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Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance
Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance
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In this broadly conceived study, Ralf Remshardt delineates the theatre’s deep connection with the grotesque and traces the historically extensive and theoretically intensive relationship between performance and its “other,” the grotesque.
examines the aesthetic complicity shared by the two in both art and theatre and presents a general theory of the grotesque. Performing the grotesque is both a challenge to a culture’s order and the affirmation of certain ethical principles that it recognizes as its own. Remshardt investigates the aesthetics and ideology of grotesque theatre from antiquityin works such as
and
to modernityin
and opens up new critical possibilities for the analysis of both classical and avant-gardetheatre. Divided into three sections,
first interrogates the grotesque as primarily a visual artistic and theatrical mode and then inventories various critical approaches to the grotesque, establishing the outlines of a theory with regard to drama. In the most extensive part of the study, Remshardt shifts his emphasis to the theatre of the grotesque, from self-consuming tragedies and the modernist trope of the artificial human figure to the characterology of the grotesque. Remshardt’s conclusion takes bold steps toward unraveling the paradox inherent in the grotesque theatre. Written in an engaging style and aided by nine illustrations,
is a comprehensive and rigorous study that incorporates critical approaches from disciplines such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, art history, literature, and theatre to fully investigate the historical function of the grotesque in performance.