Dramaturgia liminalității: de la rescrierea ritualului la rescrierea piesei

The Dramaturgy of Liminality: from Rewriting Ritual to the Rewriting of the Play
Born out of my need, as a playwright, to move beyond the usual dichotomies between structure and content, naive and sentimental, dramatic and post-dramatic and all the rest, the concept of dramaturgy of liminality recovers liminality - which has become almost the norm in performance - for the less normative use of playwrights. The paper starts from an anthropological understanding of liminality (Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, but also contemporary sociologists and anthropologists such as Arpad Szakolczai and Bjørn Thomassen), visits the rich career this term had made in performing arts, through the relationship between ritual and drama (Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Jon McKenzie, Erika Fischer-Lichte) and explores structural insights and specific elements of ritual (Roland Grimes) that can help a writer, in my opinion, to conceptualize and write a dramatic text, or - of utmost importance in the economy and spirit of this paper, and in a progressive and feminist spirit - rewrite a canonical text. Understanding the specifics of narratives of passage, I then propose four tools of the dramaturgy of liminality, borrowed from psychoanalysis, philosophy and cognitive science: the mechanisms of dream work, theorized by Freud, conceptual metaphor (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson), becoming- (Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti) and conceptual blending (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner). Using these tools, I analyse the structure and meaning of my dramatic texts and dramatic rewrites, or the ones belonging to extremely diverse authors (from Euripides, Ibsen and Martin Crimp to Caryl Churchill, Marina Carr and Rachel Cusk), in an attempt to demonstrate how, by using these four tools, we can metamorphose material taken from reality, imagination or other dramatic texts in the process of writing or rewriting texts based on a dramaturgy of liminality.