Faculty of Graduate Studies

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The author has granted a nonexclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell theses worldwide, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats. AVIS: L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou autres formats.

Collaboration can be temporal. This presentation gathers pieces of Isadora Duncan’s ideas on dance education as expressed in her own voice through primary source material, the works of her students, and questionnaire responses gathered from current Duncan based practitioners, and examines them alongside the educational philosophies of John Dewey. The tone of Duncan’s passionate remarks on dance and the education of children can seem somewhat romantic or pontifications – but the word pontificate comes from the Latin roots of pons (bridge) and facere (to do, to make) eliciting an arc towards action. 
John Dewey notes, “ … the principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after.” (Experience and Education p.35) Like Duncan’s desire to look back to the Greeks and forward to her vision of the dancer of the future, we as dance educators may find ourselves at impasses between old and new – between the dance icons and histories we admire and the desire to find contemporary relevance rather than harbour them as nostalgic references.
In addition to connecting Duncan and Dewey’s work, this presentation discusses current initiatives in the field of Duncan based movement education and speculates the ways in which Duncan’s philosophies could further extend towards innovation in the field of dance education.  More broadly it aims to bring forward a theoretical framework for connecting past discourses in dance and education as a means of creating space for and informing contemporary approaches to teaching and learning. As dance educators we embody our past training, how can we collaborate with the mosaic of our own histories to create rich educational opportunities for our students?

In 2012, Toronto based contemporary dance company, Dancemakers, presented The Adaptation Project - a new choreography that took American choreographer and filmmaker, Mitchell Rose’s 1974 choreography Following Station Identification, as a starting point for creation. Examining The Adaptation Project as a case study, this research explores fidelity analysis between the adaptation and the adapted text, and asks what is the function of adaptation in contemporary choreography? Through connecting Dance and Adaptation Studies with theories concerning time, and affect, The Adaptation Project extends beyond Trent’s analogy of a cover song, to reveal changes in cultural contexts, approaches and attitudes towards choreography, and the shifting shape of the Toronto contemporary dance community. In addition, The Adaptation Project’s evocation of Dancemakers’ formative years acts as a performative utterance revealing the identity and character of Dancemakers as an organization and cultural institution.

How do we enfold the excess we inherit from previous generations? If affect, as Sarah Ahmed proposes, sticks to objects, than how do we handle the remnants of what has come before? In this research paper I explore the Barrie Antiques Centre as a cultural site to investigate nostalgia as affect. Mobilizing Ahmed, it explores affect as not just a trajectory towards the end goal of happiness, but as a double back path – a mixed state of pleasure and melancholic longing.  Using the ideas put forward by Marusya Bociurkiw and Lawrence Grossberg, this research explores how the perceived value of objects are mediated in relation to cultural identity – given that many antiques were former products of pop culture.  Combined with Ahmed, these concepts may explain how a collective cultural memory is perpetuated through the items we keep and assign value.  Given the exploratory nature of the site, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks’ work on the texture will be addressed to understand what is expressed by what we have access to touch. Finally, this paper speculates on the ways in which artist’s evoke nostalgia, consciously or not, in their means of production through ‘upcycling’, repurposing, and in the vein of more performative mediums - adaptation.  If, as Simon O’Sullivan notes, art is a bundle of affects and it matters how an art object is mobilized, what is in play when art evokes nostalgic affects? What are the affects of projecting forward into and with our pasts?

What if instead of considering choreography solely as a function of creative exploration, we considered its function as fertile ground for identifying creative exploits? This paper explores embodied representations of networks as a training discipline and pedagogical tool to better identify hidden aspects of network protocols to find loopholes, gaps or “exploits” to enact change or facilitate collective agency. In The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker note “The non-human quality of networks is precisely what makes them so difficult to grasp.”  While Mark B.N Hansen suggests, “[…] the digital citizen acquires facility in networked communication by embodying a procedural logic […]”  This research expands on the chance based choreographic procedures of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and examples in popular films to illustrate possibilities for embodied exploration of network concepts, such as those used in internet coding. Further this paper speculates on the implications of such explorations to dance and computer science pedagogy. It makes a case for dance education as intrinsic to developing technological or systemic literacy, toward the development of the critical skills necessary to enact political change.  This approach of using choreography as a contingent participatory practice links to transferable skills in the technology industry and contributes to an embodied experience of network function – to see structures and possible exploits that aid in propelling art, science and society in alternative directions.

Throughout this term while exploring a self-directed version of Authentic Movement practice, I struggled to find an impulse to move. These sessions would result in fifteen minutes of stillness and mixed feelings of failure and disempowerment. In class however, with the presence of a witness, the opposite was true.  In Andre Lepecki’s ongoing research on stillness in dance, he has come to coin the term “still act” to name the potentiality of stillness as an action in it’s own right. Through practice based research I’m interested in exploring if a sense of empowerment can be found through a practice of active stillness in the presence of others. Is it possible to cultivate an impulse not to move? Can stillness be an act of political agency when performed in public spaces? This research will be comprised of a series of physical explorations of stillness in public places of varying durations over a one-week period with corresponding field notes recorded after each session. This paper will also draw on examples of active stillness in performance including Improv Everywhere’s Frozen Grand Central and Marina Abramović’s work The Artist is Present. These case studies will help illuminate connections between a “still act” and art intervention as well as presence in performance. The culmination of this initial investigation will help guide the framework and design for an upcoming performance series in Barrie ON, The Solidarity Project (working title), which performs the questions, what would it mean to physically stand up for what you believe in?

This thesis illustrates the narrative of the Greek political refugees of Tashkent and seeks to recognize their Greek and Soviet identity. By examining the public and private spaces of Greek political refugees in Soviet Tashkent between 1949-1974, the thesis identifies the beliefs, symbols and practices, which reveal the hybridity of Greek-Soviet identity.  Research and its findings are based on oral histories and Greek-language newspapers published during the period as well as on memoirs of Greeks who lived in Tashkent. This will aid our understanding of the collective memory and homemaking narrative of the Greek experience in Soviet Tashkent. The collective narrative of Greeks of Tashkent emerges as a very positive and idealized one. Greeks legitimized their settlement in Tashkent by showing how they defended Soviet ideology and how they contributed to and developed Soviet society. The homemaking narrative allowed Greeks to belong to the imagined Greek Soviet Community, the imagined Soviet community and the imagined Greek community.

The Brotherhood Pontion – Panagia Soumela (BPT), a cultural association, was established in 1963 in Toronto to cater to the needs of Greek Pontians. This organization came under the auspices of the PanPontian Federation of U.S.A. and Canada in 1980. To understand an ethnic organization, it is necessary to understand the group of people it represents including their cultural practices and traditions that form their identity. By examining the history of Pontian people and the organization of the Brotherhood Pontion Toronto, Greek Pontian identity can be understood. The identity of Greek Pontians specifically draws on their unique history as being a part of the Greek diaspora in Anatolia and enduring persecution and ethnic cleansing by Ottoman authorities in the early 20th century. Oral histories were conducted to explore the history impact of the organization on the general Greek community in Toronto and the Pontian community.

Communications systems designed with application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology suffer from one very significant disadvantage-the integrated circuits do not possess the ability of programmability. However, Software Defined Radio's (SDR's) integrated with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) provide an opportunity to update the communication system on nanosatellites (which are physically difficult to access) due to their capability of performing signal processing in software. SDR signal processing is performed in software on reprogrammable elements such as FPGA's. Applying this technique to nanosatellite communications systems will optimize the operations of the hardware, and increase the flexibility of the system. In this research a transceiver algorithm for a nanosatellite software defined radio communications is designed. The developed design is capable of modulation of data to transmit information and demodulation of data to receive information. The transceiver algorithm also works at different baud rates. The design implementation was successfully tested with FPGA-based hardware to demonstrate feasibility of the transceiver design with a hardware platform suitable for SDR implementation.

The essay explores the relationship between market led or neoliberal economic growth and slum incidences and challenges. Although, the statistics are clearly indicative of the fact that economic growth measured by GDP is being accompanied by rapid slum proliferation, the essay wants to explore the why. The first section covers the modernization school of thought of the why, very prominent in UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance, World Bank and IMF literature on urban development. This is in order to offer a contrast to the alternative school of thought covered in the second section. Although the alternative school of thought is not explored through any particular theoretical lens, it is generally explorative of the political economy of slums. This is in reflection of how slums and urban poverty are becoming profitable assets in a market led economic growth model, and hence the need for the infinite proliferation and existence of both slums and poverty.