This thesis addresses two principal questions: How can notions of dark and deep play be used to construct performance material? How can that material then be used to investigate dark and deep play in performance? In order to address these principal questions I conceived, composed and performed in three performances where participants were invited to become players in a one-to-one or two-to-two scenario. The conception and composition of each performance considered notions of dark and deep play that involved both a live and recorded practice where the participants also performed. Each project also responds to a subsidiary research question that relates to both the methodological design of each separate performance and hence to the ways in which participants experienced them. The overarching subsidiary research question for the entire project is: How does shifting the contract for participants' engagement in an intimate performance inform the principal research questions? trz v Each chapter discusses the ways in which data was collected and offers up an interpretation based upon that data. This research pays particular attention to play theory and specifically to Roger Caillois' game categories. These categories are expanded upon significantly through this research into new and original findings about potential routes into play and play attitudes. The work relates to my own experiences of the Catholic sacrament of penance, and explores the notion of adaptation and projection in performance. This work argues for a conceptual adaptation in practice whilst uncovering a repetitive process in both confession and adaptation that I argue relates to a Freudian and Lacanian notion of Death drive. This work also unpicks Lacan's notion of the 'unsent letter' (Zizek, 2006: 10) and Zizek's perspective on Lacan's Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real (Zizek, 2006: 9). Freudian and Lacanian philosophy critically supports the observations on my own artistic drives and the thinking on the players' journeys into slippage. This work unfolds and concludes with a list of original and complex play- strategies that permit the experience of deep play through dark play. The strategies discuss the processes of making performance in dark and deep contexts and are named in the research findings in relation to the two principal questions and to the subsidiary research question.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:555904 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Hind, Claire |
| Publisher | University of Leeds |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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