Alumni + Careers: Dissertations
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | Prior to 2005
2006
Korol, Kimberly
Modern Carnival: Performer and Patron Interaction and Immersion at the Maryland Renaissance Festival
This dissertation focuses upon the Maryland Renaissance Festival (MDRF) and examines how performers and patrons in a carnivalesque setting experience intrasticiancy—the state created by the overlapping of the actuality of twenty-first century America and the historical record of sixteenth-century England. Anthropologist Victor Turner’s studies of liminality explore temporal-spatial confluence, and my study of the intrastice builds upon his work and provides for differing levels of immersion within the performances at the MDRF. The theatrical convention that spectators are able to “willingly suspend disbelief” is the foundation of study of the intrastice, and it is also what allows for the audience to “play at belief” and “actively create belief.” I explore the manner in which spectators frame the contiguous performances at the festival and thus influence the level of intrasticiant immersion.
My research methodology, based upon the ethnographic model of what Dwight Conquergood called the “co-performer/witness,” tests its boundaries and limits while illustrating its benefits and efficacy. A history of the festival movement in the United States contextualizes the carnivalesque and its contributions to intrasticiancy, and an exploration of the sensescape at the MDRF and how it contributes to the temporal-spatial intrastice expands current landscape and soundscape scholarship. This work augments previous research on living history by considering both the tactile nature of these performances and the importance of embodied knowledge to their representation, while analyzing the difference between living history and historical elaboration and the resulting effects on intrasticiancy. I examine how actor-patron improvisational interaction imparts a deeper understanding of non-scripted performances within the milieu the MDRF offers and consider how the interface as a system of communication contributes to the understanding of the negotiation that exists between performer and spectator at theatrical events. My analysis of immediate post 11 September 2001 performance illustrates how actors complete cultural work in a carnivalesque setting during a time of crisis. Finally, I consider the ways different patrons frame the MDRF to illuminate roles spectators play and how those choices influence immersion within the intrastice.
Rossen, Rebecca
Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance
“Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance” explores how American Jewish choreographers danced “Jewish” from the late 1920s to the present day and how these representations have shifted over time. Throughout, I investigate the role concert dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life. This dissertation also contributes to a larger discussion about how cultural identity, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. My research strives not only to build upon theories and methodologies from Jewish cultural studies and dance studies, but also to put these fields in dialogue and move them forward by asking how the undeniable connections between American Jewish history and modern dance make us look at both differently. “Dancing Jewish” scrutinizes how Jewish choreographers have utilized the American concert stage as a site for building polysemous identities, and how they have maneuvered themselves between seemingly conflicting positions—American and Jewish, insider and outsider, white and off-white, present and past, masculine and feminine, modern and folkloric—achieving a semblance of solidity while in constant flux. The artists included who established their careers before 1950 are Belle Didjah, Hadassah, Pauline Koner, Pearl Lang, Dvora Lapson, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, Helen Tamiris, and Benjamin Zemach. The postmodern choreographers I discuss are David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Margaret Jenkins, Liz Lerman, and Victoria Marks. One of the key issues that I pursue is how Jewish choreographers amalgamate Jewish material with modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, as well as modernist and postmodernist notions of identity. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Jewishness is not a matter of essences, but rather a repertory of tropes and framing mechanisms. To this end, chapters are orchestrated thematically, rather than chronologically, to better communicate the prevalence of particular frames for Jewishness. By investigating how Jewish choreographers working in modern and postmodern dance engage, revise, or subvert particular images and practices over the course of a century, I am able to evaluate how meanings for Jewishness evolve in relation to changing historical conditions and aesthetic practices.
Scott, Shelly
Theorizing Performances of the Human-Animal Relationship
This dissertation investigates performative sporting and tourist events that have as their central focus human-animal teams. Case studies include Chicago-area dog shows, thoroughbred racing in Illinois and Kentucky, and the Orlando theme parks, SeaWorld and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Describing the interactions occurring between handlers and animals produces analyses of the scripted actions of the performers, the mise en scène of sites, the spectators’ reactions, and the narratives shaping the events. The primary questions addressed include: Do animals perform? What do the interactions between humans and animals convey about their relationships? How do humans use anthropomorphism to shape perceptions of interspecies relationships? Are animals exercising agency in the sporting events and at the tourist sites? The patterns that emerge among case studies lead to a consideration of whether the nature of performance changes when “nature” is made to perform.
Animals’ actions can constitute performance in certain situations and their modus operandi should be considered just as complex as that of human performers. Each of the events examined includes animals that are capable of pretending, but not capable of assuming another character; so characterizations get constructed by humans. In addition to noting what the animals actually do in performances, attention is paid to how the behavior is depicted by human co-performers and commentators. The core of this analysis deals with presentations of interspecies interactions as a paradox is identified in how humans construct animals to perform the very fictions of which they are believed to be incapable by performance theorists Richard Schechner, David Williams, and Jane C. Desmond.
