Short description:

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.

Long description:

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:

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List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

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

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