The invisibility of Italian contemporary women directors in Italy and abroad is symptomatic of how Italian theatre is studied in the Anglophone academy and the concerning gender inequality and ...misogyny widespread in Italy during the Berlusconi Era (1994-2011). This dissertation looks at this grossly understudied aspect of Italian theatre by examining the role that Sicilian director Emma Dante (b. 1967), her company Sud Costa Occidentale, and her works played in the 1994-2011 Italian theatre landscape. This study reads her staging of female bodies, her theatrical works as a whole, and her directorial persona for attitudes towards women in the context of Sicilian and Italian culture. It analyzes the individual stories told in Dante’s La trilogia della famiglia siciliana (The Trilogy of the Sicilian Family, 2001-2004), Cani di Bancata (Market Dogs, 2006), and Trilogia degli occhiali (The Eyeglasses Trilogy, 2011) as vehicles to denounce the symbolic and systemic violence targeting and oppressing Italian women. Although primarily based on text and performance analysis, feminist and body theory also undergird the explorations undertaken in this study. This work is historiographically guided and rooted in contemporary Italian cultural studies, as it reconstructs the context in which Dante’s plays were written.Chapter 1 provides the historical, sociological, and cultural background necessary to frame to rest of the dissertation. Chapter 2 presents the lower-class Sicilian women in La trilogia della famiglia siciliana as doubly marginalized by their gender and socio-economic status. It explores how the financial disparity between the sexes, the gender roles, and the violence perpetuated against women depicted in the Trilogy point at gender issues such as economic inequality, Catholic Church-backed ideas predicating the submission of women to men, and gendered killings.Chapter 3 paints mafia realities as controlled by both regional and national power dynamics regulated by laws of silence and behavior, and strengthened by the corruption and complicity of governmental and religious institutions. It then dissects the female imagery in Cani di bancata, depicting southern Italian women living in mafia-controlled regions as perennially subordinated to men and marginalized within mafia organizations, where they are idealized by male fantasies and relegated to traditional gender roles.Chapter 4 discusses Trilogia degli occhiali focusing on Ballarini. It portrays the last play of the Trilogy as questioning gendered ageism through an investigation of the representation of old age and the presence/absence of older women’s bodies in the media, the structure of the play itself, and the actors’ performances of age and the aging process.Beyond summarizing the arguments made in preceding chapters and outlining future research, Chapter 5 looks at Dante’s public persona as continuing her questioning of gender inequality, gender roles, and mediatized gendered bodies. Finally, translations of the seven plays analyzed and a list of works directed by Dante are provided in the appendix. In addition to assisting with textual analysis, these translations offer scripts that could be used by Anglophone scholars for future research on Italian theatre and by English language theatre companies to stage Dante’s works.
Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), who is best remembered in literary history for his realist reform of comic theatre, was also a prolific librettist. His texts for music written from ...1748 onwards remain understudied but warrant significant reappraisal, for Goldoni was one of the first to give shape to the dramma giocoso, an innovative and realistic new genre of opera that went on to have a lasting legacy all the way to W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte. Through an interdisciplinary, historical approach and intertextual analysis, the present study reevaluates Goldoni’s drammi giocosi, largely overlooked by scholarship, to uncover the lasting innovations in form and content introduced by the Venetian playwright. Analysis of these texts also reveals clear affinity between Goldoni's contributions to the dramma giocoso and his reform of prose theatre. Most importantly, unlike other types of comic opera, the dramma giocoso has the particularity of combining buffo with serio, a dynamic that, through Goldoni's mature output, continually evolves to bring new realism and social relevance to opera theatre. Goldoni’s influence on this type of musical representation has not been fully considered, but the realism in music that he achieves through the dramma giocoso must be acknowledged as a lasting contribution to modern literature, and to operatic history.
This dissertation explores the creation of national identity through spatial manifestations of gender in synchronized swimming from 1907–present. While many competitive synchronized swimmers ...disinherit the sport’s performance past, my dissertation illustrates that synchronized swimming’s theatrical background is precisely the reason it has become an important genre for exploring self-conscious performances of gender, nation, and socio-spatial relations. These sporting entertainment moments emerge as particularly influential in eras when national, political strife leave the defining features of femininity in flux. I claim that the hybridity of the form—as sport and as entertainment—invites the viewer to read the female body as an active subject while simultaneously opening up questions about public space and objectification. By focusing on key moments of synchronized swimming’s popularity, such as Annette Kellerman’s iconic Hippodrome and Vaudeville performances, Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the New York World’s Fair, Esther Williams’ MGM aquamusicals, and the Hollywood rooftop performances of the present-day Aqualillies, I show how synchronized swimming provides a distilled vantage into the feminine citizen’s and the feminine collective’s relationships to varying political climates, social productions of space, and of course, theatrical performance.
The purpose of this thesis is to document and analyze the collaborative design process of the costume designer. The production of The Green Bird by, Carlo Gozzi, an original translation by Federica ...Deigan, and adapted by Leslie Felbain and Kristen Messer was performed at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, opening March 2, 2007. This thesis will provide an analytical approach to the Gozzi's script and detailed account of the design process with specificity to the costumes. This thesis is broken down into four chapters. Chapter 1 details the script of The Green Bird, inclusive of contextual information of Carlo Gozzi. Chapter 2 discusses the conceptual and collaborative design process. Chapter 3 details the production and rehearsal process. Chapter 4 is a reflection of the overall production, revealing issues and problem solving tactics. The appendices support the visual work of the design process.
This dissertation explores the rediscovery of commedia dell’s arte theatre in Europe during the Modernist era (approximately 1890-1930) by dramatists and theatre directors, which led to its usage as ...a tool for individual experimentation and general escape from the anxieties associated with the changing political environment. The appropriation of commedia dell’arte theatre was, for many theatre practitioners, the perfect structure with which to counteract the dominant Realist aesthetic that was prevalent throughout Europe at the time. Although these Modernist commedia-based plays and productions were generally created as art-for-art’s sake, this is not the case everywhere, as evidenced by some of the themes, both overt and masked, in the works of some Spanish dramatists. Using literary history as the theoretical framework, this dissertation contends that Modernist commedia-based dramas serve as an appropriate point of departure for comprehending literary reactions to, and reproductions of, the revolutions in technology, politics, and social practices that contributed to the modern order. While representations of cynical clowns, such as Harlequin, were mostly apolitical, the pessimism that dominates the farces, the pantomimes and the puppet plays can be viewed in response to the radically changing social and political environment. The primary focus of this study is to analyze, in the broader literary and historical context, what place Spanish commedia-influenced dramas have in the transnational scope of the European Modernist movement. Narrowing the focus of this investigation to those elements that are salient in the Spanish commedia plays, I investigate Harlequin’s status as a poet in five of these dramas, a role that contrasts significantly with his traditional character, a buffoon. In plays by Jacinto Benavente, Gregorio Martinez Sierra and Ramon del Valle-Inclan, Harlequin’s poetic and psychological depth is observed both through the influence of French Symbolist poetry and as a steward of the changing Modernist Zeitgeist. It is Harlequin’s ability to act independently of his commedia stock characters that insures his immortality, in that his antics are just as much relevant to audiences during the early twentieth century as they have been since he first surfaced in the sixteenth century.
A study is following a development of theatrical texts inspired by the tradition of commedie dell´arte. It observes advancing of a character of Pantalone, Harlequin and partially also a female votary ...from commedie dell´arte and their gradual change in comedies of Carlo Goldoni. Carlo Goldoni allegorically reduces the meaning of a mask and reveals human traits hidden in the character behind it. With Carlo Goldoni these characters obtained a human dimension, had a psychological development. Humour
changed from rough and vulgar into a wittier form. Contemporary evaluations are reconstructed - based on criticims of Francesco De Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. Aspects of commedie dell´arte overcome further development, and as a tradition are found present in Luigi Pirandello dramas. A critic Adriano Tilgher distinguishes four types of situation masks in Pirandello´s characters. Pirandello moved the meaning of thus understood mask, and made out of mask knots round which the plot is rippled.
Also specific Italian humour is subject to development of commedie dell´arte namely from vulgar almost pornographic, to witty humour and irony of Luigi Pirandello. The study is trying to prove that presence of humour in Italian comedy and even in drama in not incidental, but creates an integral component of Italian tradition of theatrical texts.
Scholarship on the operas of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) has focused on one type of female character in the composer's work, the so-called "Puccini heroine." This female protagonist is said to be ...weak, fragile, and usually dies tragically as exemplified in characters like Mimi from La bohème (1896) and Madama Butterfly (1904). Yet the "Puccini heroine" does not fully encompass the range of female characters who clearly do not fit in this category, such as Turandot and Minnie from La fanciulla del West. The dominance of the "Puccini heroine" in musicology literature distorts our understanding of Puccini's operas and in turn our view of Puccini as a composer. Puccini's heroines are dynamic and multifaceted and often cannot be fully encapsulated by a single category. Rather than uphold a limiting and false typology, introduce a different method that accommodates the inclusion of all Puccini's heroines to analyze and understand them more fully. After studying plays and novels that were used as sources for the libretti, Puccini's correspondences, artistic movements of realism, naturalism, and verismo, and other socio-historical evidences such as periodicals and newspapers, three character types emerge: the Sentimental Heroine, the Femme Fatale, and the New Woman. These types are based on female typologies historically represented during Puccini's lifetime. The three types are not mutually exclusive; instead, they overlap one another, allowing for a character to encompass elements from more than one type. Another important aspect of this project is to show how music is used to characterize these three types. This analytical process will help revise the former understanding of Puccini as a composer of limited skills in creating female characters, who depicts stereotypical representations of women in the nineteenth century, and help modern singers and interpreters of Puccini's operas develop deeper perspectives of these heroines.
