Poland
Emilia Wieliczko-Paprota
Studia Religiologica, Volume 51, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 33-45
https://doi.org/10.4467/20844077SR.18.003.9492Emilia Wieliczko-Paprota
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 15 Issue 4, 2018, pp. 497-513
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.18.045.10587This article takes up the problem of the subversive contents in the extravaganzas of James Robinson Planché, a dramatist and creator of popular theatre in Victorian England. The female body of the extravaganzas is unlike that encountered in bodily visions imposed by the rigorous etiquette of the puritanical society of nineteenth-century England. The analysis is primarily focused on those phenomena wherein the female body is undergoing constant transformation, being contextualized and shaped in accordance with the laws of a dominant culture. It is posited that the extravaganzas created for Easter and Christmas played the role of carnival, that is a time when it was permitted to present the world in reversal, and to speak against the dominant gender discourse. In Planché’s plays the female body is constructed in a space between the audience, the actor, the word, and theatre. It is a “body-in-between,” a living space of dialogue, a playing field of the dominant discourse and the subversive consciousness. The female body is both strange to the onlooker as well as untamed by the actors, who are only partially capable of controlling the ultimate form of their body on the stage. The substance of theatre represented by the physical matter of the body, turns out to be a dynamic form emerging from the inscriptive gaze, the contents of the play, and the attributes of the theatrical space itself.