Description
Book Synopsis
This book explores the notion that the emergent language of contemporary theatre, and more generally of modern culture, has links to much earlier forms of storytelling and an ancient worldview.
This volume looks at our diverse and amalgamative theatrical inheritance and discusses various practitioners and companies whose work reflects and recapitulates ideas, approaches, and structures original to theatre's ritual roots. Drawing together a range of topics and examples from the early Middle Ages to the modern day, Chadwick focuses on a theatrical language which includes an emphasis on the psychosomatic, the non-linear, the symbolic, the liminal, the collective, and the sacred.
This interdisciplinary work draws on approaches from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, historical and cognitive phenomenology, and neuroscience, making the case for the significance of historically responsive modes in theatre practice and more widely in our society and culture.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART ONE: Looking Back: Tracing Theatre’s Roots
Chapter 1. Reaching for the Unknowable: the Human need for Ritual
Chapter 2. A Flexible Superstructure: Macrocosm/Microcosm and the Medieval Worldview
Chapter 3. The Power of Archetype: Universal-General and Historical-Specific
Chapter 4. Time and Space: Hierophany and Imaginative Flexibility
PART TWO: Moving Forward: New Historically-Responsive Methods
Chapter 5. The Sacred Body-as-Text: from Medieval to Avant-Garde
Chapter 6. Seeking Immersion, Finding Connection: the Contemporary Theatre
Chapter 7. Theatre in Times of Crisis: the Power of Ancient Forms in Collective Processing
Bibliography
Index
