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    1:1 : (manifestoes for a theatre of matter) : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of Masters in Design at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2005) Trubridge, Sam
    This thesis revisits the manifestos of Twentieth Century theatre makers in order to establish a manifesto for performance design in the Twenty-First Century. It proposes that a material theatre is necessary in order to re-sensitise its audience and counter the 'de-realisation' that has infected and desensitised popular notions of war and global trauma. At the beginning of this new century there are new crises to mirror those that Antonin Artaud, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski responded to in their own theatre and writings. With reference to the work of these artists this manifesto will construct an argument and rationale for 'The Theatre of Matter': a visual and spatial language for performance that affirms and implicates the material bodies of audience, performer, and space. By this design performance can become a complicit setting: the place of cruelty, ritual, realisation, and restoration that Helene Cixous calls "the place of crime and place of pardon" (Drain, 1995, p.340). Research through two realised productions of 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', reflection upon these productions, and conceptual drawings will make it possible to challenge and review the manifesto; thus setting it into motion within a practical framework.
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    Staging phantasmagoria : the uncanny play of live and mediatized performance : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of Masters in Design at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2006) Brettell, Andrew
    Multimedia designers working in the theatre often produce work that fails to recognize the fundamentally different spatiotemporal vocabularies of live performance and the moving image, and how they can be productively utilised to enhance theatre's inherent virtuality. This thesis argues that instead of mixing or hiding the differences between the virtual and the physical in theatre, performance design can 'play' with the two languages to produce an uncanny experience that re-establishes the strangeness of phantasmagoria' - technologies of vision that project ghostly doubles. In consumer culture, disembodied images screened by contemporary phantasmagoria such as television, cinema and the computer interface, habitually engage the spectator in a process of identification and disavowal. Integrating live performance and the mediatized image has the potential to change the spectator's response to these images. When the live performer is confronted with his or her mediatized double, the dissonance between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, animate and inanimate is marked by disconcerting logic' and 'doubt' rather than identification and disavowal. This doubt opens up ambiguities in the spectator's preconceptions about self-identity, and particularly the belief that the phantasmatic body image is simply an immaterial copy of the body. Instead, the relationship between the body and its image becomes indeterminate and reversible, actual and virtual. Embodied research was employed to develop this hypothesis, through three site-specific performance installations. Theatre Ghosts (September, 2006, Circa Theatre). Ghost Runner [November, 2006, Wellington), and Futuna (December, 2006, Chapel of Futuna), that tested the potential dissonance between the projected image and the performing body in order to provoke uncanny spatiotemporal experiences. These experiments, presented through conceptual drawings, still and moving images, are used as vehicles to consider how the ambiguous clash between live and mediated performance suggests new ways of extending the performing body, its phantasmatic double and spaces of inhabitation.