Browsing by Subject "Performance"
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Item A rambling woman : confused and certain(2023-08) Constantine, Gabrielle; Lucas, Kristin, 1968-This paper is a self-review of work produced by Gabrielle Constantine from 2021 to 2023 at the University of Texas at Austin.Item Afro-Cuban movement(s) : performing autonomy in "updating" Havana(2016-05) Berry, Maya Janeen; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Hale, Charles R; Smith, Christen A; Moore, Robin D; Paredez, Deborah; Skurski, JulieThis dissertation is an ethnography of how Afro-Cubans are enacting coordinated movement toward more desirable futures as they face increased marginalization due to Cuba’s current political economic reforms. Yoruba Andabo —a group of dancers, percussionists, and singers— take center stage in this project, as a case study to examine the unexpected ways that Afro-Cubans are practicing collective agency, going against the logics of more conventional registers of black identity politics. I use La Articulación Regional Afrodescendiente de América Latína y el Caribe- Capítulo Cuba (ARAC), as an analytical counterpoint to represent a more conventional pursuit of sociopolitical gains by black identity politics in Cuba today. Of central interest is how the sacred figures within cultural politics, to gain greater sociopolitical and economic autonomy, and how gender operates within their political imaginaries, using a critical race, feminist and performance-oriented lens. The ethnography makes the case for different ways of performing black autonomy in Cuba correlating to particular metrics of politics drawn from collective memories of group struggle. These different forms of self-organization correspond to distinct spheres of influence and distinct limits on their collective reach and agency. Furthermore, the research demonstrates the utility of performance studies for furthering the understanding of social processes by making visible the political horizon of black identity politics in embodied motion. This analysis of black collective agency in the face of political economic marginalization speaks directly to the importance of local practices of self-determination as sources of knowledge production about the limits of cultural politics endorsed by the state, the sacred and gendered valences of black identity politics, and the impact of national development on black lives.Item Agent for change : catalyzing the subject in Adrian Piper’s Catalysis VII(2021-05-10) Madera, Arin Frances; Smith, Cherise, 1969-The subject of this thesis is American artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s 1971 performance Catalysis VII, one of eight performances in her Catalysis series conducted between 1970 to 1971 in various public and semipublic spaces in New York City. In Catalysis VII, Piper made plastic and nonfunctional alterations to her body and presence. She walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Before Cortés exhibition, chewing and blowing an unusually large amount of bubble gum and allowing it to adhere to her face and clothes. She traversed the city carrying a purse filled with ketchup and keys, a wallet, a comb, and other items, occasionally opening and digging through the bag. On public transportation, she rummaged through the purse for change and fetched a mirror to check her face. Inside a women’s restroom at Macy’s department store, she combed ketchup through her hair. Finally, she coated her hands with rubber cement and browsed a newspaper stand. In this thesis, I explore Piper’s use of the medium of performance and the ways in which she engaged her physical presence in meaning-making in her art. Through an analysis of the series and other works by Piper, I examine how Catalysis VII potentially functioned as an agent for change for the external subject, or the people in her shared social space, and the internal subject, or Piper herself.Item Akoben : performance, politics and foundational narratives of Blackness(2015-12) Soares, Maria Andrea dos Santos; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Gordon, Edmund; James, Joy; Jones, Omi Joni; Hale, CharlesThis work investigates Black performances and the performance of Blackness as expression of narratives centered in the fact of existing in this world while a Black being. The themes investigated in this study are ontology, performance, and politics of Blackness deployed by Black Brazilian artists in Rio de Janeiro. In March 2012, several Black artists mobilized to protest against the systematic exclusion of artists and cultural producers of African descent from Brazilian state-sponsored funding opportunities. The Akoben movement—a word that represents the Adinkra symbol meaning “War Horn”—has the goals of Akoben of: to demand transparency from the state in funding decisions, to assure that selection committees will represent Brazilian diversity, and to implement Affirmative Action policies in state-sponsored funding opportunities. Departing from the review of how cultural expressions and art forms associated with African descendants have been used, I will discuss how Akoben brings questions of cultural appropriation and of material and symbolic alienation as effects of racism to the forefront of public debate. I will also discuss the subject of state co-optation of Black activists and the withdrawal of leaders from the social movement to engage within the state or with political parties. In the process of engaging with the state, the Akoben mobilization creates grounds for a racial identity that these artists’ aesthetic creations and activist trajectories feed. Such aesthetic and political processes resist material and symbolic forms of racial subjugation while simultaneously creating a space for exchange and learning, for the establishment of professional networks, and for political action. However, the internal contradictions and limitations, the disputes generated from alignments of Black social movements and of individuals with state institution and political parties, constrain the possibilities of more radical projects of Black liberation either in political, in aesthetic or in ontological terms.Item Analysis of performance and reliability of offshore pile foundation systems based on hurricane loading(2011-05) Chen, Jiun-Yih; Gilbert, Robert B. (Robert Bruce), 1965-; Stokoe, II, Kenneth H.; Manuel, Lance; Bickel, J. Eric; Murff, James D.Jacket platforms are fixed base offshore structures used to produce oil and gas in relatively shallow waters worldwide. Their pile foundation systems seemed to perform better than what they were designed for during severe hurricanes. This observation has led to a common belief in the offshore oil and gas industry that foundation design is overly conservative. The objective of this research is to provide information to help improve the state of practice in designing and assessing jacket pile foundations to achieve a consistent level of performance and reliability. A platform database consisting of 31 structures was compiled and 13 foundation systems were analyzed using a simplified foundation collapse model, supplemented by a 3-D structural model. The predicted performance for most of the 13 platform foundations is consistent with their observed performance. These cases do not preclude potential conservatism in foundation design because only a small number of platform foundations were analyzed and only one of them actually failed. The potential failure mechanism of a foundation system is an important consideration for its performance in the post-hurricane assessment. Structural factors can be more important than geotechnical factors on foundation system capacity. Prominent structural factors include the presence of well conductors and jacket leg stubs, yield stress of piles and conductors, axial flexibility of piles, rigidity and strength of jackets, and robustness of foundation systems. These factors affect foundation system capacity in a synergistic manner. Sand layers play an important role in the performance of three platform foundations exhibiting the largest discrepancy between predicted and observed performance. Site-specific soil borings are not available in these cases. Higher spatial variability in pile capacity can be expected in alluvial or fluviatile geology with interbedded sands and clays. The uncertainties in base shear and overturning moment in the load are approximately the same and they are slightly higher than the uncertainty in the overturning capacity of a 3-pile foundation system. The uncertainty in the overturning capacity of this foundation system is higher than the uncertainty in shear capacity. These uncertainties affect the reliability of this foundation system.Item Analysis of the impact of phase arrangement on duration and performance of capital projects(2017-12-08) Park, Hyeon Yong; Caldas, Carlos H.; Mulva, Stephen Patrick; Leite, Fernanda L; Zhang, Zhanmin; Bickel, J. ErickIn today’s construction industry, projects continue to get larger and more complex than ever before. Meanwhile, project owners demand early completion of their projects, motivated by the desire to attain the first-mover advantage that heavily presses on the construction business. Within these circumstances, establishing project schedule that is reasonably certain to bring a project to completion on time or sooner requires a thorough understanding of how project schedule has been implemented. Phase arrangement used in this research is defined as the relative position and sequence of phases that encompass the project’s development life cycle, namely: planning, detailed engineering, procurement, construction, and startup. A thorough understanding of phase arrangement can supply the basis to create preliminary project schedule early in the planning phase. The primary goal of this research is to characterize and identify patterns of phase arrangements and to measure their impact on duration and performance outcomes. Based on the quantification analysis of project schedules with consideration of their influential project characteristics, phase arrangements of the project development life cycle were characterized. Eleven unique pairwise and fifteen triple–wise patterns of phase arrangement that were employed by capital projects were identified and documented in this dissertation. Due to small sample size, comparisons of all patterns could not be conducted. Nonetheless, several statistically significant findings were observed specifically for projects that initiated early procurement involvement prior to planning, in terms of project duration and performance outcomes. This research contributed to the body of knowledge in two main areas. The first contribution is the characterization of phase arrangements to provide an analytic framework for analyzing project schedule at the phase level. The second contribution is that the impact analysis results of phase arrangements on duration and performance outcomes provide practitioners and researchers opportunities to acknowledge that phase arrangement and patterns of concurrency become an important consideration in planning and executing capital projects.Item Approaches to the performance of the Odyssey(2010-08) Tosa, Dygo Leo; Beck, Deborah; Palaima, Thomas G.This report examines different approaches to the performance of the Odyssey. The first approach focuses on the internal evidence of the Odyssey, looking at how the Homer’s poems define the singer as a type. The second approach analyzes a selection of sources from the classical period that attests to the performance of the Odyssey. The third approach uses material evidence as a means to reconstruct the music of performance. The internal evidence provides a consistent model for performance that can be correlated with external context. This model can then be used to show how the Odyssey makes use of its own performance. These approaches demonstrate that the material of the poem provides the most compelling account of performance of the Odyssey. The Odyssey presents a consistent model of performance that describes the performer, the manner of performance, and makes use of performance in its own poetry.Item Are there any machos in the house? : contemporary manifestations of machismo(2017-05) Aragón García, Seiri Janett; Gonzalez, Rachel Valentina; Lopez, Belem GThis research explores the transnational existence of machismo and its continuous presence among Mexican and Mexican American men as transnational ideologies and attitudes from Mexico into the United States. This mixed methods approach, comprised of in-depth interviews, virtual ethnographic analysis, and textual analysis. These approaches to machismo is dedicated to better understand the social performances of Mexican origin, cis-gendered men living in the United States and Mexico, who find their masculinities bridged through social media, as nationalistic pride, taking pride in their Mexican origin/ heritage risen out of narco culture specifically. These three different interviews are presented in holistic sections titled, Señoras de Las Lomas and Machismo, Traditional ideologies of Mexican undocumented millennial, and The Complexity of Social Media and the Narco Lifestyle. The compilation of these case studies presented, aims to demonstrate how machista ideologies and attitudes continue to persist in contemporary U.S. and Mexican society. This research aims to provide insight on how traits are learned and adopted, (public and private) and how they become manifested in online spaces (not exclusively). Readers will be able to reflect about the oversaturation of machista ideologies, and gendered perspectives on machista ideologies and how these “traditions” have been embedded in Mexican culture, become transnational, circulated, re-circulated, inculcated, and how they persist, even subtly in quotidian life in the 21st century.Item Artists are entrepreneurs : a four-year case study examining the academic expectations, entrepreneurial attitudes, and career aspirations of first-year performing arts majors(2018-07-30) Blackshire, Richard Scott; Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul; Canning, Charlotte; Rossen, Rebecca; Somers, Patricia; Holtschneider, DennisDeciding to pursue a career in professional theatre is an exciting venture for undergraduate students in higher education arts programs. Performing arts training is emotionally challenging—rigorous academics are not secondary to intense creative and artistic physical labor. A four-year, four-cohort case study situated in performance studies seeks the essence of first-year performing arts students’ entrepreneurial attitudes. Annual questionnaires query their academic expectations and career aspirations, and gauge their readiness and willingness for entrepreneurship engagement. Embedded case study analysis of qualitative and quantitative data collected in fall 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017, reveal diverse student thinking. Results compel the need for an arts-business practice incorporating artists’ ideologies for flexible real-world application. Interdisciplinary literature—phenomenology, student engagement, and entrepreneurship, alongside extant data on professional artists from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project—activate exploring which skills and competencies students believe support creative careers. Students’ statements weave passionate energy among established theory and humanize the literature. Methodology design utilizes phenomenology to guide the survey-questionnaire development and deployment. Embedded case study analysis constructs a foundation for a consilience framework focused solely on students’ relationships to entrepreneurship. Analyses create new knowledge drawing a line between art-makers and their creative outputs. Discussions on findings—students’ base needs for artistry and networking, entrepreneurial ambivalence, and professional career intuitiveness—follow. Findings suggest how higher education arts training programs might support student artists develop enduring entrepreneurial identities based on needs, values, and beliefs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, tenets of collective social entrepreneurship and practices from the feminist theatre movement, inspire radical pedagogy. Pedagogical interventions incorporate powerful learning experiences (PLEs) to invigorate current coursework and shape new curricula that engage students to create and adopt entrepreneurial practices and behaviors. Findings hold significance for arts programs working to align students’ thinking with teaching entrepreneurship according to shifting trends in creative job markets. Outcomes empower artists to acknowledge entrepreneurial uniqueness as a support mechanism for art making. Immediate recommendations span theoretical deliberations and practical classroom ideas, from shifts in programmatic thought to artist-focused entrepreneurship seminars. Future research recommendations above all stress separating artists from the institutional foci of arts entrepreneurshipItem Automatic static analysis of software performance(2016-05) Olivo, Oswaldo Luis; Lin, Yun Calvin; Dillig, Isil; Dillig, Thomas; Lahiri, Shuvendu; Shmatikov, VitalyPerformance is a critical component of software quality. Software performance can have drastic repercussions on an application, frustrating its users, breaking the functionality of its components, or even rendering it defenseless against hackers. Unfortunately, unlike in the program verification domain, robust analysis techniques for software performance are almost non-existent. In this thesis we formalize important classes of performance-related bugs and security vulnerabilities, and implement novel static analysis techniques for automatically detecting them in widely used open-source applications. Our tools are able to uncover 92 performance bugs and 47 security vulnerabilities, while analyzing hundreds of thousands of lines of code and reporting a modest amount of false positives. Our work opens a new avenue for research: the development of rigorous automatic analyses for effective software performance understanding, inspired by traditional research in functional verification.Item Becoming I’x : Maya ontological decolonization and the turn to theater in postwar Guatemala(2017-05) Thelen, Czarina Faith; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Vargas, Joao H.; Sturm, Circe; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L; Speed, Shannon; TallBear, KimThis dissertation examines theater’s capacity to communicate Maya ontologies and nurture cultural-political imaginaries among rural Mayas engaged in decolonization politics. In response to the highly exclusionary Guatemalan state and the 1980s genocide of Mayas, and coinciding with continent-wide Indigenous protests against quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas in 1992, a vibrant Maya Kaqchikel movement emerged in Sololá, Guatemala. This rural grassroots movement of farmers and schoolteachers, which I call Tejido Social (Social Fabric), demonstrated an enormous capacity for mobilization around a range of issues including recovering ancestral land, expelling a military base, building a bilingual Kaqchikel community school, and revitalizing the practice of Maya customary law and governance. Beginning in 1999, a local political party sought to incorporate the Tejido Social movement, at times using tactics of intimidation and violence. In 2000, children of Tejido Social leaders, curious about aspects of Maya culture and ontology that had been repressed by genocide and colonization, took another approach. Turning away from broad grassroots organizing through village networks, they express a politics of reivindicación (cultural dignification and vindication) through theater. Through an ethnography of rehearsals, theater productions, and audience responses to the theater group Sotz’il, I analyze what Sotz’il’s theater performances do for performers and audiences. Extending Hirschkind’s concept of “ethical soundscapes,” I contend that Sotz’il shapes Maya worlds through theater. This research finds that Sotz’il’s theater performances evoke sensory memories of Maya ontology and lifeways. I contend that by awakening an emotional connection to everyday rural Maya experience, Sotz’il strengthens audiences’ ethicopolitical commitment to Maya reivindicación. Sotz’il’s project, however, stands in tension with the maintenance of the village networks that are central to Indigenous communities’ mobilizing power, leaving open questions about its future amidst repression. By exploring this tension I seek to rethink subaltern politics more generally, beyond social movements as a political formation, to conceptualize processes through which subaltern peoples internalize and emotionally attach to – and then mobilize around – identity-based causes and values.Item The body rockers : New Orleans "Sissy” Bounce and the politics of displacement(2013-12) Chapman, Alix Andrew; Smith, Christen A., 1977-; Costa-Vargas, Joao H.; Gordon, Edmund T.; Jones, Omi Joni L.; Gill, Lyndon; Allen, Jafari S.This dissertation in an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which black cultural performance is mobilized to produce and maintain social relationships and space in times of economic and sociocultural displacement. New Orleans Bounce music is a dynamic cultural performance of locality and blackness that prompts conflicting debates about the meaning of identity, place, and cultural heritage in “post-Katrina” New Orleans. Focusing on “Sissy” Bounce, an emergent subgenre defined by sexuality and gender, I investigate its significance as an expression of blackness marked by deviance within the socio-historical context of "post-Katrina" New Orleans. Specifically, the project frames “Sissy” Bounce as a cultural medium for the production of black space in a time of crisis, and argues that Bounce's symbolic form frames "queerness" as a tool of survival for young black people facing the politics of displacement, disorientation, and disaster. The quick rise of Bounce to national popularity has made it representational of the deviant black dancing body within the national imagination. Consequently, this dissertation also asks how these dances and representations effect meanings of blackness at home and throughout the nation? What does the resonance of “Sissy” Bounce in New Orleans and among its diaspora tell us about the political significance of queerness and displacement as nodal points of the contemporary black experience in the United States? The “Sissy” Bounce music scene’s ubiquity points to the resilience of black people living on the margins of family, community, and nation.Item Bridging theatre and visual art : the role of an applied theatre practitioner in a fine art museum(2011-05) Genshaft, Lindsay Michelle; Alrutz, Megan; Dawson, Kathryn; Garner, JenniferThis thesis document details the theoretical and practical implications of using theatrical techniques and drama-based instruction in the visual art museum setting. Presented are four diverse museum theatre programs created and implemented at The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. These programs support the argument that drama-based instruction and theatrical techniques can help deepen and/or complicate the notion of visitor engagement in a visual art museum. The theoretical underpinnings of museum theatre are investigated by examining elements of applied theatre and museum learning and the progressive education theory which shapes their practice. The belief is put forth that creative participation in museum education is essential for personal and critical connection with visual art. Theatre is a dynamic and powerful tool to support this creative participation. Findings include recommendations for utilizing museum theatre programming implemented by an applied theatre practitioner as it promotes the use of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, engages the senses, and stimulates meaningful dialogue.Item Bringing lIfe to life : cultivating authenticity, freedom, and holistic integration in the art and practice of acting(2013-05) Kimball, Elizabeth Lee; Abraham, Lee (Lee E.)This MFA thesis document explores the development of my acting craft and artistic development over a three-year period of intensive graduate training. The document includes an in-depth discussion of the preparation, rehearsal, and performance process of my culminating graduate production – Suzan Zeder’s The Edge of Peace – as it relates to my approaches to acting. The document also includes a discussion of various other areas of my acting process, including the importance of bringing my authentic self to every role, letting go of results, and the integration of body, voice, heart, and mind as well as the productions and experiences in my graduate work that proved essential to the development of these practices.Item Bus network redesigns in medium-sized cities : an equity evaluation on supermarket accessibility(2021-07-30) McGee, Jordan Kathleen; Karner, Alex; Wegmann, JakeTransit agencies across the country are redesigning their bus network for the first time in several decades in order to increase ridership and the attractiveness of the system. The reallocation of resources and resulting service cuts raise equity concerns. This report calculates and evaluates equity-focused performance measurements related to supermarket accessibility before and after the bus network redesigns in the medium-sized cities of Austin, Columbus and Indianapolis. The performance measures related to grocery store accessibility significantly improved under Columbus’ bus network redesign and appeared equitable. The measures for Indianapolis largely worsened, but people of color equitably fared better than white residents. Austin’s bus network redesign had mixed performance and equity results for grocery store accessibility. On average, the redesigns of the three bus networks did not raise significant equity concerns for grocery store accessibility.Item Cafeteria Formosa(2022-05-09) Chen, Hsiao-Wei, M.F.A.; Barreto, Raquel; Dawson, Kathryn M.; Buchanan, Jason B.Taiwan, Formosa, has struggled with its identity in the past hundreds of years with multiple foreign sovereignties’ rule. This thesis project develops a conceptual framework that explores the writer’s identity as a Taiwanese and expands the research into an immersive performance with creative collaborators and audience members. It is a site-specific performance using reflective practitioner methods that document how both audience members and performers explore the nuances, complexities, and delights in an engaging, all-you-can eat food cart stop called Cafeteria Formosa.Item The captain's verses(2004-05-22) Bravo, Enrique Manuel; Abraham, Lee (Lee E.)This project incorporates selected poems from Pablo Neruda's The Captain's Verses along with different types of movement and music. All three are combined to form one unique theatrical experience. The universality of love serves as the overriding theme and palate for each of these poems.Item Choreographing borderlands : Chicanas/os, dance, and the performance of identities(2015-12) Salinas, Roén René; Rossen, Rebecca; Canning, Charlotte; Gutiérrez, Laura; Jones, Joni L.; Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul“Choreographing Borderlands: Chicanas/os, Dance, and the Performance of Identities” examines the unexplored work of barrio-based dancemakers who choreograph and rehearse the diverse political, cultural and emotional contours of Chicana/o life, thought, and borderlands worldviews. As creative concert dance practices that figuratively and literally per/form at the margins, the borders of both American and Mexican national cultures, I argue Chicana/o concert dance operates as an embodied site to house memory, acts as an important archive for Chicana/o history, structures space to interrogate culture, and in the process asserts a new aesthetics (repertoire) for Chicana/o dance and American concert dance more broadly. My project departs from the 1960-70s Chicano Arts Movement and situates today’s contemporary works within the cultural and artistic legacies produced through decades of innovation and reinvention. My dissertation brings the fields of dance, performance, and Mexican-American/Chicana/o Studies into conversation to consider the Chicana/o dance body as a site for identity production and contributes to larger conversations about race, class, gender and ethnicity and how they are per/formed through body and movement. The choreographies I analyze are Danza Floricanto/USA’s Alma Llanera: Spirit of the Plains (2009, 2014), Guadalupe Dance Company’s Historias y Recuerdos (2010), Latina Dance Project’s Coyolxauhqui ReMembers (2009), and the Aztlan Dance Company’s Loterialandia (2013). These case studies illustrate how dance chronicles Chicana/o barrio history, claims agency to remake tradition, and opens space to articulate contemporary Chicana/o aesthetics in movement culture. Each chapter is arranged thematically around recurring Chicana/o tropes and aesthetics practices. By locating Chicana/o choreographers and their respective companies in space, place, and time, I demonstrate how dancemakers actively participate in giving voice, body, and visibility to Chicana/o subjectivity through dance and contribute to larger genealogies and trajectories of Chicana/o cultural production and performance.Item Come, let's wrestle : language and the struggle for authority in online Persian social networking sites(2016-05) Afrasiabi, Dena; Atwoord, Blake Robert, 1983-; Brustad, Kristen; Keating, Elizabeth; Urrieta, Luis; Aghaie, KamranThis dissertation builds on prior scholarship in linguistic anthropological studies of performance to examine transnational spaces in online social networks where members of the Iranian diaspora use emerging technologies to interact with one another in ways that highlight the tensions between them. The focal point of this project will be the Facebook page Iranian Vines, which features short (5-15 second long) comedic videos that address issues unique to the experiences of Iranians living in diaspora. While many second-generation Iranians use online spaces to linguistically construct a hybridized identity, first-generation Iranians use these same spaces to evaluate the authenticity of these constructed identities by policing the language used by performers and deciding on the linguistic legitimacy of their performances. I argue that the performative nature of the Iranian Vines page creates a space for first-generation Iranians to respond to global sociolinguistic hierarchies that value English over Persian by acting as gatekeepers of Iranian authenticity through linguistic prescriptivism. Second-generation Iranians, on the other hand, use performance to decontextualize (and thus make visible) the moments of difference that define their particular vantage point and to acquire sociolinguistic capital through humor. These performers use “identity-switching,” a practice in which they juxtapose performances of non-Iranian and Iranian identity for comedic effect to challenge sociolinguistic hierarchies within the Iranian community that value monolingualism or parallel bilingualism. A core focus of this dissertation will be the ways that emerging technologies shape power relations between members of this community by making visible the processes by which members of ethnolinguistic communities negotiate the relationship between identity and language.Item Communicative elements of fluid collective organizing(2019-05) Smith, William Rothel, III; Treem, Jeffrey W.; Barbour, Joshua; Jarvis, Sharon; Love, BradOrganizational communication research has traditionally focused on the organizing processes of firmly structured conventional organizations, such as workplaces, schools, and nonprofits. However, a growing line of research is beginning to investigate more fluid, ad-hoc, ephemeral, spontaneous, and loosely structured social collectives. This dissertation draws upon interview, observational, photographic, and social media data collected over a four-year time frame to investigate how a community of bicycle motocross (BMX) riders in the Southern United States communicate and organize to build and maintain public bicycle dirt jumps, despite lacking many of the elements commonly associated with formal organizing. The dissertation explores three key areas: (1) how communication gives rise to forms of authority in this fluid social collective, (2) how the materiality of the natural environment intersects with the group’s organizing, and (3) how intermingling social, material, and performative practices negotiate the tensions inherent to this organizational setting. Findings of the first study reveal that specific communicative interactions in the form of repetitive stories and assertives scale up to form a paradoxical “authoritative text” (Kuhn, 2008) that upholds a group ethos of contribution, but fails to specify the nature of how to carry out that contribution. The paradoxical nature of this authoritative text perpetuates conflict within the space. Study two conceptualizes environmental materiality as pure natural or (re)natural—depending upon the degree of alteration at human hands—and explains how a combination of these forms of nature contribute to the group’s organizationality. Finally, study three develops a model showing how the tensions of organic/civic, inclusion/consensus, and contributing/loafing are negotiated through communicative practices to sustain a version of the space that is both material and vision flexible. Theoretical contributions of this dissertation include extending our understanding of how authoritative texts emerge outside of formal organizing, providing a stronger analytical focus on the material, and explicating the importance of the space of practice in the tensions inherent to fluid organizing. The final section provides suggestions for how organic community recreation sites might be supported through official organizations, without bureaucratic or institutional influence undermining the core characteristics of the community.