UC Irvine

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Devising Dance Theatre

By

Robyn C. O’Dell

Master of Fine Arts in Dance

University of California, Irvine, 2019

Dr. Lisa Naugle, Chair

This research explores devised theatre approaches in efforts to teach and enhance the skills for contemporary modern dance students to participate in a collaborative, cross disciplinary style of performance making. Devised theatre is a contemporary theatre approach which derived from a desire to create collaboratively designed theatre and to challenge the hierarchal western theatre traditions. Collaborative approaches to theatre and dance can be traced throughout the twentieth century, with roots to post-modern dance and feminist collective theatre movements.

The training of many contemporary modern dance students is often focused on the traditional solo artists paradigm, with little emphasis on creative collaboration, although many professional contemporary choreographers do create work within a collaborative construct. As theatre, dance, and the visual arts continue to traverse and intersect with each other, practitioners grow increasingly more interested in working in a collaborative, cross disciplinary process.

Investigating my own choreographic interests to create dance theatre works, I used devised theatre methods in my process to help develop skills necessary for this style of performance. Through a four-month rehearsal process, six undergraduate dance students, one university staff member, and I embarked on a collaborative creative process to create an original devised dance theatre work, based on the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This process-based research resulted in a performance at the Experimental Performance Laboratory Theater at the University of California, Irvine in April of 2019.