Experiencing Performance: the Horizon of the Feast

Antitheatrical pamphlets and treatises are often useful tools to approach questions about the perception and reception of performing arts; counterintuitively, they usually provide more information on how plays were experienced than texts and documents written by people who approved and promoted theatrical performances by pointing out at their educational value. When not entirely based on moral prejudices and ancient religious precepts, those pamphlets also tried to describe how theatre and performances worked out their noxious effect on spectators. The essay deals with the experience of performance at the time of Christian Reformation, when the term “play” was extensively used to mean any form of exhibition of the body in action. Behind the exhibited body and its “useless” — that is, not work-related — activities, the horizon of pre-Christian festive atmosphere seems to exert its disquieting appeal, during an age of transition to the modern pattern of culture.