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

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.

In this fascinating volume, acclaimed theatre historian Erika Fischer-Lichte reflects on the role and meaning accorded to the theme of sacrifice in Western cultures as mirrored in particular fusions of theatre and ritual. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual presents a radical re-definition of ritual theatre through analysis of performances as diverse as: Max Reinhardt's new people's theatre the mass spectacles of post-revolutionary Russia American Zionist pageants the Olympic Games. In offering both a performative and a semiotic analysis of such performances, Fischer-Lichte expertly demonstrates how theatre and ritual are fused in order to tackle the problem of community-building in societies characterised by loss of solidarity and disintegration, and exposes the provocative connection between the utopian visions of community they suggest, and the notion of sacrifice. This innovative study of twentieth-century performative culture boldly examines the complexities of political theatre, propaganda and manipulation of the masses, and offers a revolutionary approach to the study of theatre and performance history.

Shows how the themes of drama, play, trance, music and dance have been found to be fundamental to the practice of good health in a Malaysian culture, and how this can be applied to the more general notions of therapy, including dramatherapy. .

In performances by Euro-Americans, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and Asians, Richard Schechner has examined carefully the details of performative behavior and has developed models of the performance process useful not only to persons in the arts but to anthropologists, play theorists, and others fascinated (but perhaps terrified) by the multichannel realities of the postmodern world. Schechner argues that in failing to see the structure of the whole theatrical process, anthropologists in particular have neglected close analogies between performance behavior and ritual. The way performances are created—in training, workshops, and rehearsals—is the key paradigm for social process.

The topic of the origins of theatre is one of the most controversial in theatre studies, with a long history of heated discussions and strongly held positions. In The Roots of Theatre, Eli Rozik enters the debate in a feisty way, offering not just another challenge to those who place theatre’s origins in ritual and religion but also an alternative theory of roots based on the cultural and psychological conditions that made the advent of theatre possible. Rozik grounds his study in a comprehensive review and criticism of each of the leading historical and anthropological theories. He believes that the quest for origins is essentially misleading because it does not provide any significant insight for our understanding of theatre. Instead, he argues that theatre, like music or dance, is a sui generis kind of human creativity—a form of thinking and communication whose roots lie in the spontaneous image-making faculty of the human psyche. Rozik’s broad approach to research lies within the boundaries of structuralism and semiotics, but he also utilizes additional disciplines such as psychoanalysis, neurology, sociology, play and game theory, science of religion, mythology, poetics, philosophy of language, and linguistics. In seeking the roots of theatre, what he ultimately defines is something substantial about the nature of creative thought—a rudimentary system of imagistic thinking and communication that lies in the set of biological, primitive, and infantile phenomena such as daydreaming, imaginative play, children’s drawing, imitation, mockery (caricature, parody), storytelling, and mythmaking.

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