In recent years dramatic critical enquiry has increasingly adopted a
somatic framework. Long occluded by the perceived authority of text, the
performance dimension of theatre, with the human body as its primary instrument
of signification, is now accepted as an integral object of study. This
mirrors a concurrent trend in artistic production, both textual and visual,
of exploring human geography as contiguous with its political and social
spaces. This “new bodyism,” however, has not necessarily elucidated the
meaning, function and effect of the body in the theatrical process, nor
enhanced our understanding of how the body signifies in space. Visual art
and theatre are sibling arts, both occupying space and signifying primarily
through the body. Visual representations are an important point of access
to the early (Renaissance and Baroque), largely unscripted commedia dell’arte
theatre tradition. This early theatre iconography lends itself to examination
through a modified, “post-Bakhtinian” approach to grotesque and transgendered
bodies, with a view to the way in which such representation/distortion
constitutes a space or barrier between the psychic and the somatic, between
the watcher and the watched.
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