Browsing by Subject "Theater"
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Item Open Access Evaluating Applied Theatre Using Amateur Community Actors as a Modality for Pedestrian Education Among Primary School Students in Moshi, Tanzania(2014) Dideriksen, ChrissyBackground: The WHO estimates that in 2010 there were over 10,000 road traffic injury related fatalities in Tanzania. Pedestrians accounted for a third of those fatalities. Education is essential to improving Tanzanians' road safety. Theatre has been used as a modality for education for many years, though most efficacy research focuses on professionally created and delivered theatre. The act of creating theatre is an inherently collaborative process, making it a good tool for participatory interventions that involve community members. Collaborative, theatre-based interventions have several benefits for global health projects: 1) they are relatively low-cost; 2) they incorporate community ideas encouraging stakeholder investment; and 3) they have potential to be self sustaining after development aid has stepped away. However, there are two main impediments to using collaborative theatre in global health interventions. First, there is little investigation on the efficacy of collaborative theatre to educate. Second, there are few guidelines to help drama-based programs take advantage of collaboration with amateur community members for health topics.
This study combined qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how participatory theatre with amateur community participants can convey health topics such as road and pedestrian safety in Tanzania. The study measured local primary students' pedestrian knowledge, evaluated theatrical performance as a method to teach pedestrian safety, and explored how community members could use drama techniques to become advocates for road traffic injury prevention. This project sought to adapt a replicable framework of applied theatre exercises to address health issues in a collaborative manner between community members and educators.
Hypothesis: Participatory theatre will increase pedestrian knowledge among primary students.
Methods: Young adult volunteers from Moshi, Tanzania participated in a month long workshop to create a performance to teach road and pedestrian safety. The workshop process was evaluated through qualitative methods, including journaling by the workshop facilitator, daily informal group discussions, and performance response cards from community leaders. At the end of the project, 17 open-ended surveys were administered in Kiswahili among the participants. A focus group with 8 participants was also conducted at the end of the project. A follow up focus group was conducted four months following the end of the project.
Workshop participants presented their play in Kiswahili to local primary schools. Knowledge assessment surveys were administered in Kiswahili to 439 primary school students. Pre and post knowledge assessment surveys were utilized to measure the impact that the community created play had on students' pedestrian knowledge.
Results: Primary school audiences showed statistical improvement between their pre and post survey scores. The average mean score improved from 71.40% of the pedestrian knowledge items correctly answered to 84.39% (P>
Item Open Access Guilt and the War within: the Theater of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Giraudoux(2008-12-12) LaMarca, Mary AnnThe moral and ethical choices made during the Nazi Occupation of France would echo for generations: they served as a source of pain and pride when the French sought to rebuild their national identity after the ignominy of the defeat, and acted as the foundation for the intellectual legacy on which post-war life stands.
In my dissertation I examine the diverse trajectory of two writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Giraudoux, during the Occupation by focusing on their dramatic works. During this period, no writer could legally exercise his vocation and receive compensation without submitting to certain legalities designed to monitor the content of artistic output. Therefore, any author who published did, at least in some small way, collaborate. This particular line in the sand has become blurred with time and usage. Critics and intellectuals, not to mention the legal system, have initially categorized artists' politics, then, when the boundaries (or public opinion) have shifted, they have chosen to reclassify. Collaborationist, resistant, or neutral - these three convenient labels cannot do justice to the vast array of colors in the Occupation-era landscape.
Writers, like the public at large, responded to the Occupation by becoming extreme collaborators, opportunists, simply earning their daily bread, or becoming fierce resistants, with an infinite number of various roles in between. Although critics have historically attempted to evaluate Jean-Paul Sartre's and Jean Giraudoux's actions in order to classify them as "resistant" or "collabo," this is a reductive act. Both men, like so many Frenchmen of this period, made an infinite number of small and large decisions that refracted their post-war image according to which critic held the prism. The historiography with regards to this era has dramatically changed. Must the manner in which we "categorize" these two authors not change accordingly?
With this question in mind, I have carefully studied the authors' primary texts (plays, essays, critiques, memoirs, and letters). In particular, I focus on their theatrical offerings: Les mouches, Huis clos, and La folle de Chaillot, as these are their best-known works of the era. Next, I examined biographies of the Sartre and Giraudoux (as well as other major historical, political, and literary figures) in order to gain as much background information as possible, and moreover, to identify both tendencies and discrepancies with regards to the authors. After this I sifted through the contemporary press related to these two authors, including theatrical reviews of their plays, their own publications in order re-evaluate the Occupation-era theatrical offerings of Sartre and Giraudoux. I have chosen to focus mainly on their plays from the era, as it those are their best-known works, and the those which had the most influence, in creating their political legacy and reputation during the Occupation. Finally, I applied the theories from contemporary historians - Robert Paxton, Henry Rousso, Philippe Burrin, and Gisèle Sapiro among others - in order to develop my own analysis of the theater of Sartre and Giraudoux and their post-war legacy.
Themes centering on guilt and condemnation abound during the war, especially in these three works. Fueled by De Gaulle's myths of an almost unilaterally resistant French population, the immediate post-war period focused on deliverance from an exterior enemy. However, contrary to popular interpretation, the plays in my corpus condemn the enemy within, the French betrayal of the French.
Item Open Access Memory, Will, and Understanding in El veneno y la triaca by Calderón de la Barca: A Cognitive Approach(2017) Rodriguez, AlejandraThis dissertation explores the representation of cognition in the Spanish Golden Age theatrical genre the auto sacramental, with reference to the best known playwright of these eucharistic mystery plays, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and specifically his pre-1644 auto El veneno y la triaca (The Poison and the Remedy). I contextualize the auto in the Western philosophical tradition in which it was rooted, while also probing the psychomachia or allegories of mental and emotional processes in relation to philosophy of mind, cognitive literary studies and recent neuroscientific research. How are cognition, emotion, and decision making used and depicted in dramatic structures including character, plot, performance, and audience reception? This study establishes the relationship between organic neurological and psychological processes and literary tropos and archetypes that can make the dramatic mimesis of the auto sacramental understandable or successful even in modern secular theatrical contexts.
Item Open Access Representaciones temporales en la construcción del espacio y el sujeto atlántico en el siglo XVII(2009) López-Martín, Francisco Javier"Representaciones temporales en la construcción del espacio y el sujeto atlántico en el
siglo XVII" is a study of the different representations of time, temporality and space in
literary and historical texts such as the chronicles that originated in Peru and Spain. This
project seeks to understand the new configuration of time and space that appeared at this
time and that was represented in literary texts during the Spanish Baroque period. What is
most important is that the Atlantic is not only an ocean that separated two realities but
also a new space that made possible the emergence of a new subject who combined pre-
Hispanic culture and the occidental episteme. This new subject is the product of a
translation failure of the concepts that were transported back and forth across the
Atlantic. During the XVIIth century, many literary and historical texts are produced in
order to understand this new subject. As an immediate consequence of the encounter
between American and European epistemes, thinkers and writers in all Europe begin to
hesitate between "the real" and "the images"; a crisis of the real begins. In the Americas,
writers such as Guaman Poma or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz who produce narratives which
seek to interpret the new realities brought about by the encounter with the Europeans,
whose writings do not follow to either indigenous or European conventions. These
writers mix pre-Hispanic and Western traditions to account for the new forms of
subjectivity that the conquest produced. Similarly, Spanish writers such as Cervantes or
Calderón re-work traditional European conventions in order to understand and interpret
this new historical moment/subjectivity.
Item Open Access The Persistence of Smoke: Opera in One Act, Libretto by John Justice(2011) Lam, George Tsz-KwanThe Persistence of Smoke is a documentary opera. The libretto is based on interviews with various individuals related to the former Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.
The cigarette industry once dominated Durham, but saw its decline in the 1990s as the link between cancer and smoking became increasingly clear. The American Tobacco Company and the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company were once the biggest cigarette manufacturers in the city. As these companies left Durham, their factories and tobacco warehouses first sat vacant, but were gradually preserved and transformed into new spaces for offices, apartments and restaurants.
This project focused on the former Liggett and Myers headquarters along Main Street, a collection of buildings now known as "West Village". I interviewed current and former Durham residents who had a connection with these buildings, including local business representatives, community leaders, former Liggett employees, historians, current residents in the downtown area, municipal urban planners, journalists, and an architect. These interviews were given to local playwright John Justice, who created a libretto based on the themes that emerged.
The opera's story focuses on Kevin, an architect about to unveil his visionary master plan for redeveloping several defunct cigarette factories in an unnamed city. As Kevin leaves his newly renovated apartment for the press conference, he is confronted by his estranged father Curtis, a former cigarette worker who desperately wants to reconcile and reconnect, deliriously recalling the glory days of tobacco and the money that followed.
Item Open Access Virtue's an Ass: When Being Bad is Really Good(2006) Thawley, AllisonWhen Charles II assumed the title of King of England in 1660, he ushered in an era whose spirit was as liberal as the previous years under the puritanical Commonwealth had been oppressive. Theater,rigidly controlled under Cromwell, flourished into a popular entertainment industry whose plays were notable not only for their political and social relevance but also for the extent of their debauchery.