ABSTRACT
The Dance of Death strikes at the heart of the carnival since it concentrates on final bodily purification, whatever might await the soul, whereas carnival celebrates bodily regeneration on earth. This chapter scrutinises The King Is Alive's use of Lear and the presence of Shakespeare in a film that ostensibly aligns itself fully with the Dogme endeavour, as the last of the original Dogme brotherhood's seminal four films, after Festen, Idioterne and Mifunes Sidste Sang. The narrative of inversion, cathartic performance, death and subsequent rebirth, follows Bakhtin's model of the appropriation of Hell into carnival experience. Festen, as the chapter discusses in, is essentially depicting a festive moment of oppressive restriction inverted. Festen's much more audacious theft, as the chapter discusses much more complete inversion of Shakespeare. The King Is Alive presents a danse macabre, a cohesive narrative and figurative element within both the film and the play and is inextricably linked to notions of performative self-fashioning and carnival death.
