Alumni + Careers: Dissertations

2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | Prior to 2005

2008

McMahon, Christina S.

Theatre in Circulation: Performing National Identity on the Global Stage in Cape Verde, West Africa

This study examines how Cape Verdean theatre artists construct transformative performances of race, gender, language, and colonial history at the Mindelact International Theatre Festival on the Cape Verde Islands. The aim is to understand how international theatre festivals participate in the production and shaping of new social imaginaries about nationhood. Drawing on my sustained ethnographic work with Cape Verdean performers and archival research into the festival’s media coverage, I analyze three trends that featured prominently at Mindelact from 2004-06: dramatizations of oral histories about colonial-era rebellions and drought, theatre and dance performances foregrounding Cape Verdean women’s labor and sexuality, and adaptations of Western plays. I argue that when Cape Verdean artists circulate this theatre to a festival context, they rewrite central narratives about their country’s national identity. By analyzing how festivals operate as mechanisms of circulation, I expand globalization theories that reassess how cultural production functions in an age dominated by increased circulation of people and finance.

The Mindelact Festival is a crossroads for Lusophone (Portuguese-language) theatre from Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Drawing on the islands’ complex history with Portuguese colonialism, I demonstrate how a festival venue privileging Lusophone theatre is a productive site for performers to interrogate colonialism’s legacies of historical bias, restrictive gender roles, and regional formulations of racial identities and linguistic hierarchies.

Cape Verde’s creolized society is a product of centuries of African and European peoples and traditions intermingling on the islands. I analyze how theatre artists strategically perform facets of this Creole identity at Mindelact in order to situate their islands’ local culture within Cape Verde’s still emerging national identity. To examine the impact of circulation on these performances, I situate theatre productions within the material and social conditions enabling their circulation to the festival: media discourses, funding, rehearsal tactics, performance training, and audience expectations. I maintain that the convergence of these factors in a festival arena allows locally devised Cape Verdean theatre to become incorporated into a national dramatic canon that helps shape public perception of the islands’ national identity.

Mihaylova, Stefka

From Gestus to the Abject: Feminist Strategies in Contemporary British and American Radical Theatre

This dissertation examines performance and textual techniques used by American and British artists to provoke discussion about the politics of viewing. I theorize a model of spectatorship which exposes the race and gender symbolism of actors' and spectators' bodies and its effects on meaning-making in the performer-spectator encounter. In contrast to other models of feminist and radical spectatorship influenced by Brecht, which analyze race and gender as material economic and social relations, this model also considers their affective dimensions and alerts spectators to the cultural beliefs and prejudices that influence viewing. My analysis brings together two theoretically disparate concepts, commonly regarded as incompatible: the Brechtian gestus, a distancing device which calls attention to the economic motivation of representation; and the psychoanalytic concept of abjection, an emotionally-charged instance in which established paradigms of knowledge fail, revealing the cultural contingency of meaning. By accounting for the symbolic, non-material aspects of race and gender, my case studies contest the premise on which Brechtian theatre and social realism predicate critical intervention: the assumption that a spectator can observe the stage objectively from a position external to representation. Countering this assumption, the performances I analyze show how spectators are positioned as socially-situated participants, which initiates dialogue on the ethics of viewing. I draw on political theories of democratic contestation and feminist standpoint theories which account for the effects of imagination and affect on social interactions. The case studies include works by Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment, and the Upstream Theatre.