170301 VO Lecture on the History of Theatre (2016S)

...To which the devil, stopping the cart, answered quietly, "Senor, we are players of Angulo el Malo's company; we have been acting the play of 'The Cortes of Death' this morning, which is the octave of Corpus Christi, in a village behind that hill, and we have to act it this afternoon in that village which you can see from this; and as it is so near, and to save the trouble of undressing and dressing again, we go in the costumes in which we perform. That lad there appears as Death, that other as an angel, that woman, the manager's wife, plays the queen, this one the soldier, that the emperor, and I the devil; and I am one of the principal characters of the play, for in this company I take the leading parts. If you want to know anything more about us, ask me and I will answer with the utmost exactitude, for as I am a devil I am up to everything."

The connext between theatre and the feast is manyfold and encompasses constellations of Healing/Judging/Narrating within the old feast, medieval and Early Modern celebratory cultures linked to the court and the cleric space as well as present-day theatre cultures.
Taking the well-preserved and well-documented Iberian feast cultures as a starting point (and also extending to Italian, German-speaking and French spaces), this class addresses the relation between theatre and the feast, positions of adjacent anthropological research, the differentiation of feast and festival, cultures of representation and the performance of communities as well as the genesis of theatre structures in a dynamic exchange between practices included and excluded.