Historically Responsive Storytelling

How Contemporary Western Theatre is Rediscovering its Roots
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-0-367-54717-2
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 649 g

Reihe: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

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.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chadwick, Eleanor

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Eleanor Chadwick is a researcher and theatre maker currently working with Watershed Pervasive Media Studio and University of Bristol on a MyWorld Fellowship. She is also Artistic Director of Sleight of Hand theatre company, and a postdoctoral associate in Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Warwick, UK.