Sacred Theatre

Description

The notion of the sacred has long informed the work of British dramatists like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Ralph Yarrow’s Sacred Theatre is the first book to examine the role of the sacred in the practice, process, and performance of drama. While leaving enough room for the personal and experiential, Yarrow draws on concepts from sociology, anthropology, and critical theory as well as analytical readings of plays and performance events to examine how theater interacts with the otherworldly. This volume is essential reading for anyone intrigued by the intersection of drama and consciousness.

 

“This book takes on the enormous task of identifying not only the sacred in theatre but also questions ideas of sacred across the spectrum. It offers a great deal of material for discussion within performance and theatre theory courses.”—Jade Rosina McCutcheon, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis

 

 

 

 

Sujets

• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Theatre
• Live Art
• Performance art
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841502144
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sacred Theatre
Devised Edited by Ralph Yarrow
Written by Franc Chamberlain, William S. Haney II, Carl Lavery, Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow
Sacred Theatre
Devised Edited by Ralph Yarrow
Written by Franc Chamberlain, William S. Haney II, Carl Lavery, Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow
First Published in the UK in 2007 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First published in the USA in 2007 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-153-6/EISBN 978-1-84150-214-4
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Note
Preface
Part 1: Basic Questions
Chapter 1: What Is the Sacred?
(i) Overture
(ii) Writing the Sacred
(iii) Where to Begin with Sacred Theatre?
(iv) Performance and Knowing
Chapter 2: Terminologies and Categorizations of the Sacred
(i) Modern Views of the Sacred
(ii) Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Sacred
(iii) Ritual
(iv) The Sacred, Drama, Ritual and the Ancient Mystery Religions
(v) Space
(vi) Time
(vii) Performance Factors
(viii) Aesthetics
(ix) The Absurd
Part 2: Text and Performance
Chapter 3: The Phenomenology of Nonidentity: Stoppard s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
(i) Introduction
(ii) Liminality and Subjectivity in Theatrical Space
(iii) Intersubjectivity in Stoppard s Theatre
(iv) Rosencrantz: A Void in Thought
(v) Rosencrantz: Social Mirrors and Stage Mirrors
(vi) Conclusion
Chapter 4: Between the Opposites: Gender Games
4.1 Caryl Churchill: Cloud Nine
(i) Introduction
(ii) Cloud Nine: Player/Role
(iii) Identity and Gender
(iv) Mindfulness
(v) Are We Really Free?
4.2 M. Butterfly: The Phenomenology of Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence
(i) Introduction
(ii) Concept of Self vs. Pure Consciousness
(iii) Theatrical Gaps
(iv) Identity: Machine or Witness
(v) The Actor s Double Entry
(vi) Changelessness and Presence
(vii) False Reversals
(viii) Theatre and Metanarrative
Chapter 5: Ionesco
5.1 Rhinoceros
(i) Riding on the Back of Rhinos
5.2 The Chairs
(i) The Play s the Thing
(ii) Ionesco s Working Methods
(iii) The Chairs
Chapter 6: Pinter
6.1 The Birthday Party
6.2 Ashes to Ashes
(i) Pinter s Working Methods
(ii) Ashes to Ashes
Chapter 7: Genet
7.1 Genet s Sacred Theatre: Practice and Politics
(i) Introduction
(ii) Bataille and the A/theological Sacred
(iii) Genet and A/theology
(iv) Genet s Theory of Sacred Theatre
(v) Sacred Politics/Sacred Theatre
(vi) Sacred Politics in the Trilogy
(vii) Conclusion
7.2 Deconstructive Acting: Genet, Beckett, the Absurd
(i) Genet
(ii) Beckett
Part 3: Processes and Directions
Chapter 8: Processes
(i) Transitional Moments
(ii) Absurd Leap
(iii) Actor-training
(iv) Physiologies
(v) Desiring the Other
Chapter 9: Places, Spaces and Generative Directions; A Symposium
(i) Liminal or Liminoid? Turner and Grotowski
(ii) With Rena Mirecka (1)
(iii) Meeting Gardzienice
(iv) Nicol s N ez and the Taller Investigaci n Teatral (1)
(v) With Rena Mirecka (2): Sardinia
(vi) Nicol s N ez and the Taller Investigaci n Teatral (2): Cura de Espantos
(vii) The Dog s Moments
(viii) Performance and Sacred Space: A Polemic
(ix) Theatre and the Wound
(x) Facing Death
(xi) One Rock
(xii) Wondering
(xiii) Full Stops to Full Stocks
(xiv) Coda
Bibliography
The Authors
Index
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce material published previously.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing for three chapters from William Haney s book Postmodern Theatre and the Void of Conceptions .
The editor of Consciousness, Literature and the Arts for the essay on Genet s Sacred Theatre: Practice and Politics by Carl Lavery and Ralph Yarrow.
John Fox, Artistic Director of Welfare State International, for his two contributions in Chapter 9 , which are published on his website, www.deadgoodguides.com .
N OTE
Where no author is specified in the text, these sections have been compiled by Ralph Yarrow, usually as a result of discussion with one or more of the other authors and sometimes with direct incorporation of text by them.
P REFACE
This book was always conceived as a collaboration, because it does not set out to present a single or monolithic perspective. There are an unlimited number of ways to approach sacred theatre and experience. You cannot schematize a felt sense of the infinite in the language and categories of the finite. Initially, there were to be three contributors; this has grown to five, and as this has occurred, both the process and the outcome have built on the initial model in developing the dialogic interweaving of voices and the juxtaposition of different kinds of approach. The addition of the two contributors to come on board last - Franc Chamberlain and Carl Lavery - has allowed more perspectives to emerge and has significantly contributed to the extension of the plural or heteroglossic model.
Part 1 asks what the sacred might be with reference to theatre and performance as practice, process and production, and how it may be encountered: so while it attempts to analyse key structural features of the kinds of experience we call sacred, and to suggest some of their vital functions, it also gives space to the personal and experiential. Part 2 deals with ways in which these experiences may be generated in performance by text and by the spectrum of modes of production, reception and effect which text-as-performance incites or stimulates; it consists of a number of chapters which are closer to the conventional critical essay, though the contributions are intended to reflect back upon and illuminate each other. The third and final part examines the nature of some of the key processes by which such experiences may be delivered or accessed for performers and participants, with reference to the contexts in which they arise; it concludes with an exchange of views about issues which the writing of the book has raised, which is intended to suggest some directions for further work. What this means is that the parts themselves work rather differently; so there is no need for the reader to feel that they have to be read either in their entirety, or in the order in which they appear in the book. As Yarrow wrote about the first collaborative work he compiled (a handbook of material about or in response to the French New Novel), play is encouraged in this space .
It s also the case that the argument is not only linear. Topics are taken up by different writers in different ways, and the intention is to produce a process of reflection and refraction, to allow the reader to approach issues from different angles and to accumulate multi-layered and multi-perspectival understanding, rather than to lay out a single track. The writers themselves have experienced the sacred in different ways, conceptualized it according to different criteria and cultural or theoretical preferences, and write about it in different kinds of voice and tone. If that is a mess from the point of view of linear rationality, that is not entirely inappropriate, because the sacred in our understanding is precisely what escapes that kind of tramlining. And they represent different kinds of lived experience. Malekin and Haney are practitioners and explorers of consciousness in refined and subtle modes, who apply to the analysis of theatre in performance an unusual combination of precision and intuitive insight about modes of cognition at the edge of experienceability as interpreted by neo-Platonic and Vedic thought, balanced with recent theoretical models. Chamberlain and Yarrow are performance-makers, improvisers and speculators upon their experience whose approach is often more hazardous and whose language is more imagistic and evocative, and whose understandings are checked out against a continuous and innovative practice of theatre methodologies. Lavery is a restless thinker and explorer of performance dynamics whose acute reading of contemporary theory challenges all forms of practice and the domains in which they operate, with a resolute focus on the politics of personal choice. All of them have written about, performed in, translated and adapted, directed and delighted in theatre and performance.
The book aims to:
argue that the sacred, as experience, mode of being and perception, is central to theatre practice, which thereby locates a radical refiguring of engagement with the world
signal that an understanding of the sacred in this sense is a vital part of models of performance theory and practice, and to outline its contributions to these fields
map sacred praxis across dramatic texts and their effects, actor training and directing method, audience reception
investigate the implications of the sacred as here identified in and as theatre for ethical and political life
rescue the term sacred from monotheological and prescriptive use
We want to be clear about this - the notion of the sacred discussed in this book has nothing in common with theological or religious notions of the sacred, which, with the exception of marginalized mystic traditions within them, generally try to positivise the sacred by making it knowable, that is to say, reducible to a set of precepts or commandments. Where theologically based ideas of the sacred all too often result in aggressive forms of religious and political fundamentalism - and we all living through the dange