My dissertation topic engages in the trajectory of Roma/Gitano culture and flamenco and its implications for Chicanx culture in New Mexico. New Mexicans have the reputation amongst US Chicanx as referring to themselves as Hispanic and aligning culturally with a Spanish sensibility. Historically in the larger US Chicanx community this type of popularity for flamenco would be described as typical of New Mexico’s wavering Chicanidad that yearns to be connected to a Spanish colonial past more than to its indigenous Mexican roots. However, I believe the reality is a bit different. What makes New Mexican Chicanx different from the larger US Chicanx community is that they utilize flamenco and its Gitano roots as a cultural example of their Chicanidad. There is scant research on how Chicanidad as a historical movement has been influenced by the flamenco culture that exists in New Mexico. This dissertation will begin a conversation that places flamenco and the precarious identity of Chicanx, Gitanos and Nuevomejicanos in dialogue through the body, the art form, and the cultural stylings of flamenco rooted in the Flamenco Festival Internacional de Albuquerque (FFI).

Since its inception, the American Broadway industry has flourished and grown to include numerous vocal styles and techniques. The early twenty-first century has seen a rapid increase in demand for collegiate courses and instructors pertaining to music theater. It has therefore become necessary for voice instructors to be equally comfortable teaching both music theater and classical techniques such as bel canto. This document serves as a resource for instructors seeking more information on defining and teaching vocal styles in music theater including legit, mix, and belt. The first two chapters address the following three questions: 1) What is bel canto and how does the technique function? 2) What is music theater as a vocal style and how do colloquial terms such as legit, mix and belt function within music theater? 3) Are the technical ideas behind bel canto and music theater really that different? The third chapter offers a curriculum for a semester-long course (a hybrid between a song literature class and a performance-based seminar) called Singing Music Theater Styles: From Hammerstein to Hamilton. This course shows the rich development tracing techniques of bel canto through techniques used in contemporary music theater. This document concludes with an annotated bibliography of major sources useful to both the instructors wishing to teach this course and the performers looking to expand their knowledge of singing music theater.

“Mierda.” was an original 50-minute solo dance and theater performance by Jordan Klitzke along with guest artist Gina Jurek that premiered from September 6-8, 2018 at Arizona State University. The creative tools of sensation, presence, and fantasy were applied in the development of an individualized movement vocabulary focused on the artist’s embodiment of contrasting ideas. That research was then further cultivated into an immersive theatrical collage that stimulated relational thinking and heightened consciousness. “Mierda.” was an example of a contemporary creative process that utilized the languages of dance and theater. The performance was a unique continuation of artistic research undertaken by pioneers in the dance and theater fields such as Danielle Agami, Lloyd Newson, Hofesh Schechter, and Anne Bogart. It was documented and created over a nine-month period including the three final performances. The form and content of “Mierda.” was not predetermined, but emerged throughout the creative process and performance of the work. The resulting narrative demonstrated the revelatory potential of this style of theatrical inquiry. Precise energy, tension and questioning formed an immersive, intimate experience for the viewers and performers and invited the audience to “fill in the blanks” as they connected with the emerging narrative. The final work was a collage of surprising juxtapositions on both the micro-level of individual movements and the macro-level of theatrical structure. Analysis of the work resulted in a critical understanding of the creative tools used along with future proposals for continued research. Not only did the research enlighten and contextualize the practices of an emerging choreographer, it also argued for a new understanding of the value of Dance as a personal practice of reflection and growth.

Don't Hold Your Breath is an evening-length performance created and performed by Sarah "Saza" Kent and EPIK Dance Company that consisted of street and concert dance combined with hip hop theatre, spoken text and live singing. What began as a one-woman show about the choreographer's life, turned in to an ensemble piece that included the stories of many people, including ten community members who were interviewed on their views of life and death after being affected by a diagnosis. The show follows Kat, a young woman tiptoeing the line between her party girl past and the thought of finally growing up and settling down. Typically confident and self-assured, she is now grappling with the idea of life and death. Kat finds herself in an MRI machine that could ultimately determine her fate. As the machine examines her body, she begins to examine her life, causing her to confront some of life's most existential questions. Has she spent her time wisely? Would she do anything differently if given a second chance? When it comes down to it, and all distractions are stripped away, what is truly important? Her thoughts take her to memories of her past and visions for her future as she faces the reality that life is finite and tomorrow is not promised. This document is an account of the show's process and serves as a place of explanation, analysis, and reflection, while also questioning its significance on a personal level all the way to its place in the field.

En contexto del desarrollo urbano culturalmente acrítico, el cual con la gentrificación amenaza el bienestar del barrio y sus habitantes, esta disertación interpreta la dialéctica barrioización y barriología como atmósfera dramática en la dramaturgia chicana. Como tropo de supervivencia social y ontológica en la producción cultural chicana, la recurrencia literaria del barrio también queda reflejada en la temática y las formas de numerosas obras de teatro chicano. De tal modo, el análisis de la conciencia espacial chicana en Bernabé (1971) y Heroes and Saints (1994) revela la significancia de un sentido de lugar colectivo y sitúa esta interpretación dramática del barrio en torno al matiz ideológico de la evolución de la conciencia espacial chicana. Manifestada como una dialéctica entre muerte y vida social y ontológica, la representación y representatividad del barrio en La trampa sin salida (1973), Water and Power (2009) y A Drunkard’s Tale of Melted Wings and Memories (2016) ilustra el efecto dramático de la dialéctica entre barrioización y barriología. Mientras algunos estudios precedentes a este han explorado la espacialidad chicana y el significado sociocultural del barrio, esta disertación es la primera en demonstrar concomitantemente la función temática y semiótica del barrio en la configuración de la atmósfera dramática en el teatro chicano. Más aún, la intersección entre barrio, espacio social y teatro no solo revelan la significancia semiótica de la atmósfera dramática, si no que también sostienen la urgencia de fomentar la (re)producción socioespacial urbana históricamente informada y culturalmente crítica.

This research study examines the interaction between youth queer narratives and young people through examining my core research question, How do young people engage, interpret, and respond to queer narratives? Applying a feminist narrative analysis to examine the qualitative data, I propose a methodological research shift where the voices of youth are valued as content experts; an artistic shift that moves content-creation away from a top down traditional media model and towards a youth-centered new media approach for art making; an aesthetic shift away from over-used stereotypes, tropes, and stale representations and instead innovate to represent intersectional, spectrum-based diversity of the LGBTQ+ experience.

This qualitative research study utilizes questionnaires, focus groups, and case study interviews, to engage adolescent perceptions of queer narratives. The youth, ranging in ages from 15 to 18 years old and living in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area, explore and examine LGBTQ+ themes, characters, plots in traditional and new media.

My dissertation examines youth interactions with queer narratives through three chapters. These address themes of: character, identity, and representation; plot and the search for accuracy; and the symbiotic exchange between narrative and community. Throughout the dissertation, young people analyze narratives, reflect on their own lives, and envision the future of youth queer narrative. The youth describe a move away from traditional media and towards new media platforms with user-created content, social network interaction, and the sharing of common experiences with peers. Finally, I examine the implications of both the research findings and the methodology on the future of youth-engaged qualitative research, as well as the performing arts.

The purpose of this mixed methods case study was to evaluate a dramatic arts curriculum focused on building protective factors including resiliency, cognitive flexibility, self-efficacy, and hope in eight to ten adolescent male sex offenders undergoing treatment at a residential behavioral health facility in Mesa, Arizona. The impetus for this research was suicide prevention efforts. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for ages 15-24 in the United States (CDC 2013), and prevention efforts demand complex approaches targeting major risk factors like lack of belonging and hopelessness. Arts-based prevention efforts have shown promise for building pro-social preventative factors.

My project maps assets of welcome in the built environment in youth performing arts spaces. What signifiers reveal how a physical space conceptualizes the child, reflects professed theological claims, and cues youth to practice ownership and experience belonging? I explore the cultural capital that emerges from the sites and I assert theological implications of the findings. Through mixed qualitative, quantitative, and arts-based methods, I employ asset-based and cultural mapping tools to collect data. I parse theories of space, race, and capital. Half of the ten sites are faith-based; others make room for practices that participants bring to the table. Therefore, I discuss theologies and theories about racialized, religious, public, and arts spaces. My research shows that one ethnographic task for the arts groups is unearthing and embedding neighborhood legacy. I source fifty-six written youth questionnaires, forty youth in focus groups, staff questionnaires, parent interviews, and observations across fourteen months at ten sites. Interpreting the data required that I reconceive multiple terms, including “youth dedicated,” “partnership,” and art itself. The research codes spatial, relational, economic, temporal, and comfort-level assets. Observed assets include strategies for physical safety, gender inclusivity, literary agility, entrepreneurship, advocacy, and healing. Analyzing data showed the sites as conceptualizing the child in three change-making areas: the Child as Hungry, the Child as Village, and the Child as Visible. The Child as Hungry emerged because participants self-report myriad “feeding” physically, spiritually, and artistically at each site. Youth participants at each site maintain a Village presence, and each site offers a manner of gathering space that signifies Village responsibility. Each site carves space to witness the child, contrastingly with other spheres—so much so that being a Visible Child becomes a craft itself, added alongside the fine art. Child theology is the primary theoretical lens that I use to contribute to and intersect with performance studies theory, critical race theory, child drama, and childhood studies.

How do trees (live and representational) participate in our theatrical and performed encounters with them? If trees are not inherently scenic, as their treatment in language and on stage might reinforce, how can they be retheorized as agents and participants in dramatic encounters? Using Diana Taylor’s theory of scenario to understand embodied encounters, I propose an alternative approach to understanding environmental beings (like trees) called “synercentrism,” which takes as its central tenet the active, if not 100 percent “willed,” participation of both human and non-human beings. I begin by mapping a continuum from objecthood to agenthood to trace the different ways that plants and trees are used, represented, and included in our encounters. The continuum provides a framework that more comprehensively unpacks human-plant relationships.

My dissertation addresses the rich variety of representations and embodiments by focusing on three central chapter topics: the history of tree representation and inclusion in dramatic literature and performance; interactions with living trees in gardens, parks, and other dramatic arenas; and individual plays and plants that have a particularly strong grasp on cultural imaginaries. Each chapter is followed by one or more corresponding case studies (the first chapter is followed by case studies on plants in musical theatre; the second on performing plants and collaborative performance events; and the last on the dance drama Memory Rings and the Methuselah tree). I conclude with a discussion of how the framework of synercentrism can aid in the disruption of terministic screens and facilitate reciprocal relationships with trees and other environmental agents.

In the United States, we tend to understand linguistic systems as separate and autonomous, and by this understanding, bilinguals are people who speak two different languages and switch between them.  This understanding of bilingualism, however, does not reflect the reality of the way many bilinguals use language.  Rather than “code-switch” between two languages, sociolinguists posit that many bilinguals understand their language as a single linguistic system, and choose different elements of that system in different situations, a process termed, “translanguaging.” Translanguaging provides an alternative framework for examining bilingual language as an ideological system in plays, particularly plays which use translanguaged dialogue to describe the experiences of young people who dwell on and cross borders, a category of plays I term, “Border Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA).” This descriptive study utilizes grounded theory and close reading theoretically grounded in border studies and sociolinguistic theory to determine what roles Spanish and English play in Border TYA as autonomous systems, and as pieces of a new, translanguaged system.   Playwrights of Border TYA u translanguaging as a structural metaphor for cultural negotiation to examine identity, belonging, and borders.  Translanguaging provides subaltern characters a process for communicating their experiences, examining their identities, and describing encounters with borders in their own unique linguistic system. Border TYA, however, does not exclusively translanguage.  Border TYA also incorporates monolingual dialogue and translation, and in these instances the languages, Spanish and English, function autonomously as tools for teaching audience members to recognize vocabulary and cultural experience.