Abstract:Joy-infused Theatre By Princess Kannah Buddha once said, "There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path." Scientific studies find that "positive experiences or stimuli reinforce similar behavior in the future. While negative emotions often prompt specific and immediate responses to aid an individual's survival."(Aknin,2021) Positive experiences and stimuli might be the key to fixing many problems that can arise in educational spaces. As Buddha said, it is the path. This paper examines the current theatre acting classroom and rehearsal space model. It calls into question the underlying problems in both models and calls for them to be addressed, analyzed, and changed. This paper argues that a radical joy approach, one that prioritizes boundaries and centers around joy and embodiment alongside the current model, will correct the pitfalls of the current models. With a different approach in the rehearsal room and classroom, spaces that prioritize safety and promote healthy alternatives to acting can be created. An alternative model based on radical joy dismantles the current theatre acting classroom and rehearsal space hierarchies and calls into question the harm that the current model is inflicting.

Abstract

Performance Beyond The Binary:

Towards An Intersectional And Intersexual Theatrical Discourse

My research is rooted in post-structural feminist, intersectional, and queer theories. This thesis seeks to ignite a discursive dialogue about the sociopolitical reinforcement of the western gender binary in the theater. By drawing on political theories that highlight gender as an anti-essentialist product of culture (a social construct), I seek to discuss my methodologies of adapting these theories for the stage. From a post-structural view, gender is a network reinforced by larger institutional systems. After discussing the many institutions that which contribute to the preservation of the gender binary, I will offer ‘intersexuality’ (as reappropriated from its medical etymology) as a discursive intersectional approach to theater. I am interested in theater’s role in the production of identity and of new meaning. In analyzing forms of transgender and gender variant resistance on stage, I hope to posit theater as an organizer of political resistance off stage. Ultimately I will provide case studies from Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s Hamlet and from UCSC’s The Odyssey, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Zoot Suit, that employed subversive artistic choices in order to navigate the gender binary. Expounding on techniques like genderswap casting, nonbinary acting, and cross-gender casting, I assert that artists who take an intersectional and intersexual approach when representing gender on stage, can mobilize audiences to think more critically about gender beyond the binary off stage.

Abstract

Justin Tandy

My Portrait Of Henry V:

A collaboration of fear, intrigue, exploration,

and the modest beginnings of an acting career.

This paper is about my experience on tour with a Shakespeare company, co-produced by the University of California Santa Cruz theater arts department and Shakespeare Santa Cruz. It chronicles my rise from a young and inept performer to a classically trained Shakespearean lead actor. Tracking key moments in a blossoming career and providing valuable insight into the fragile mind of a young man, finding himself through the role of Henry V. I mature past the vain aspects of performance and delve into the art of acting and the power to incite change and provide mentoring and inspiration for all races, religions, ages, and genders. My Portrait Of Henry V is, hopefully, an inspiring tale to any aspiring actors that may stumble across it in their own search for self-affirmation and the art of acting.

When the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time premiered in 2012, it was one of the most significant representations of autism produced for the stage up to that point. However, the production was not accessible to autistic people, with the script and staging unaccommodating to the needs of autistic people.As an autistic director, I attempted to stage a version of the show that was accommodating to the autistic community and empowering to them. For this, I adapted the Theatre of Neurodiversity created by Sarah Magni for online performance to an in-person rehearsal environment and used myself as an autistic individual to determine the success of this adaptation. I created a manifesto that defined Theatre of Neurodiversity to evaluate the result. Ultimately, while the production did not fully meet the standards of the Theatre of Neurodiversity, it was closer than the original production.

My thesis project is a response to Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House; entitled ANAG[NORA]ISIS, it is an adaptation and expansion upon the life of Ibsen's character Nora Helmer. Using dance, music, poetry, borrowed and original text, ANAG[NORA]ISIS delves into the unexplored aspects of Nora Helmer's consciousness, imagining what passes through her mind in the moments before she decides to leave her husband. In addition to both writing and adapting A Doll's House, I also directed ANAG[NORA]ISIS at San Jose Repertory theatre's Emerging Artists Lab.

ABSTRACT

The Artist as Educator:

Empathy Desperately Needed for Social Change

By: Natalia Delgado

My background in performance and educational outreach motivates me to advocate for arts in education. My purpose here is to serve students, communities, and artists alike. I aim to use Theatre as a vibrant teaching tool for youth in hopes of returning the love and support I have for the arts in education- underlining the necessity to bring theatre to the people.

My Thesis will be investigating how educational outreach programs like UCSC’s Shakespeare to Go serve as a tool for social justice, inspiring empathy for young audiences. This outreach program investigates a two-fold process- observing the rehearsal process and the performance itself as the actor on tour. Throughout the course of six months, the creative team of Shakespeare to Go work toward building a story together for the sake of storytelling.

This project will be a collection of moments framing arts educational outreach as the stepping stone in encouraging empathy to students where we see the creation and performance relationship between the consumer and the maker, sharing the same breath and space.

This thesis tracks the process of the creation of the play Frankenstein: A Prometheus Experiment from theoretical groundwork to performance reflection. With inspiration drawn from Jeffery Cohen's "Monster Culture (7 Theses)", Alfred Jarry's Symbolism, and Richard Schechner's "6 Axioms of Environmental Theater", the piece is comprised of fragments of the work and life of Frankenstein's author, Mary Shelly. This thesis serves as a account of the artist's process and documents the theoretical and practical application of theory in the artists' work.

Unlike traditional, text-based theater, “devised” theater can be an alternative form of theater that emphasizes democracy within groups, movement-based techniques, and sometimes encourages politically driven works of live performance. Actors can become a part of generating material for the final product instead of portraying a prewritten role. Their voices, impulses, physicality, and sometimes their life experiences influence the show in a personal and reflective way. I use The Odyssey, directed by Professor Kimberly Jannarone at UCSC, as a case study of what the devising process can look like. I use my experience to highlight the ways a devised production has the flexibility to change in response to current events. Our devising process allowed the utilization of each actor to the best of their potential; letting individual talents dictate roles and contributions to the play (rather than immediate casting for specific roles). Devising’s open and democratic model helped us make political art in an encouraging rehearsal atmosphere where our diverse voices felt heard, in a time where political art is important and needed in America.

For my thesis project I chose and was approved to direct Princess Ivona in the University of California-Santa Cruz Second Stage. Published in 1938 and written by Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, Princess Ivona tells the story of how a society, hastily built upon fear-centric oppression, violently reacts when its crooked structure of power is put into question. In this thesis I will recount the production process as it unfolded while examining how power circulates in rehearsal between a director and their collaborators, power as it is represented in the script, and finally how we presented it on stage.

In our ever-changing, turbulent social and political climate, issues of race, racism, and representation continue to be a high-profile aspect of society. When scrutinizing US history, taking into consideration the mistreatment communities of color, we must take into account the error of our past and consider how these communities left with indelible ideas of misrepresentation have been affected. When examining our own societal and cultural viewpoints, we must consider the sensibilities experienced by people of color. Though society has made significant strides in the areas of equal rights and equality over the past 50 years with the success of the 1960s civil rights movement, the question of misrepresentation communities of color remains a significant area of concern for the community, even in today's progressive environment. On the evening of November 8, 2019, the opening night of UC Santa Cruz's production of the Dharma-Grace Award-winning script, What in the World?, a play addressing issues of homelessness, poverty, and racism, a protest by students of color took place in which they stormed the theatre and took over the stage. This extreme action led to the cancellation of the remainder of the evening's performance and the subsequent six performances.

In light of this event, it is clear that POC concerns of misrepresentation remain prevalent in our student body here at UCSC. To best understand the protest, it is essential to examine the event and to assess the present. In doing so, it is necessary to take a current cultural snapshot of the sensibilities of both the community of students of color, as well as their "white" counterparts, which comprise a significant portion of the student body here at UCSC. The use of critical race theory to examine the motives behind this event will inform and possibly justify such an act of extremism, however, may uncover a reality in which our younger generations have succumbed or surrendered to the ideologies of the past rather than create new doctrines of a developing and progressive cultural movement. To test my hypothesis, I will conduct an ethnographic study of members of the UCSC student body, including both students of color and Caucasian participants. By sampling opinions, viewpoints, and value systems of members of our student body, I will provide a current assessment and cultural snapshot, which will aid in understanding the current state of racial concerns in the Theatre Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and provide insight into questions of representation, embodiment, and permission.