Author: Matthew Yde
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476652813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This is the first book-length study of one of the most talented and exciting American playwrights working today. Stephen Adly Guirgis has said that "God is the starting point and the finish line" of his work, and this book identifies him as a playwright with a distinctly Christian sensibility who uses the technique of "inculturation" to translate the gospel for a secular audience. Critics have noted that his plays are peopled with poor, suffering minority figures, but few have also noted that these figures bear a remarkable similarity to the dispossessed with whom Jesus identifies in Matthew 25. Beginning with his early play Den of Thieves and proceeding through each of his dramas, this work examines Guirgis's plays within a biblical context. While noting that Guirgis is a writer of the "post-Christian age" who staunchly resists identification as a "Christian playwright," the book situates him within the tradition of the "drama of ideas" as a powerful writer employing a dialectical method to inculcate the New Testament ethos and transform the theater space into a place of sacrament.
Author: Christine Schnusenberg
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 0809105446
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
This unique, comprehensive work tackles questions posed by the polemics of the Church Fathers against the Roman theater and explores the subsequent developments of Western liturgical drama as a continuation of the Roman theater up to the time of Amalarius of Metz in the ninth century.
Author: Roger Grainger
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837642206
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
Historically speaking, religious ritual and theatre appear to have evolved together. But what is the relationship between catharsis and liturgy? How liturgical is theatre, and how theatrical is liturgy? This book explores the characteristics of liturgical experience - concentration, single mindedness, intentionality, and emotional catharsis.
Author: Christine C. Schnusenberg
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532616864
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 453
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Book Description
This work has grown out of the question regarding the negative relationship of the Church Fathers toward the Roman theatre and the apparent subsequent theatre vacuum of over 400 years (ca. 530 AD to 930 AD). This is considered to be the time which lies between the end of the Roman theatre and the appearance of the quem quaeritis tropes. This work moves between these two poles: on the one hand, between the polemics against the pagan Roman theatre which the Church Fathers described as a theatrum daemonicum and on the other hand, the appearances of dramatic-liturgical configurations in the Christian Church. This work attempts to connect these two opposite poles instead of separating them. This study begins with an examination of documents dealing with the patristic polemic. This is followed by an examination in chronological sequence of the development of the liturgical dramatic manifestations from Jerusalem to Amalarius of Metz. It also examines the allegorical method connected with this development. In conclusion the argument is maintained that aside the theatrum daemonicum, a theatrum infictitium et sapirituale is beginning to develop.
Author: Roger Grainger
Publisher: ISBS
ISBN: 9781845193065
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
The Drama of the Rite brings home the dramatic identity of ritual and the religious significance of all kinds of theatre. Historically speaking, religious ritual and theatre appear to have evolved together. But what is the relationship between catharsis and liturgy? How liturgical is theatre and how theatrical is liturgy? Liturgy's purpose is dramatic; like theatre, it is a kinetic medium focusing upon the presence of the other person, whether divine or human. This book explores the characteristics of liturgical experience - concentration, single mindedness, intentionality, emotional catharsis, and, above all, the quality of encounter on which personal environment depends. It is an exploration which leads into the dramatic shape underlying both liturgy and theatre, that of the rite of passage itself. Examples are given of such rites, understood from the point of view of their theatrical nature and purpose. This involves looking at liturgical structure from a point of view which, up to now, has largely been neglected by scholars, although its relevance emerges with striking force, as the drama of the incursion of the divine into human lives. Many have spoken and written of the 'drama of religious ritual' and been content to leave it at that. Roger Grainger takes a clich ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (c) and examines the often misunderstood truth it expresses.
Author: Marvin Carlson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191648612
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
From before history was recorded to the present day, theatre has been a major artistic form around the world. From puppetry to mimes and street theatre, this complex art has utilized all other art forms such as dance, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Every aspect of human activity and human culture can be, and has been, incorporated into the creation of theatre. In this Very Short Introduction Marvin Carlson takes us through Ancient Greece and Rome, to Medieval Japan and Europe, to America and beyond, and looks at how the various forms of theatre have been interpreted and enjoyed. Exploring the role that theatre artists play — from the actor and director to the designer and puppet-master, as well as the audience — this is an engaging exploration of what theatre has meant, and still means, to people of all ages at all times. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Author: Robert Speaight
Publisher: New York : Hawthorn Books
ISBN:
Category : Christianity and the arts
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Raises the curtain on the theatre of the Western world to show how a constant Christian source has been at work filling the ever-changing dramatic forms. Christianity has a proper and important place as a theme in the Occidental theatre. Indeed, the infusion of Christian values in the theatre transcends all other influences. In one way or another, the Christian influence exists on the stage of every era and every nation involved in the Western tradition.
Author: O. B. Hardison Jr.
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421430878
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Originally published in 1965. The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis—the earliest of all medieval dramas—is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.
Author: Soumick De
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000608743
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Perversion, Pedagogy and the Comic studies how the idea-of-theater shaped western consciousness during the Christian Middle Ages. It analyses developments within western philosophy, Christian theology and theater history to show how this idea realized itself primarily as a metaphor circulating through various discursive domains. Beginning with Plato’s injunction against tragedy the relation between philosophy and theater has been a complicated affair which this book traces at the threshold when the western world became Christian. By late antiquity as theatre was slowly banned, Christian theology put the idea-of-theatre to use in order to show what they understood to be the perverted nature of worldly existence and the mystery of the Kingdom of God. Interrogating the theological teachings of some of the early Church Fathers like St Augustine, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria the book offers a new look at how the idea of theater not only inspired Christian liturgical practices but Christian pedagogy in general which in turn shaped the nature of Christian religious drama. Finally the author tries to demonstrate how this hegemonic use of the theatre-idea was countered by a certain comic sensibility which opened the idea of theatre in the Christian Middle Ages to a new and subversive materialist possibility. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Author: Wolfgang Vondey
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802864015
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
The Pentecostal Manifestos series aims to speak for and to a rising, outward-looking generation of Pentecostal scholarship. Written by both established and newly emerging scholars, the various "manifesto" volumes are to be creative statements, marked by rigorous theological scholarship, reflecting a distinctly Pentecostal engagement with wider themes and concerns in Christian thought today. --
