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. Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance 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...