Ideas of agency have assumed considerable significance in criminal justice (Smith, 2009) and have much to offer in the field of youth justice specifically. For instance, Maruna (2001) suggests that antisocial/criminal behavior in juveniles can be indicative of a lack of personal agency in significant areas of their lives and the need to demonstrate personal agency and control, making the concept a vital part of rehabilitation. While the empirical evidence of the effects of applied theatre (AT) programs on recidivism rates is limited, their impact on improving personal agency and prosocial behavior abounds in the available literature. The process vs. product model of AT makes it a suitable strength-based rehabilitation model that helps youth offenders access their agentic potential. However, the overemphasis on the quantifiable effects of rehabilitation programs on recidivism rates of the justice intervention model has resulted in a limited exploration of the topic within applied theatre and criminal justice research. This research is therefore grounded in the welfare intervention model. It uses multiple case studies to explore how and if applied theatre artists (ATA) and organizations that work with youth experiencing incarceration (YEI) advocate for youth agency in their work within the justice intervention model in the U.S. The study reveals that ATA negotiate for youth agency through their facilitation and leadership culture. It also demonstrates that negotiating for youth agency is directly tied to how ATA negotiate for their place in the facilities and how they maintain support and good relationships with corrections staff. The study further highlights how ATA use theatre techniques with a “yes and…” approach and creative agency that help YEI to access their agentic potential. It demonstrates that ATA also conduct youth agency advocacy work outside incarceration facilities. It shows that applied theatre artists use theatre techniques with a “yes, and…” and approach and creative agency that help youth experiencing incarceration access their agentic potential. It also reveals that systemic insecurities of incarceration of the justice model interfere with applied theatre program implementation. The study’s findings offer scholars and artists a better understanding of applied theatre practice with justice-involved youth.

Performing arts curricula, specifically theatrical role-play, have aided in enhancing life skills of secondary education students throughout the past. This continues to be the case in the present education climate. However, the performing arts are still not viewed by some education policymakers at a level that helps those programs flourish and thereby be accessible to students. Despite the empirical evidence of life skill enhancement, both academically and socially, that can be applied in an interdisciplinary manner and to life outside of the school setting, the arts are often not considered as important as core content areas. These programs are subject to elimination to a greater extent compared to other education programs. This action research study sought to examine the ways in which high school theatre programs impact life skills, defined in this study by both academic and social contexts, learned by secondary education students. The innovation intervention consisted of theatrical role-play applied in an interdisciplinary manner. The innovation occurred over the course of two weeks in a senior English class at a southwest public high school. The likelihood of the English teacher using theatrical role-play in future lesson plans was also studied. The action research utilized a mixed-methods approach with a theoretical framework consisting of Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) and Academic Risk-Taking (ART). Results indicated assertions related to the enhancement of the social skills of empathy and public speaking in student participants, as well as the English teacher planning on utilizing the innovation in future lesson planning. The academic skill of text analysis was possibly affected, however results were inconclusive.

This document investigates the nature of artistic collaboration in an immersive production. The term “collaboration” indicates the multiple participatory connections between the director and cast collaborators, the director and performers, the performers and audience, and the director and the audience. From my research on immersive dance studies, I will elaborate on three topics in this document: the collaborative interaction between the choreographer and cast collaborators, the dancers and audiences, and the choreographer and dancers. The purpose of this study is to conceptualize dance as the main expression to create active audience engagement and centralize dance in the discourse surrounding immersive performance. Dance in immersive practice prioritizes “co-authorship” through establishing a close kinesthetic and emotional sharing experience to eliminate the traditional boundary between the performers and audiences; and it innovates a new way to blur the distinction between these two parties. In this document, I will specify the definition of “immersion” through a multi-collaborative perspective that is relevant to my applied project. In addition to sharing my creative experience, I will further analyze the artistic utilization of participation, engagement, and interactivity in two existing immersive productions: Sleep No More and Home Training. My primary methodologies to effectively conduct this research include post-performance interviewing with the audiences, dancers, and cast collaborators who are directly engaged in the immersive production; reviewing the studio practices and rehearsal footage; and the examination of existing literature, published scholarship, critical review, online video resources, professional blogs and social media sites. This research contributes to the development of contemporary dance and theater studies through an immersive lens and prioritizes interactive spectatorship within this mode of artistic expression. My ethos of developing theatrical immersion studies as an emerging artist is to emphasize the integration of dance and theater. I strive to contribute my academic investigation to the dance field through conducting critical scholarship and maintaining artistic vitality. I hope to change the traditional paradigm of how my audiences enjoy and think about the contemporary aesthetic by honoring their diverse social identities.

Predominantly White arts colleges in the United States, like many other institutions around the country, need equitable leadership frameworks that center Black and Brown students. This project is a response to that demand. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a BIPOC equity coalition in an Arts college at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). The choice to utilize an autoethnographic research design was based on the researcher’s lifelong work in social justice and equity. Additionally, the choice to utilize Black-centered storytelling was due to the researcher’s identity as a Black male who has a company devoted to social justice activism. The research questions for this dissertation are: 1) How does one develop a diverse equity coalition that is BIPOC-centered within a Predominantly White arts college? and 2) What leadership roles must be in place in order to develop a diverse equity coalition that is BIPOC-centered, within a Predominantly White arts college? The data sources for this dissertation are meeting notes, Facebook call for action, letter of demand, and reflective journal process. The data from this year-long experience was analyzed to describe the steps needed to develop a BIPOC equity coalition. The steps included a call to action on social media, listening sessions, formation of the coalition, development of guiding principles, and action steps taken throughout the academic year. Additionally, data revealed that roles such as having a seat at the table with administrators, and having the power of a job and a title within the arts school influenced the success of the coalition’s actions throughout the academic year. The first three chapters of the dissertation present the theoretical frameworks supporting the equity coalition. Chapter 4 and 5 presents findings and answers to research question 1 and 2.

This research scrutinizes theatre teaching practice through a teacher perspective to find mechanisms that enable health promotion and quality theatre-making skills for students. The critical investigations conducted are twofold. First, I examine the intersection of my 18 years of experience teaching high school drama for connections to theatre and health research. I employ a narrative inquiry method to analyze lived experience to create an initial health promotion framework. And second, I interrogate that framework investigating the experience of a focus group of other high school drama teachers, a high school counselor, and a psychologist. This study reveals that drama teachers perceive their drama programs as psychologically, socially, and emotionally health-promoting for involved students. Furthermore, this study identifies the complex processes, relationships, and components of the theatre-making that the teachers pinpoint as preconditions and mechanisms that enhance and enable student flourishing. The teachers describe themselves as key to health promotion by modeling the artistry of theatre and the art form's social and emotional skills. Their narratives demonstrate that flexible time, their students, and the relationships they build with them as preconditions to maximize health promotion. Specifically, they identify the creation of a safe, supportive environment as foundational to the process.

This study explores the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German dramatic genre Sklavenstücke (slave plays). These plays, which until recently have not received any significant attention in scholarship, articulate a nuanced critique of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and thus bear witness to an early German-language discourse indicative of abolitionist currents.Tracing individual acts of German-language abolitionism, I investigate the correlation between abolitionist movements in the Euro-American space and German involvements in these very efforts. In this sense, I contest the notion of an absence of German abolitionist awareness in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. My reading of these slave plays contributes to discussions about the transcultural nature of abolitionist discourse and defies the notion that abolitionist activism only emerged within the specific nation-states that have previously been the subject of scholarship. Challenging this layering both theoretically and analytically, then, requires an innovative shift that centers approaches rooted in Black thought and theories, which are the foundation of this study. These concepts are necessary for engaging with issues of slavery and abolition while at the same time exposing white paternalist perspectives and gazes. Plays of this genre often foreground the horrors of slavery at the hands of cruel white slaveholders, and characterize enslaved Black Africans as unblemished, obedient, submissive, hard-working, and grateful “beings” deserving of humanitarian benevolence. Based on these sentiments, an overarching discourse opposing slavery and the transatlantic slave trade emerged by way of German-language theatrical plays, theoretical treatises, newspaper articles, academic writings, travelogues, diary entries, and journal articles that negotiated the nature, origin, and legitimacy of Black African humanity around debates on slavery. Thus, my study demonstrates that these German-language literary contributions indicate inscribed socio-critical commentary and take up transatlantic abolitionist discourses, a dialogue that surfaced under the auspices of the Enlightenment.

Those who are in or have aged out of foster care, most of whom are queer, Black, brown, and low-income, are represented by social workers, educational advocates, behavioral health specialists, and the mainstream media as “at-risk” for criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, homelessness, and lower levels of educational attainment. Current and former residents of foster care and their experiences must be understood beyond these deficit models in order to restore humanity to and bring about positive change for this population. This project traced the strategies for survival of those in and aged out of foster care in Arizona through artmaking and critical qualitative methods.

Using borderlands theory and medicinal histories, I demonstrated how system involved youth paint a picture of foster care as a dehumanizing borderland creating una cultura mestiza – a hybrid culture that youth learned to navigate as both healers and healing. Additionally, I argued the foster care system is inherently disabling by way of the processual (re)narrativization the system dictates in order to make those in the system legible to the State through the labeling of mental and physical disabilities. Lastly, I explored insights garnered about foster care through ensemble-based devised theatre. I found it is important to have systemic representations of foster care in tandem with embodied experiences of said system. Collage-making served as an accessible mechanism for relationship building, material generation, and material knowledge. I discovered meaningful ways of representing absent presences of system involved people through feeding forward their artistic creations into the devising process. Taken together, I found foster care system involved people survive through art and creativity, connection to people and places, and keen resourcefulness cultivated in the system.

In this dissertation, I translate and provide a critical analysis of the Iranian play, Tomb Dwellers (2009), by Hussein Kiyani. It was first staged after the contested presidential election in Iran in 2009 which brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into power for a second term. The play depicts the socioeconomic situation of Iran and its relation to other countries, the situation of women and the working class during Ahmadinejad’s two terms of presidency. Tomb Dwellers is written as a comedy, a genre more likely to make it past censors in Iran or other despotic countries. My research and translation project are sparked by questions that move in two directions simultaneously: one, toward understanding the sociopolitical context for theatre in Iran after the revolution of 1979; the other, toward the challenges of translating into English a play that stands as a social metaphor in its own historical context. Regarding the former, which forms the basis of my critical analysis, I explore the strategies artists have used to avoid the limitations imposed by the authorities. In making this play available to English-speaking readers at a time of political tension between Iran and the United States I offer to USAmerican audiences a more nuanced perspective of the way Iranian people feel about their government and its relation to other countries. This play is both timely and informative. Timely because of the tensions between the US and the Middle East. Informative because it represents the Iranian community and may serve to create a bridge between the two cultures. Translating and staging this play along with the critical analysis I am providing will help American audiences and immigrants from other countries to know more about Iran in a creative and entertaining way.