The traditional power dynamic of theater rehearsal spaces is based in a culture in which the director is in the ultimate position of power. This power dynamic can, and has, led to an abuse of power that has often resulted in the harm and harassment of mainly female-identified actors. The #MeToo movement proved just how prevalent on an issue this remains to be in the entertainment industry. My thesis project demonstrates the process of creating a feminist rehearsal space with a focus on building a culture of consent, respect, and collaboration that aims to rectify the past harm female-identified actors have faced at the hands of patriarchal directing styles. This process will be based on the tenets of theatrical intimacy coordinator, Chelsea Pace, and the guidelines she lays out in her 2020 book Staging Sex to create a rehearsal space that respects the actor’s boundaries and give them agency. I also address the issue that in order to fully incorporate feminism in theater there needs to be attention given to the gender stereotypes that are present in the scripts that we stage. For this research, I directed a production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and demonstrated how to take the sexist elements of a culturally important and popular play and stage them through a feminist lens.

This study means to identify and acknowledge the connection between the director’s ego and the potential for emotional danger and harm in the rehearsal space and critique the heightened consideration the ego of a director can acquire in the rehearsal space by means of engaging in the typical director/actor power dynamic. This, alongside an industry-wide emphasis on the end goal of a rehearsal process to be the expedient creation of a cohesive finished product, and a lack of emphasis on and care for the mental wellbeing of actors producing vulnerability and, in some cases, reenacting traumatic events, are major flaws in the current standard rehearsal process. In this thesis, I argue that these aspects of the standard rehearsal process contribute most heavily to the potential for emotional malpractice in the rehearsal space. In order to explore ways in which I as a director could work against the normative privileging of a director’s ego and vision, I devised a two act fully improvised performance piece with six actors over Zoom in January and February of 2020. In an effort to increase collaboration I implemented Open Space into my rehearsal, a devising structure developed by London theatre company, Improbable, that breaks down many aspects of the typical rehearsal space. I discovered that in dismantling the normative power and chronological structure of rehearsal, I made room for the recentering of the space on that of the creative liberation of the actor and was able to create a space in which the actors felt comfortable to communicate clearly and directly about their own consent and boundaries.

Towards the end of summer in 2020, the CZU Lightning Complex Fires began, covering vast swaths of both Santa Cruz County and San Mateo County in the state of California and causing long lasting damage. As we approach the three year anniversary of the fire, only a small portion of the homes that were destroyed have been rebuilt. In this thesis, I argue that this issue is impacted by multiple sources, both structural and interpersonal, and thus propose an artistic vision that utilizes multiple forms to contend with this multiplicity. This ultimately resulted in the creation of Smoked Out: Watching Them Scrape Our Home Away, a documentary piece composed of three parts: a verbatim theatrical performance composed of interviews with individuals going through the rebuilding process; a mobile game that explores some of the bureaucracy involved; and a forum in which audiences can contend with the issues at play. These are informed by larger traditions of documentary theater, serious games, and Theater of the Oppressed, respectively. While the work did not fully prepare audiences to contend with the systemic issues at play, it otherwise successfully shows the potential for future documentary practice that utilizes multiple mediums in conjunction with one another in order to approach complex issues.

Come, Fur(r)es, Dance! is a devised, hybrid lecture-performance performed on the 26th, 27th, and 28th of May 2023, in UCSC’s eXperimental Theater. It is the final iteration in a series of performative experiments I used to better understand the ways experiences of masculinity are navigated, manipulated, and remade in communities within social VR (virtual reality). Created with the help of three devising artists, a team of student designers, a technical crew, and the larger UCSC arts community, Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! uses puppetry, dance, live interviews, and storytelling performed across virtual- and meat-space. The work focuses on the legacy of military development in the embodied experience of VR users, the desires that traverse the gap between users' identity presentations in and out of VR, and directly engages with a Waifu-themed MilSim community that calls themselves the British Armed Forces. To facilitate the rehearsals and performance of Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance!, I developed a distributed signal management system for a flexible, mediated stage ecology. This thesis situates the performance within the social, artistic, and personal context from which Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! arose and reflects on the insights and challenges from throughout its making. First, I explore the discoveries unearthed by the performance surrounding virtual masculinities and the drives behind certain social formations in VR. Then, I discuss my strategy of critique within the structure and aesthetic logic of Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance!. After, I reflect on the rehearsal practices that created the performance, outline two technical innovations that made it possible, and situate the performance within an artistic field engaged with related concerns. Finally, I connect this work to my personal history. The end of the thesis includes an archival script from the first performance and a separate reflection on technical challenges.

ABSTRACT

David Crellin

Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture

California defines much of its identity in the public imagination through the sport and cultural formations of surfing. This identity has been almost exclusively associated with white men as the accepted standard bearers of surfing’s evolution and excellence. This narrative runs parallel to the larger political and social discourses of Whiteness and racialized exclusion in American society. My project, “Troubled Waters: The Ocean as Contested Space in California Surf Culture,” explores the history of racism and representation in the formation of the so-called “California Dream” of surfing, interrogating white supremacy in surf and beach popular culture along the California coast, and presents research to understand and engage surfing and surf culture through a framework of greater diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Trellis has been used as a structure to support plant growth for thousands of years. Drawing from traditions of participatory performance, conceptual art, and social practice, The Trellis Project (L’art du Treillageur) utilizes the trellis form as a historical and aesthetic reference for thinking through support structures relevant to our current moment. The work engages participants in construction and reflection; this iteration of the project saw participants build and document their own miniature trellis, contributing their reflections and documentation to a community archive based online and housed in a sculptural installation. The work may continue to grow as a system of social and economic relations through subsequent works, additional collaborations, and social media presence. The Trellis Project aims to engage with a collective imaginary: What structures support us? What structures do we demand be built? What structures must remain?

In this thesis, I will demonstrate that live performance is powerfully situated to apply insights articulated by French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and that of Zen Buddhism, which share many similarities. I will situate the Deleuzian/Zen project in and across two contrasting productions, to illustrate its utility as a foundational strategy for the creation of new work and in order to offer an expanded way of thinking live performance potential. The first production, a post-dramatic, mediatized event, 100% City was created by Rimini Protokoll, a Berlin-based collective, and performed in over 30 cities around the world. The second production is an immersive circus-based allegory, The Show To End All Shows, imagined by Circus Contraption, a Seattle-based performance troupe, of which I was the co-founder and a principal performer. Through my analysis of these performances, I will illustrate the effectiveness of adopting a Deleuzian/Zen framework toward creating live performance that gives rise to greater inclusive, non-hegemonic freedom of expression, and offers a stronger facility for engaging with the world around us.

This thesis thoroughly explores the potential of using artistic practice as a research-basedapproach to facilitate positive experiences and engage with traumatic memories. It is firmly grounded in the five stages of grief outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in “On Death and Dying”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The project constructs a non-linear narrative around the traumatic memory of losing a loved one to violence. The central research question investigates how imaginal exposure techniques using aesthetics in mixed-media design can aid individuals with traumatic memories of grief. The research draws on Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy techniques, focusing on in vivo and imaginal exposure methods. These techniques involve confronting traumatic memories to reduce associated fears and anxieties through staged encounters and narrative rescripting experiments. Imaginal exposure primarily extracts memories through verbal interactions, which inspired the creation of a mind map that encapsulated these memories’ mental, physical, and virtual environments. By utilizing an autoethnographic lens, the research meticulously maps these emotions and translates them into a mixed-media art framework, reflecting the abstract, fragmented, and overlapping nature of mental imagery. This process aims to build on extracting a cathartic and transformative healing journey through art. The findings highlight limitations in this method related to language, memory complexity, and the elusive nature of memory formation and their temporal perceptions. The PaR autoethnographic approach suggests that PE therapies can benefit from evolving with new technologies and frameworks taught to people undergoing treatment. This adaptation to existing therapies could enhance the discovery, design process, and narrative articulation, offering individuals a means of expressing and communicating their contained recollections of personal experiences.

The Big Gay is an ongoing project intended to interrogate and update the visual culture of gay, leather, and queer kink community spaces, specifically bars. The first iteration featured a collaboration and curation with 8 different artists, each expressing their own vision of what erotic masculinity could be on wooden cutouts created at a superhuman scale. I traveled throughout California assisting in the creation of these pieces, the majority of which went on to be featured in my MFA thesis exhibition, Eagle UCSC.For the exhibition, a small wooden bar was installed in the center of the installation. The pieces were suspended in the air, giving viewers a sense of a space while also allowing them to feel as though the pieces were erotic participants in the communal physical experience. On the bar were physical magazines and flickering projections expressing the history of the visuals in these spaces, as well as a small television displaying documentation of the manufacturing of the pieces around the bar. I placed myself as a bartender in this space, serving drinks but also explaining the purpose of the project, the history of leather spaces, and the manufacturing of the pieces suspended around the viewers. The first iteration of The Big Gay will be completed once the pieces are installed in queer kink spaces, in dialogue with existing artwork and directly intervening into the historical and rarely updated visual culture of these spaces.

This thesis will discuss how adaptation is a useful tool to keep Mother Courage and her Children relevant in the modern day. By placing the narrative in a new country, Mexico, it also opens the door to increase representation of the Latinx community. The adaptation showcases the similarities in the issues some people in Mexico face, and the central issues of Bertolt Brecht’s original play. The adaptation also comments on the use of trigger warnings in a production. Using Augusto Boal’s theory of theater of the oppressed and “spect-actor,” I will demonstrate how the audience’s actions directly influence the ending of the show, and the importance of the audience feeling that change is possible. My adaptation, La Madre de los Valientes y los Violentos, has the option of two different endings where the key difference is the survival of the youngest daughter. I will discuss how the study of Learned Helplessness influenced my decision to give the play a less negative ending.