Ritual And Drama

This book considers the relevance of ritual theatre in contemporary life and describes how it is being used as a highly cathartic therapeutic process. With contributions from leading experts in the field of dramatherapy, the book brings together a broad spectrum of approaches to ritual theatre as a healing system.

This well-illustrated book thoroughly investigates the relations between East and West in the Ancient world as seen through the lens of ancient religious practices. The author has concentrated on one aspect of the cult, the ritual drama, and its setting, the cultic theatre.The point of departure is the presence of a great amount of theatrical structures in the sanctuaries in Greece and Italy. Many of these structures were not proper theatres in the modern sense of the word, but rather primitive rows of seats, 'a place to watch from', which is in fact the original meaning of the word 'theatre'. These structures have never before been examined from a functional viewpoint, and the author proposes that their primary raison d'etre was the performance of ritual dramas at the great seasonal feasts. These non-literary dramas re-enacted the story or myth of the divinity, which in symbolic form treated the crises connected with precarious transitions during the agricultural year and human life in general.For various reasons, which she describes, the author points to the relative obscurity of this religious institution in the Greek and Roman world, and notes that as a result, it has received scant attention from scholars. In contrast, it is well known that ritual dramas had been performed in the distant past at the great seasonal feasts of the Orient, and the book includes an excellent overview of the development of this institution as well as the setting chosen for it in the Egyptian, Syrio-Phoenician and Anatolian cults, both in their homelands and in their new host countries in the West.This is a fascinating book for archaeologists and classicists, as well as for anthropologists andhistorians of religion, but it also gives food for thought for those who simply want to l

Turner looks beyond his routinized discipline to an anthropology of experience . . . We must admire him for this.-Times Literary Supplement

This volume presents the development of medieval drama from its origins from Christian rituals, the growth of the dramatic idea, styles of dramatic presentation, and the evolution of the morality play. This work focuses on the time period of the 900s to the end of the 1400s A.D.

Sue Jennings and her three children spent two years on a fieldwork expedition to the Senoi Temiar people of Malaysia: Theatre, Ritual and Transformation is a fascinating account of that experience. She describes how the Temiar regularly perform seances which are enacted through dreams, dance, music and drama, and explains that they see the seance as playing a valuable preventative role in people's lives, as well as being a medium of healing and cure. Her account brings together the insights of drama, therapy and theatre with those of social anthropology to provide an invaluable theoretical framework for understanding theatre and ritual and their links with healing.

Late medieval and renaissance cities, though powerful communities jealous of their own jurisdiction, were constantly negotiating their relationships with other secular and religious authorities. The seven essays in this collection treat various aspects of civic display and pageantry during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The overwhelming sense one receives is that the solemne pomps were essentially about power -- how to get it, display it, share it and retain it. Each paper demonstrates how, through ceremony and symbol, municipalities sought to fashion their own corporate self-image in order to establish the limits of their authority in relationship to the countervailing powers sur-rounding them. The essays are concerned with the period before the ever widening impact of the Reformation and the intellectual and political revolutions it spawned had reached the level of civic pageantry. In the varied rituals considered here we can see reflected the highly sophisticated minds of their creators using the symbolic landscape of their religious and cultural past in important acts of corporate self-fashioning.

An analysis of the literary and dramatic function of ritual within the world of Sophocles' plays, for scholars of Greek tragedy, ancient theater, and poetics.