Historically Responsive Storytelling: How Contemporary Western Theatre Is Rediscovering Its Roots

This book explores the notion that the emergent language of contemporary theatre, and more generally of modern culture, has links to much earlier forms of storytelling and an ancient worldview.

This volume looks at our diverse and amalgamative theatrical inheritance and discusses various practitioners and companies whose work reflects and recapitulates ideas, approaches, and structures original to theatre’s ritual roots. Drawing together a range of topics and examples from the early Middle Ages to the modern day, Chadwick focuses on a theatrical language which includes an emphasis on the psychosomatic, the non-linear, the symbolic, the liminal, the collective, and the sacred.

This interdisciplinary work draws on approaches from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, historical and cognitive phenomenology, and neuroscience, making the case for the significance of historically responsive modes in theatre practice and more widely in our society and culture.

Eleanor Chadwick is a researcher and theatre maker currently working with Watershed Pervasive Media Studio and University of Bristol on a MyWorld Fellowship. She is also Artistic Director of Sleight of Hand theatre company, and a postdoctoral associate in Theatre and Performance Studies at University of Warwick, UK.