Ritual and Event
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies Series

Ritual today can be encountered in the midst of catastrophic and transforming events. This collection reassesses and revises traditionally understood relationships between ritual and politics, ritual and everyday life, ritual and art making, and ritual and disaster. The methodologies as well as the subject matter are interdisciplinary: they range from the anthropological to the art and dance historical, from the theatrical and literary to the linguistic, philosophical, and psychoanalytic. It will be a valuable tool for scholars of Theater and Performance Studies, as well as Anthropology, Art, and History.

Introduction: Eventful Knowledge and the Post-Ritual Turn Mark FrankoPart I. Critical Historiographies/New Formations 1. Going Back to Bateson: Towards a Semiotics of (Post-) Ritual Performance Sally A. Ness 2. Performative Interventions: African Community Theatre in the Age of AIDS Ola Johansson 3. Ritually Failing: Turner’s Theatrical CommunitasAndrew Wegley 4. Situation and Event: The Destinations of Sense Tyrus MillerPart II. Case Studies from the Performative and Visual Archive 5. The Terrorist Event Bill Nichols 6. Gojira vs Godzilla: Catastrophic Allegories Aaron Kerner 7. Given Movement: Dance and the Event Mark Franko 8. Illness as Danced Urban Ritual Janice Ross 9. Post-colonial Torture: Rituals of Viewing at Abu Ghraib Catherine Soussloff

Mark Franko is a choreographer and performance scholar who teaches in the Theater Arts Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among his publications are Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, and The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity.