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 Mc Cutcheon, Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis
Over de auteur
Ralph Yarrow is a teacher, theatre director, performer, actor trainer, writer, editor, translator and project leader. Emeritus professor of drama and comparative literature, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. Previously head of French and chair of drama programmes. His career spans an engagement with language and cultural production from Europe to India, from comparative criticism to postcolonial theory, from teaching innovations to directing practice; theatre and performance in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, India and Asia, South Africa. He made a founding international contribution to research into consciousness and the arts; developed further specializations in improvisation, Indian and Asian theatre; and in theatre in and as development, which comes out of theatre practice as training for personal and communal creativity, but also opens out into democracy as practice. I work currently in many of these areas as well as on performance and ecology; including close cooperation with India’s leading Forum Theatre/Theatre of the Oppressed organization, Jana Sanskriti. Books include Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance (with Anthony Frost, third edition, 2015), Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom and the co-written Sacred Theatre (with Carl Lavery et al.); translations (from German) of Birgit Fritz’s In Exact Art: the Autopoietic Theatre of Augusto Boal and her The Courage to Be: Augusto Boal’s Revolutionary Politics of the Body (2016).