Sacred Theatre (Theatre and Consciousness) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841501530 ISBN 13: 9781841501536

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

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, DavisThe 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, DavisThe 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, DavisThe 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, DavisThe 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,

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Yarrow is professor of drama at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. He also works as a writer and director. He is the author of Consciousness, Literature and Theatre and Improvisation in Drama.

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Sacred Theatre

By Franc Chamberlain, William S. Haney II, Carl Lavery, Peter Malekin, Ralph Yarrow

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-153-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Note, 
Preface, 
Part 1: Basic Questions, 
Chapter 1: What Is the Sacred?, 
Chapter 2: Terminologies and Categorizations of the Sacred, 
Part 2: Text and Performance, 
Chapter 3: The Phenomenology of Nonidentity: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 
Chapter 4: Between the Opposites: Gender Games, 
Chapter 5: Ionesco, 
Chapter 6: Pinter, 
Chapter 7: Genet, 
Part 3: Processes and Directions, 
Chapter 8: Processes, 
Chapter 9: Places, Spaces and Generative Directions; A Symposium, 
Bibliography, 
The Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

What Is The Sacred?

This book could perhaps better be called 'the sacredness of théâtre' (le sacré du theatre) or 'the theatreing of the sacred': it is not about sacred drama (dramatic texts within or on the edges of a doctrinally prescribed definition of what the sacred is) or even about theatre as a place/space for the sacred, conceived in that kind of way, to manifest; though it may engage with both of those at times. Rather it tries to see what, in the event-structure called theatre, may generate or open up to something which isn't definable within conventional categories, maybe not within any kind of category; moments when you fall through the interstices of categories and into a kind of amazement. Sacred theatre may be searching for the generators or equivalents of the condition of being 'beyond', 'between', 'outside' or 'before'.

So some of the questions we are going to ask are:

[] What is the experience that sacred theatre can deliver?

[] How is it delivered?

[] What are its effects: in terms of being and knowing (status, function, self/world/other); in terms of psychology, physiology, community?

[] How does it relate to contexts and frames – aesthetic, political, ethical, psychosomatic, psychophysiological, psychospiritual?

[] Is theatre itself too much of a frame, a restriction, for the sacred – or can theatre in some way match it, reconfigure itself as a viable channel or vehicle to deliver it?

Not all those questions will necessarily be answered directly or in this chapter; the book as a whole will return to them at different moments and in different ways. This chapter describes and evaluates versions of the sacred constructed in various 'languages' and terminologies (e.g. anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, theology), though referring back throughout to theatre and performance. It examines paradigms by which the sacred may be thought, and assesses how useful and appropriate they are when set against theatre and what it does.

(i) Overture

Ralph Yarrow

I run a UK theatre company called Sacré Théâtre, which works mainly in French. Its name expresses some of the ambiguous delight of doing theatre, and the wager of doing it in a foreign language. It also incorporates something of what motivates this book: the sense that theatre has the ability always to come up with something unexpected, and that it is important to explore precisely the forms and scope of that unexpectedness. They may be both profound and perverse: after all, those who have speculated about the nature of the sacred in theatre range from Abhinavagupta to Zeami, from Jean Cocteau to Peter Brook, from Antonin Artaud to Shakespeare (not forgetting Maurice Maeterlinck, Aleister Crowley, Rabindranath Tagore, Kavalam Pannikar and Nicolas Núñez).

They will also be diverse. So this book is a dialogue of many voices, and it does not seek to come up with singular definitions; rather to offer a spectrum of reflections and perspectives; the writers include theatre-makers, literary theorists and philosophers, teachers of theatre and performance studies; and the practitioners, writers and work discussed range across many periods and cultures, in an attempt to be as non-exclusive as possible.

There are five different voices here, and perhaps within those voices, dozens of other echoes: we are not seeking to be exclusive or to edit out the differences. We are all asking what the sacred may be for each of us, as experience and in its relationship to what we think of as 'theatre'. We each have a different, though overlapping, spectrum of experience and different conceptions of what theatre is. So why are we chasing this combination down?

Somehow, it seems to us that in the nexus of events called theatre (even if some of us would sometimes rather they weren't called that, or did not conform to some of the expectations the term seems to call up), there is a more-than-ordinary possibility of the kind of experience we call sacred (with the same kind of reservations as before). We do not by any means claim that the characteristics of either or both of these concepts (or better, event-horizons, space probes or agents of origin) have exclusive tenure in this domain; what we want to do is to open up some of the processes, problems and outcomes of this collision.

So the writing of this book, whilst by no means entirely dialogic (it offers space for individual pursuits), builds in a process of exchanges, of interaction and intervention in each other's thinking and expressing. We attempt particularly to bring this out in the final section, though an awareness of what each of us has been writing has also been present at other stages.

Why bother to write about the 'sacred'? Firstly, because there is a substantial, if varied, body of work relating to theatre and performance which hovers around this area, and it is a useful way of bringing much of it together and seeing what it might be about. Secondly, because we need a redefinition of the terms which tend to get used, in order to release the theatre and performance processes relating to this area from claims of exclusivity and ownership by doctrines, dogmas and reified ideologies.

Thirdly, because theatre activates forms of knowing and stimulates ways of being and doing – many of which are currently more specifically approached under the heading of performance. If there is a sense in which the sacred is an entry to a particularly vital condition, then theatre – as a praxis – is one of the primary sites for its activation, and the forms and methods of theatre may lead to it and disclose what it is.

William S. Haney II, in Chapter 3 of Part 2 of this book, defines the sacred of theatre as a 'voiding of thought' (going beyond pairs of opposites) and a condition of liminality; and claims that the optimal subjective experience of liminality is performance. D. E. R. George proposes that performance needs to be investigated as a particular kind of knowledge, 'an actual way of knowing' (George 1999, 8); and that it offers 'other ways to look at Time, at Space, at Person, at Knowledge, at Experience; which may be closer to both contemporary scientific research (Quantum Theory, Chaos, Complexity) and contemporary philosophical enquiry (Cognitive Science, Process Philosophy)' (9).

To take the receiver out of the ordinary is the task here; not just in the sense of presenting something slightly unusual, but much more 'radically' or fundamentally opening up the capacity for seeing anew, for beginning to get in on the way things put themselves together. To do that, you have to go 'back' to 'before' preconceptions,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841501530
• ISBN 13: 9781841501536
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Herausgeber: Yarrow Ralph
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland