Fine Arts and Music Collected Works - Theses
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ItemPink God: An Ecstatic Communion of Choreography( 2022)This doctorate serves as a reflexive autobiography to expose a theatrical dynamism of a quixotic choreographer. Through a monotheistic gaze it strives towards queer philosophical introspection. Its investigation of personal Christian indoctrination (as a source of creative subjectivity) works through allegorical imagination, and themes of devotion, holiness, and transformation. What emerges is a twenty five-year interdisciplinary choreographic practice, a polymorphous interaction of multiple art forms, in which ‘learnt and unlearnt obedient and disobedient bodies’ reveal the philosophical underpinnings of my works’ social, religious, queer, cinematic, absurdist, historical and phenomenological experimentations. The DVPA traces the spaces that I have explored in creating my vision of the stage as an altar; a place for my work to serve a queer and non-queer community in lieu of (a) God but armed with the intention to be an artist in search of the divine. To this, I find in the dance, the dancers, staged objects and paraphernalia, an interdisciplinary adulation to the neo-baroque — a queer aesthetic to which I remain transfixed, and that insures my immaturity. To grow via this research is an ambition, but to remain in the childlike world of wonder and possibility is a necessary tonic to the sensible. The works presented below demonstrate my attempts to parody religion and cinema, which I refer to in this doctorate as Hollywood Blockbusters of Religious Catatonia — and that I use to interpret my own spectacles of the exaggerated and the absurd. My desire to deconstruct learned steppage of dance: ballet, court dance, contemporary, or jazz, is not as a rebuke to those styles but a means to innovate a dance vocabulary to express a vision of a queer empowered mythology-cum-reality. To this end, my writing demonstrates how a queering aesthetic remain the dominant partnership in my practice.
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ItemPhysical Acting: Words Made Flesh( 2022)This doctorate synthesizes the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the Pulse improvisation approach with a practical framework for practitioners to use Pulse as an applied process in training performers, developing original material, and rehearsing a dramatic script. The book project Physical Acting – Words Made Flesh represents thirty years of practice-led research and contributes knowledge in terms of praxis to the development of contemporary theatre practice. The book project is a trilogy – three separate yet interconnected parts. Two of the three parts are practical workbooks for performance practitioners; the third part provides complementary material to assist in the understanding of those workbooks. This dissertation begins with a Contextual Framing Statement focusing upon influences and key turning points in the evolution of Pulse and looks at its position within contemporary performance practice. The Training Workbook outlines the Pulse Canvas framework, supplying a practical, step by step guide through the eight phases of the training. It offers a way to teach structured improvisation through ensemble practice leading to the execution of Performance Improvisations. The Directing Workbook describes in detail how to apply Pulse improvisation to the rehearsal of a scripted text. Part One outlines the four phases of the rehearsal process: Intuitive Investigation, Immersion, Mapping and Rendering. It builds on the shared ‘language’ of process and skills developed by an ensemble and a trainer/director through the Pulse training. Part Two demonstrates how to apply the process outlined in Part One. Using case studies of productions that I have directed, both classical and contemporary, I describe how each of the rehearsal layers were used by offering detailed examples of potential rehearsal outcomes. The productions focused on are The Mill on the Floss, Pericles Punished, Five Kinds of Silence, Stage Beauty and Manbeth: Macbeth Amplified. The last part of the trilogy, In Conversation with Practitioners consists of edited extracts from interviews with former students and theatre artists who use Pulse. With my accompanying commentary, these extracts serve to give voice to the perspectives of others and to put a frame around the experienced outcomes of the Pulse work.