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Item The True Meaning Of Etiquette: The Choreography Of Idealized Womanhood(2020-05-01) Hameline, AmandaIn this MFA thesis, I use Emily Post’s famous manual Etiquette (1940) as point of departure for my investigation of the implications of the various demanding, yet often unacknowledged, social requirements made of women. Rather than aspiring to one, consistent manner of comportment, there are social demands placed on women to perform a variety of roles depending on the situation. Of course, all people, regardless of gender, shift their behavior in some way depending on the context. Yet I propose that women in particular learn to choreograph their conduct in order to live up to the many contradictory, simultaneous requirements presented by Western patriarchal society. Dance, an artistic field rooted in nuanced physical performance, offers a valuable lens through which to understand the complications of idealized femininity. Like much concert dance, which seeks to hide the labor of choreography to present a slick, smooth creation, a woman must not reveal the labor that shapes her into a “beautiful” product. I am interested in cracking open this façade by investigating the work that goes into choreographing the ideal woman and displaying the consequences of this labor. I argue, using examples from sociology, neurology, dance studies and the work of Pina Bausch and Adrian Piper, that these consequences include: an essentialist conception of gender that incorrectly blames women for their own oppression; a sense of dissociation from the body; and a connection between women and blankness. Finally, I demonstrate the ways in which I incorporated these theories into my own performance work and website, Refrain from Doing Things Badly, and how I worked to both complicate and reclaim the relationship between performer and audience during the period of social distancing brought about by COVID-19 in 2020.Item Queering Spatial Relationships Between Audiences and Performers Relational Aesthetics & Queer Spaces in Contemporary Concert Dance(2019-05-01) Shugar, KateQueering Spatial Relationships Between Audiences and Performers examines how theatrical space works to produce the rules and conventions of spectatorship in contemporary dance performance. How does space—specifically the space designed for the audience in relationship to the performing space—inform notions of subjectivity? This project proposes that to change spatial relations is to subvert conventions of spectatorship in order to support the presence of a queer body politic that has both historical and personal dimensions. I filter knowledge through two lenses: the first is analytical in its approach to understanding how the construction of space exerts power over subjectivity. Working through theories from Henri Lefebvre and Sara Ahmed, this project lands in the proximal, immersive space offered by ‘black-box’ theaters. The second lens is choreographic; it is a practice which attempts to manifest these philosophies in physical and experiential form. It is through this latter form of knowledge production that the audience’s role in creating the performance becomes clear. Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and Claire Bishop’s critique of it helps to evaluate and assess the relations produced therein that maintain the possibility of multiple, fluid subjectivities, essential to a queer identity. By disrupting the socially conditioned conventions of spectatorship, space is cleared for a new approach to a queer body politic in performance.Item Locating and Losing the Self: Explorations of Trauma and Identity in Live Performance(2019-05-01) Hannan, NadiaExamining the location and presence of personal history and identity, specifically trauma, this thesis explores depiction and approaches to trauma in live performance alongside theories of abstraction, disinterestedness, and depersonalization. Using Kant’s notion of disinterestedness, along with Arlene Croce’s review of Bill T. Jones’ work Still/Here (1994) and her introduction of the term “victim art” as a jumping off point, this thesis asks: What is the relationship of art and trauma? Who is ‘allowed’ to make what art? What stories, bodies, and identities are seen on stage, which ones are left out of the western dance canon? What it is about the specific medium of the body that complicates the idea put forward by Kant, and upheld by Croce, of a universal subjective experience? What is the relationship between form and content, the subject and how it is being structured/presented? Bringing together body art from the 1970s, written and performed work produced during and in response to the AIDS epidemic, performance work from the 2000s, and psychological research around PTSD, this paper moves in and out of theory, history, and personal narrative as a way to interrogate the idea of a universal identity and ask questions around the value and role of abstraction in art from modernism to the present.Item The Naughty Boy Dancing Queen: Embodied Agency In Queer Transgression and Conceptual Muchness(2020-05-01) Bamberger, HankThis thesis aims to understand and glorify the transformative characteristics of theatrical transgressions and their lasting effects on performers and audiences in dance performance. In a history of queer transgression, artists have explored the concept of naughtiness in varied ways and through forms of embodied research, have attempted to activate unique landscapes for their own performative, excavational discoveries. By shifting modes of temperament within the stage arena, myself and others before me have attempted to achieve knee-jerk effects in live theater and concert dance in order to gain concretized levels of performative agency and authorship. Within this artistic genealogy, I pose the question: How can performances of conceptual muchness, defined as transgressing sensory (affective) and social norms, offer agency to a performer? This points to the possibility for creating utopias and dystopias in performance, where perfect worlds and destruction-based environments are formulated through surrealist structures and etherealized dreamscapes. These manifestations in my creative work are achieved through action-based doings and constitute an overt rejection of a white, patriarchal, hegemonic, cultural sphere that thrives on normativity. This project proposes that a performer can achieve agency through conceptual muchness: transgressive acts in performance that disrupt hegemonic norms of propriety by providing experiences of sensory overload and queer, overt resistance to assimilation.Item Choreographic Excavation Through Dramaturgy(2019-05-01) Zvosec, MarieThe choreographic process is often described as one of construction, or of making. However, is it possible to understand the choreographic process in another way, as one of discovery? In the course of this project, I propose to illustrate a new understanding of the choreographic process, which I call un-airing . By un-airing , I mean to throw light on the activity of making a dance that is itself already imperceptibly present in a space perceivable to an audience’s sensory apprehension. The methods employed to expose the un-aired work I characterize and illustrate as acts of excavation. Due to the expansion in the contemporary era of the realm of choreographic, the contributions and practices of dance dramaturgs have been incorporated into the processes of excavation, establishing new, dyadic modalities. I elucidate the effects of these new modalities with depictions of the process of excavating and un-airing my 2017 work Venus and Adonis , as well as those to be employed for another, my piece from 2019, entitled Dress Form.