Theatre, Ritual and Transformation: The Senoi Temiars - Softcover

Jennings, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415119901 ISBN 13: 9780415119900

Publisher: Routledge, 1995

Synopsis

Sue Jennings and her three children spent two years on a fieldwork expedition to the Senoi Temiar people of Malaysia: Theatre, Ritual and Transformation is a fascinating account of that experience. She describes how the Temiar regularly perform seances which are enacted through dreams, dance, music and drama, and explains that they see the seance as playing a valuable preventative role in people's lives, as well as being a medium of healing and cure. Her account brings together the insights of drama, therapy and theatre with those of social anthropology to provide an invaluable theoretical framework for understanding theatre and ritual and their links with healing.

About this title

About the Author:

Sue Jennings is Senior Research Fellow at the Royal London Hospital Medical College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. She is also a dramatherapy consultant.

Review:

"This important book brings together in a refreshingly new way the themes of drama, play, trance, music and dance as aspects of a general cultural aesthetic among a Malaysian people, the Temiar. The underlying concern with the aesthetic and how it is continously transformed and yet restores emotional and physical balance and order, is fundamental to ideas and practice of good health. While the special cultural distinctiveness of the Temiar is highlighted, the book provides theoretical insights into more general notions of therapy, especially dramatherapy."
-Professor David Parkin, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0415119901
• ISBN 13: 9780415119900
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238