ETD Collection

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/104


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Subject: search.filters.subject.Performing arts

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Untitled: a solo theatre performance interrogating clown and bouffon performance patterns, and what they offer to the performance of personal narrative in South African theatre today
    (2019) Pombo, Roberto
    This research paper investigates the use of the popular theatre personae of the clown and the bouffon as practical tools in the theatre making project, particularly focusing on their interaction with personal narrative and autobiographical fragments. It could be argued that use of personal narrative as a story- telling strategy within theatre has created a set of expectations and assumptions for audiences, and requirements on the part of the performer, who is obliged to demonstrate and declare a sincere and authentic presentation of self. This paper aims to address the issues associated with personal narrative storytelling, and to expand on the assumptions of what constitutes as autobiographical storytelling, particularly within the South African theatre paradigm. In so doing, this research offers performers and theatre makers alternative methodologies and practices in the use of subjective experience in the theatre making project. Using a practice-led research model, core propositions and methodologies around the use of the clown and the bouffon and their contact with autobiographical fragments were tested and investigated through the creation of Untitled, a devised theatre work. Key texts from practitioners such as Jacques Lecoq, Phillipe Gaulier, Jon Davison, John Wright and Keith Johnstone underpinned the theoretical component of the research. The clown and the bouffon encourage a critical, yet comedic approach to dealing with personal narrative story-telling, allowing theatre-makers and performers to experience an objective distance from sometimes, emotionally sensitive material. In so doing, they offer audiences a stylistically heightened theatrical encounter, where the authenticity and truth of the artist’s personal experience is masked by the deliberate use of overt theatricality.
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    Mobility, identities and performance
    (2019) Raphunga, Chuene
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    Beyond the "linoleum colon": performance as research into the constructed narrative of the public hospital space
    (2017) Lee, Tarryn Elizabeth
    A theory of performance-making is presented through this study that contributes to the body of performance studies research. The consideration of looking “beyond” the “linoleum colon”, as the research title suggests, positions this study to respond to the research question: To what extent can a constructed performance narrative provide the potential for audience transformation in reading, knowing, and understanding the public health site as an ally to health care practice? The “performance-making process” is forwarded as a possible model for creative research. The collaborative process leading to the performance Beyond the linoleum colon is an experiment in performance-making. I frame this experiment as a “collision course” (Pollock, 2010: 203) that presents a convergence between performance studies, urban spatial praxis, and narrative theory. The performance-making process as a model presents a formula for a theory of performance-making. A performance-making theory can be derived from the ways in which a citing of site took place and will be presented as part of this study. I have connoted the action of ‘digestion’ from the metaphorical element of the ‘colon’, an incorporation of supportive theoretical ideas that develop into a model for a theory of performance-making. The research to follow is informed by writers in performance studies including Schechner (2002), Conquergood (1995, 2002a, 2002b), Pollock (2010), and Warren (2010), urban spatial praxis from the perspective of Lefebvre (1991), and narrative theory with reference to Braid (1996), Bruner (1986), and McArthy (2007). The implications of performance-making on the field of performance studies will be addressed, underscoring the importance of a performance-lens to the creative endeavour of the current study. Urban spatial praxis will be stressed, as a consideration of space within the performance was twofold: the citing of site in a theatrical space emerged, as well as a foregrounding of hospital site as a space for the culmination of experiential accounts that developed the Expressionist theatre work. A framing theory on space and the circumstances for its production will be emphasised, leading to an imperative to what I reinforce as narrative construction and narrative performance. The way in which the research has developed in response to these key theoretical perspectives informs the process, progress, and concluding findings of the performance experiment: Beyond the linoleum colon.
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    Performing media
    (2015-02-13) Osso, Tamara
    Catherine Wood describes our society today as an entanglement between languages, time, space, intimacy, drama and diversity (Wood 2012: 10). Ian Chambers affirms that the notion of communicating or recounting with greater multi-­‐dimensionality, enacting or displaying more than one perspective at the same time, seems to better facilitate the complexity involved in communication itself (Chambers 2000: 25). Interaction in today’s context is therefore a complex experience that can position many modes of engagement in the same moment. The following dissertation explores the process of translating more than one visual language – here, painting and performance. It explores how the interdisciplinary nature of visual languages can interpret experience as multifaceted, lending greater perspective to concepts, issues and subject matter. Walter Benjamin suggests that this is only possible because languages “are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express” (Benjamin 1969: 72). Benjamin’s text introduces the idea of translation between languages as a mode, a natural way of interaction. I will use his concept of translation to explain my interest in the conflation between painting and performance, and how this process reflects on a particular experience our current context.
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    Biography and the digital double: the projected image as signifier in the mise en scene of live performance
    (2011-09-26) Pater, Dominik Lukasz
    This research report examines the role of the projected image in the creation of meaning in theatre-based live performance, through the interaction and integration of the projection, the live performer and the staged environment, termed as intermedia performance. The report is based on findings gleaned from my own creative practice and documents a process of practice-led research. It begins by establishing a historical context for this type of creative practice by tracing the development of intermedia performance in the twentieth century. It then takes five of my performance works as case studies, reflecting on the successes and shortcomings of each work in relationship to the stated goal of integrating the projected and live elements of each performance, with major emphasis placed on the analysis of my staged work Heaven and Hell :The Life of Aldous Huxley. In the analysis, a theoretical framework is introduced in the form of Steve Dixon’s digital double, Phaedra Bell’s Dialogic Media Productions and Inter-media Exchange, as well as Philip Auslander’s notion of liveness. The report concludes that the major shortcoming of Heaven and Hell was the tendency of the projected image to overwhelm the live performer both aesthetically and – through mostly temporal constraints – to stifle the potential of the live performance medium in providing a more inclusive and visceral experience for its audience than that offered by exclusively screen-based media. My findings focus on the need to make use of physical computing technologies such as motion sensors in intermedia performance in order to empower live performers and to create more scope for spontaneity and true interaction between the live and the projected.