att använda sig så mycket av det som möjligt, varför uppfinna hjulet en gång till?Frågeställningen blir här därmed: ​Vad finns det för skillnader och likheter mellan skådespeleri och operasång, och vad man lära av det för att bli en bättre sångare?

Despite acceptance that physical activity serves as a protective agent against the burden of non-communicable disease, half of all adults in the developed world remain insufficiently physically active. The promotion of physical activity is therefore of paramount importance to public health researchers and practitioners. Dance, as a leisure or social activity, can play a role in the engagement of adults in physically active pursuits that are not necessarily thought of as traditional exercise per se. This is especially important for those individuals not currently meeting physical activity guidelines and is fully congruent with the current public health message that "some activity is better than none". A holistic exploration of Latin dance was undertaken in this thesis in the context of physical activity and psychosocial health promotion in non-clinical adults. The research encompassed a quantitative assessment of physiological and psychological measures related to dance. Over a 3 yr period, eighty-four women and men were enrolled in a series of four interrelated Latin dance (salsa) and Latin-themed aerobic dance (Zumba fitness) studies. Research grade motion sensing and heart rate monitors were used to evaluate the physiological responses to dance, and a novel activity-specific value calibration method was developed to process the data. The monitors, which are small and unobtrusive to wear, were then utilised for collection of data during performance of dance in naturalistic settings. Psychological measures associated with dance participation were captured using previously validated questionnaires. Results indicate that Latin dance elicits physiological responses representative of moderate to vigorous physical activity when performed primarily for leisure purposes. Modest improvements were observed post-dance in measures of cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and inflammatory biomarkers in relation to cardiovascular health. Moreover, participation fostered interest, enjoyment, and a positive psychological outlook, and enhanced well-being, mood, and health-related quality of life with large magnitude effects. The findings of this thesis may be relevant for researchers and practitioners interested in the efficacy of dance as an expressive and creative medium for the promotion of physical and mental health.

Drawing on extensive primary research into John Ford’s early films, from the silent era up until the late 1920s, the thesis charts the evolution of what has become known as the ‘Fordian sensibility’ through a close textual analysis of the director’s extant silent films, taking into account the implications of the auteur theory as applied to Ford’s work. A major part of the research process has been devoted to the appropriation of the director’s surviving early titles, in order that all existing film materials relevant to the thesis can be included. Prior to examining Ford’s silent film output, the thesis covers the evolution of the auteur theory, and the nature of the ‘Fordian sensibility’. This chapter also discusses key thematic and visual motifs that have been identified by various film scholars over the years, along with a number of other patterns discerned by the author of this thesis, through a close examination of all of Ford’s sound films, from The Black Watch (1929) through to 7 Women (1966). The main text of the thesis considers whether the identified key thematic and visual motifs can be detected in the director’s early work, and how these themes and motifs evolved chronologically into fully formed components of the ‘Fordian sensibility’. The four main chapters of the thesis cover the following periods: Pre-directing career 1914 – 1917; Apprenticeship at Universal 1917 – 1921; Early 1920s work at Fox 1921 – 1926; Late silent period at Fox 1927 – 1930. This examination of the director’s work analyses how John Ford, the man and the director, became ’John Ford’, the brand, and the label. Using the director’s early silent work as a case study, it questions how the idea of ‘authorship’ is formed and studies how Ford’s style and aesthetic evolved during the silent period due to the influence of other artists; biographical factors; technological innovations; and institutional, cultural and social issues.

This thesis questions how sub-disciplines in theatre and performance negotiate ‘sitespecificity’ as an aesthetic practice and tool of urban governance that ‘sees’ and ‘performs’ social housing estates. As a practice that, predominantly, takes place beyond conventional performance spaces, applied theatre might be a paradigmatic form of socially engaged sitespecific activity. However, scholarship on the ‘social turn’ more readily cites Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, or Bishop and Jackson’s critiques of ‘social practice’, which emerged in gallery and visual arts contexts. The ‘social turn’ poses problems for scholarly relations between ‘social practice’, ‘applied theatre’, the cultural economy and urban governance. I draw on socio-legal scholar Valverde’s ‘seeing like a city’, theatre scholar McKinnie’s ‘performing like a city’ and cultural economy as a theoretical framework, developing McKinnie’s concerns with ‘cultural equity’, and Harvey’s use of ‘fixed capital’ and ‘consumption fund’ in my analysis of relations between cultural and social realms. Consequently, this project hopes to contribute to an emerging area of research between socio-legal urbanism and performance studies, complicating ‘site-specificity’ as a descriptive category. Over five chapters I analyse site-specific works about estates staged in Lambeth and Southwark (inner-city London boroughs) since 2008. First, I examine relations between site-specificity and estate regeneration: the representations of overhead walkways in Delahay’s The Westbridge (2011) and Cotterrell’s Slipstream (2011) and the estate as ‘ruin’ in two Artangel interventions, Seizure (2008) and Pyramid (n.d.). I then shift to issues raised by legal and social boundaries in governance; I examine SLG’s partnerships with a neighbouring estate and ‘issue-based’ plays in two examples of theatre for young people. The final chapter draws out the project’s wider thematic concerns: the aesthetic implications of pedagogy and funding bodies on imaginings of site. This project calls attention to the complex cultural, socio-legal and economic structures that shape our cities, and the degrees to which they might be repurposed or re-imagined.

"Reading Costume Design" identifies and theorizes an important shift in costume practices: in the mid-nineteenth century, it was common for actors to wear their own clothing onstage or to choose a garment from a theatre's generic stock, without coordination with other costumes or attention to the particular demands of a role. By the early twentieth century, however, costume was firmly established as an expressive artistic tool in building a character and shaping the complete theatrical experience, overseen by a professional designer who routinely received credit in the program. By focusing on this specific moment, my dissertation reclaims theatrical costume as an object of theoretical inquiry (a text), while maintaining its place as an object of material culture, fully embedded in a particular historical context. I use the figure of the professional costume designer - and her rising prominence across the performing arts after 1880 - as a lens to focus on the changing relationship between the stage, fashion, and visual culture. "Reading Costume Design" argues that this historical shift reveals an important change in the status of costumes: from craft to art. At the beginning of my period, costumes impressed audiences as bravura displays of wealth, spectacle, or craftsmanship; by 1920, theatre practitioners and audience members viewed costume as an expressive art form, and its designer as an artist. As art objects, costumes acquired additional semiotic value, conveying new kinds of information to spectators. Designers created costumes for audiences to "look through" - reading costumes not only for their surface beauty or accuracy but also for commentary or reflection upon the text or overall performance. As a form of expression in their own right, costumes interacted in more collaborative or critical ways with the literary and musical texts. I contend that in this fertile period, four kinds of artists made key contributions to this expanded expressive model of costume design: performers, directors, couturiers, and painters. I use the term "proto-designer" to denote these artists, who helped to shape the profession of costume design from adjacent fields. Each of my four chapters studies one type of proto-designer, focusing on two or three significant examples. Major figures discussed include Georg II of Saxe-Meinengan, Richard Wagner, Marietta Piccolomini, Ellen Terry, Lucy Duff-Gordon (Lucile), Paul Poiret, Edward Gordon Craig, Leon Bakst, and Pablo Picasso. "Reading Costume Design" shows how theatrical Modernism established norms of costume design that are still with us today, analyzing the consolidation of costume choices into the hands of one individual (the designer) as part of Modernism's investment in the single artistic consciousness. This project highlights the importance of costume design as an object of study, able to move across different genres within the performing arts (theatre, dance, opera) and to offer fresh perspectives on fields such as theatre history, media and celebrity studies, art history, gender studies, aesthetics, and material culture.

The PhD dissertation entitled A Materiality of Sound: Musical Practices of the Moche of Peru examines the role of sonic practice within the Moche culture, a complex polity that flourished on the north coast of Peru between 100 and 900 AD. Music, as a cultural expression of sound, plays an important part in every known human society. Instead of accepting that such a significant aspect of human social life, as sound should remain forever beyond the reach of archaeological inquiry, A Materiality of Sound investigates the durable material traces of sound, such as instrumentation and architecture, using modern recording and acoustic measurement technologies. These techniques permit the exploration of aural experience and sound use in past contexts. The foundation for the archaeological inquiry of sound and music derives from the phenomenology of Merlau-Ponty (1962); a theoretical standpoint stating that humans experience and interact with the world through all our senses simultaneously. Archaeological interpretation tends to focus on the visual aspects of the world, with the implications that past peoples also privileged sight above all other senses. In order to interpret the choices and strategies employed by past societies, one must consider that the visual may not represent the only, or most valued, sense involved. This dissertation presents two primary arguments. First, the efficacy of Moche theatrical performances resides in the intersensorial interaction of the visual and the auditory. Moche sound producing artifacts consistently display exterior decoration, and performances depicted in Moche art regularly include specific sound producing artifacts. This repeated confluence of sound and image creates “multi-media” objects, in which image and sound potentially amplify the effects of each other. These multi-media objects generate a new experience of “sound-image,” the efficacy of which derives from the interaction between sound and image in a single object. A “sound-image” stimulates the intersensorial nature of human experience in a specific way, perhaps invoking the generative power of these objects to create action and communicate presence. Without the presence of “sound-image,” the efficacy of a Moche performance could not be achieved. Second, this dissertation argues that the desire to create specific multi-sensory experiences, which include sound, acted as a driving force behind the creation of Moche performance spaces and material culture. The construction of performance spaces, whether monumental huaca structures or smaller platforms and plazas, requires planning the structure, procuring resources and organizing labor. Architecture does not present space co-opted as a stage for performance, but an actively constructed and desired space. Moche iconographic depictions of platforms and plazas utilized as the settings of performances that included sonic practices indicates that at least one of the roles of these spaces was as stages for Moche theatrical performance.

Many high school communities across the United States grapple with issues of bullying, harassment and other forms of student conflict that are often the result of intolerance and misunderstandings across and among social identities (Griffin et. al., 2012). In an effort to rebuild tone and community, however, schools have focused predominantly on (1) addressing only antagonistic student behavior and (2) tolerance-based approaches that result in the superficial “choreography of civil speech” (Mayo. 2004). Both methods, in different ways, have struggled to meaningfully address many of the underlying issues responsible for intergroup and interpersonal conflict and the deterioration of community in schools (Dessel, 2010; Poteat & DiGiovanni, 2010). This qualitative case study examines the impact of an innovative arts-based curriculum designed to center the construction and performance of student “creative authoethnographies” in the classroom as a way of proactively working toward dialogue about identity and social analysis. Conducted over the course of a single school year at a high school in New York City, this research looks carefully at the experiences of seven students. Through close analysis of student interviews, archived student writing, curriculum documents, student surveys and other qualitative data, this work strives to articulate what courses such as these offer students, and how their presence in schools holds the potential to directly address issues of bullying and conflict across difference. Responding to the critical multiculturalist call (Banks, 1995, Morrell, 2007; Camangian, 2010) for a pedagogy that combines the successful but historically separate practices of autoethnography and the teaching of dialogue skills, this study introduces “cultural ruptures” and a “pedagogy of disruption” as part of a new approach to engaging young people in an of education that is explicit in it’s efforts to critique society and interrogate one’s own identity (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This research also advocates strongly on behalf of English classrooms (and English teachers specifically) as among the most important “actors” in the work of humanizing education, and offers tangible recommendations and strategies for practitioners toward that end.

This dissertation was conceived as an addendum to two self-published catalogs that American artist Chris Burden released, covering the years 1971–1977. It looks in-depth at the formative work the artist produced in college and graduate school, including minimalist sculpture, interactive environments, and performance art. Burden’s work is herewith examined in four chapters, each of which treats one or more related works, dividing the artist’s early career into developmental stages. In light of a wealth of new information about Burden and the atmosphere in which he was working in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this dissertation examines the artist’s work in relation to West Coast Minimalism, the Light and Space Movement, Environments, and Institutional Critique, above and beyond his well-known contribution to performance art, which is also covered herein. The dissertation also analyzes the social contexts in which Burden worked as having informed his practice, from the beaches of Southern California, to rock festivals and student protest on campus, and eventually out to the countercultural communes. The studies contained in the individual chapters demonstrate that close readings of Burden’s work can open up to formal and art-historical trends, as well as social issues that can deepen our understanding of these and later works. Benefitting from access to the artist’s estate, as well as archives collected at various institutions in Southern California, this dissertation is the first authoritative coverage of Chris Burden’s early career.

Irish theatre and its histories typically appear dominated by men and their actions. Drawing on the work of Marina Carr, Edna Walsh, Mark O'Rowe and Deirdre Kinahan, this thesis aims to complicate this masculinist narrative by comparing and contrasting a diverse range of female characters that have appeared in the work of these four important contemporary Irish playwright, since the 1990s. The playwrights and the plays chosen by no means comprise a comprehensive survey of contemporary Irish playwriting, but instead are intended to provide a more focused and illustrative study of male and femeale-authored representartions of women during the period. The study includes male and feamle playwrights and mainstage writers such as Carr, alongside Kinahan who, from a scholarly perspective, is lesser known. My account of Kinahan's work thus represents a new and original contribution to Irish theatre scholarship. In what follows I employ a critical methodology best described as hybrid, combining elements of culturals amterialist analysis, espcially the concept of hegemony as outlined by Antonio Gramsci, with a more performance-oriented mode of textual analysis. My theoretical underpinning draws on a range of existing arguments about the position of women in Irish culture, but also on the work of theatre scholars and cultural historians who have identified the stage as a significant site for cultural transformation. I argue that playwrights are leading the way in encourgaing soical, political and cultural progress for Irish women. I will begin by reviewing existing literature in the field and considering the influence and impact of an earlier generation of Irish playwrights and of the long sustained influence of the state and church on hegemonic depictions of female characters in Irish playwriting. However, my intention is to show that more recent stagings of Irish 'femininity' have been remarkably wide-ranging and anything but hegemonic.

Research on aesthetic perception of dance has been recently generating considerable interest within the field of Psychology of Aesthetics. There are, however, a number of methodological and conceptual gaps in our knowledge such as the application of the method of production, as well as understanding the role of motion smoothness, synchronous movement, and cultural factors in aesthetic perception. The present basic research addresses those gaps through five psychological experiments. In study 1, participants generated static sequences of images according their preference. Smooth continuation of meaningful objects was preferred when considering implied motion. In study 2, participants sorted images into moving sequences that they would like to see. Participants liked movements with smooth motion. In study 3, participants rated different schematic video animations depicting two dancers. Participants preferred smooth movements preformed in synchrony. In study 4, participants rated video animations depicting different types of motion performed by human body or abstract shapes. Participants preferred smooth synchrony. In study 5, British and Japanese participants watched synchronous and asynchronous actual dance video clips, rated the videos according their aesthetic judgement and answered questionnaires about motivations and individualism/collectivism. British participants preferred asynchronous dance while Japanese participants preferred synchronous dance. Studies 1 and 2 applied the method of production for the first time to study aesthetic preference for human movement, studies 1 to 4 support the neurocognitive model of aesthetic appreciation in the performing arts. Study 5 supports our cultural hypothesis: British participants preferred asynchrony (in line with analytical perceptual style, Western focus on individual movements), whereas Japanese participants preferred synchrony (holistic style, Eastern focus on group movement). Convergence between the neurocognitive model and the cultural hypothesis is discussed. The present research opens new lines of research in perception of human movement and performing arts: the method of production, motion smoothness, synchrony, and cross-cultural aesthetics.