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THEATRE, SACRIFICE, RITUAL: EXPLORING FORMS OF POLITICAL THEATRE. By Erika Fischer-Lichte. London: Routledge, 2005. pp. 290. $115.00 cloth, $39.95 paper.
In 1963, Erika Fischer-Lichte witnessed theatrical history when Gustav Grundgens gave his last, unofficial performance of Prince Hamlet in Hamburg. In her Auto / Archive for the October 2005 issue of Theatre Journal, she describes Grundgens as "a lifelong tightrope-walker and gambler . . ., aware that at each and every moment death might happen" (560). While Grundgens performed his balancing act onstage, Fischer-Lichte has accomplished a similar acrobatic performance in her critical efforts to reshape the field of theatre studies. By shifting focus from the dramatic text to an embodied semiotics of the theatre, her work has broadened the field to considerations of cultural performance. In her wideranging History of European Dmniii ami Theatre (1990 / 2002) she clarifies this distinction by defining drama as dealing with individual identity. Performance speaks a different language, an idea that she develops in The Semiotics of Theater (1983 / 1992) by refocusing on the interrelationships between spectators and performers in the event. The dialogue between bodies in space replaces the textual dialogue of the play. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual explores the political impact these complex relationships have.
Fischer-Lichte's new book traces the departure of twentieth-century theatre practices from questions of individual identity to the body's political potential. Divided into three parts and spanning Max Reinhardt's Theatre of the Five Thousand, Nazi Thingspiel, and 1960s performance art, Fischer-Lichte offers an erudite reading of both theatrical and political spectacle as instances of sacrifice in search of Utopian communities. Each of the performance sites she...