Browsing by Subject "Theatre Making"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Female bodies as text : disobedient representations of the witch
    (2001) Berk, Anita; Mills, Liz
    This paper is an exploration and explication of the ideas and theories that served to fire the journey of my thesis production, Hex, from conception through to performance. As a Masters student in Theatre-making with a leaning towards performance, my particular area of focus is the physical: female bodies as text. To delineate this further, I concentrate on disobedient representations of the witch: what are these; what do they mean and effect in our world and within women themselves? Since as Theatre-maker I variously switched mode from director (in the initial conceptual stages) to designer, writer and actor within the process, this written explication will similarly switch perspective as I weave through the issues at hand in the creation of Hex. I begin the paper with an introduction to the figure of the witch. A selection of examples of stage and screen portrayals of witches is given. I then describe the salient features of the witch's journey as represented from past to present, in order to shed light on the choice of witch characters which eventually formed the collage of Hex. This is followed by an exploration of the goddess I witch dichotomy, with specific reference to the presence or absence of her physical form as theatrically manifested in Hex. I delineate, define and exemplify the concepts of obedience and disobedience in witch representations. This leads to an in-depth look at the physiognomic I gestural language of the witch's body in performance, noting in particular its relation to a male gaze. The third and final section of the paper centres on the marginalisation of various witch figures. This serves to explicate the presence and meaning of certain key figures that appeared in various forms in Hex, such as the absent crone-wise-woman, and the happy childless mother. I conclude with a statement of my personal position in relation to the topic that inspired the explorative journey of Hex. The purpose of Hex was to imaginatively crack open the realm of the witch for the audience. For it is out of such pinholes that truth has a tendency to loom out, in her infinite number of gorgeous and appalling forms that, together, dance the jig of Life.
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    Picture-making through performance - experiments in visual dramaturgy
    (2017) Nassimbeni, Francesco; Fleishman, Mark
    This dissertation attempts to draw parallels between my process as a graphic artist and my process as a theatre-maker. The study has been prompted by my discovery of theatre-practitioners whose graphic art practices preceded and suffused their subsequent performance works and my desire to trace the antecedents of this phenomenon. The dissertation charts the movement from art to performance as exemplified by the Futurist and Bauhaus schools who devised a poetics of abstraction for the theatrical stage. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks and modes of practice developed by artists associated with these historical movements, I identify attributes of my own works that function in similar ways. I then go on to link my practice to the concept of the postdramatic as outlined by Hans-Thies Lehmann, with a specific focus on how visuality operates in postdramatic performances. I conclude by articulating the artistic and creative principles that will inform my final production in 2017.
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    Theatre : the art of human being : locating the cultural value of theatre in the Age of Broadcast Media and a retrospective paper on the process leading towards the 2000 performance Involving Eternity
    (2000) Torres, Thain N J; Hyland, Geoffrey
    This essay is concerned with the position of theatre as cultural commerce in the postmodern milieu of electronic broadcast media. It is the partial fulfillment of an MA degree in Theatre Making as studied from a performer's perspective. The other part of my final project was comprised by the 2000 performance of a play entitled Involving Eternity, a video of which is available through the Drama Department of the University of Cape Town. Thus the essay is a research document and ideological treatise supporting and grounding my recent work as a theatre maker and actor. I begin by examining the position of theatre in relationship to popular culture and the newly emerging aesthetics of the electronic era. The dynamics that separate the theatre from new forms of popular culture are strongly defined and examined. It is my position that the theatre cannot compete on the same front as technological media and I set out the reasons why I believe this to be so. The gulf existing between live performance and Media culture constitutes a political and ideological gap in the climate of the emerging technocracy and so I go on to examine these two field in closer detail. My analysis of broadcast media is focused on how these new aesthetic modes can be said to be reforming social perceptions about reality and representation. I draw from the theories of Jean Baudrillard and Phillip Auslander to present the critical position, which post modern discourse offers regarding these notions. Ultimately I foreground the notion of simulation in contemporary aesthetics and the erosion of the phenomenological space. My analysis of performance focuses on the emergence ofthe new ideologies of actor training ideology. These systems are best characterized by the work of the Odin Teatret and Jerzy Grotowski . My theory is that this work has created a framework in which the Theatre can return to contemporary culture by providing a counter discourse to the technological. A technology of the self. Lastly by way of example I illustrate how this theoretical position influenced the practical work on my play Involving Eternity.
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    Towards theatre remix : a net generational perspective on theatre making
    (2011) Fourie, Ilse; Aqiel, Mohamed
    My research explicates the process of remix, normally associated with digital media, and contemplates how it could be applied to live performance in order to create a 'theatre remix'. I locate my own subject position as a theatre maker within what is termed the Net Generation and regard remix as part of the Net Generation's creative expression. This paper outlines the characteristics, significance and mindset of the Net Generation to provide context for and to enable a better comprehension of remix as a creative expression for the Net Generation. Remix is regarded as a conscious process used to innovate and create through means of copy, transformation and combination. The possible cultural implications of remix are considered as a challenge to notions of originality, a larger cultural need to celebrate re-appropriation and laying claim to cultural inheritance by making use of popular culture as a source for new creative works. It is acknowledged that we live in a convergence culture (as posited by Henry Jenkins 2006), where content moves between different forms of media. For example an image, song or narrative is transferable across a range of media such as television, cinema, the Internet or theatre. A possibility to converge digital sources with live performance in order to create a 'theatre remix' lies in seeking the similarities between these seemingly different media. I contend that what could possibly be most enticing about remixing digital media with performance is that, due to performance's liveness, it offers something other remixes cannot-presence. Remixes are predominantly digital such as music, remixing clips from movies to create faux trailers for hypothetical movies and setting remixed movie clips to remixed music. Therefore they are mediated and cannot be experienced in the same way one would experience a live event.
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    Working theory : an analysis of the use and misuse performance tools
    (2016) Kawitzky, Roxy; Pather, Jay
    In this paper, I work through some of the theoretical and practical research concerns which have emerged during my MA in Theatre Making, including the Minor, Medium and Major projects developed as part of its coursework component. I begin with an outline of my core hermeneutic lenses, describing the relationship between the expressive faculties of the brain, voice and body in performance articulation, advocating for their de-conventionalisation within theatrical modes, and indicating a more diverse range of possibilities for these performance tools. I then describe the three primary examples I will be using in my explication, and relate each to a specific chapter; Siri Hustvedt's novel The Blazing World is discussed in the chapter of the Brain, and used to speak about the relationship between an expressed, materialised art object, and its invisible progenitor or counterpart which exists privately in the mind of the artist. Boris Nikitin's Woyzeck is discussed in terms of its approach to representation and communication, and the peculiar relationship it establishes between audience and performer. Finally, I talk about my Medium Project Journey from the Centre of the Earth in a consideration of the bodily and ethical implications of participatory performance practice, before beginning to describe my final production, CLOAKS, and concluding.