Doctoral Degrees (Drama)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Drama) by browse.metadata.advisor "Hofmeyr, J. H. S."

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    Contact improvisation as a foundational learning tool for contemporary performers : singular complexity
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2015-04) Prigge-Pienaar, Samantha; Kruger, M. S.; Hofmeyr, J. H. S.; Sellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept of Drama.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This artistic research dissertation employs the principles and practices of contact improvisation in a literary performative to describe and demonstrate this somatic form’s potential as a complex system of embodied knowing. For strategic and thematic purposes, chapters in this dissertation are referred to as Streams. The First Stream motivates the methodological approaches and emergent strategies employed in the researcher’s simultaneous practices of teaching, researching and writing about contact improvisation. The Second Stream is offered as an oral testimony of the researcher’s attempt to find practical solutions for the increasing complexity apparent in her work environment during the last two decades. It is written primarily as a first-person narrative with references by other somatic and contact improvisation practitioners embedded in the body of the narrative and presented as personal subconscious/collective unconscious interjections. The Third Stream uses a locally-emergent artistic research strategy termed Secondary Primacy to critically and creatively engage with existing literature. The observations of theorists and practitioners from the researcher’s own context (theatre and drama), as well as from a diversity of interrelated disciplines (including psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, quantum physics, pedagogy and visual art) are presented in an autonomous authorial voice employing the performative strategy of what if. This strategy serves to demonstrate the researcher’s experience of the link between personal subconscious and collective unconscious motivations for action and exposes the transdisciplinary ground upon which many of the ideas and observations voiced in other Streams, in particular about contact improvisation as a complex system of embodied knowing, are implicitly dependent. The Fourth Stream discusses contact improvisation as a complex system foregrounding the particular characteristics of nonlinearity, paradox, emergence and additional capacity introduced in the Second and Third Streams. The Fifth Stream demonstrates convergences and overlaps between contemporary theories about agency, embodiment and transformation as they may apply to educators in tertiary educational performing arts contexts. This discussion is interspersed with accounts of the researcher’s own attempts – through her performing arts educational practice - to understand agency and transformation as workable elements. The Sixth Stream is offered as a personal philosophy of action. The implicit values and strategies of the researcher that were exposed in previous Streams are here distilled and presented as affirmations and Actions motivating the sustained use, by the researcher within her localized educational context, of contact improvisation as a foundational somatic approach for performers. In keeping with the positioning of this dissertation as artistic research, the literary framing devices of a Foreword and Afterword are used to draw a reader’s attention to the practicebased nature of the subject under discussion.