Theatre and the Macabre
Description:... - The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence.
- This volume offers a comprehensive exploration of these ideas. While horror cinema is more popular than ever, its older sister, horror theatre, is actually what undergirds the popular macabre.
- This volume shows the origins of so many popular tropes and elements of horror cinema.
- It includes multiple essays from international scholars exploring the global macabre through history and contextualizes current examples of theatrical horror in a larger framework of representations of death, dying and destruction on stage. It includes renowned experts in the field such as Richard J. Hand (whose work on the Grand Guignol is second to none) and Michael Chemers, alongside emerging scholars.
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