ABSTRACT
It is proposed that the root of all theater – not only of tragedy – lies in a body memory of a violent primordial ontological schism that is lived, experienced and encoded in body memory as “death.” We re-enact the story of our origins as individuals in a primordial creative eruption that marked the beginning of the history of the I as a divided entity. This is manifest in the very structure of theater – its defining characteristic – viz. the ontological split between the I-spectator and the I-actor. Mimesis and the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences are discussed, as are Schechner’s notion of the need of homo sapiens to perform his/her dreams, Rozik’s theory of theater as pre-linguistic mental images imprinted on the body and ritual as a precursor of theater. Freud’s Fort-da play of dealing with loss points to the un-symbolizable and leads to a discussion of Winnicott’s and Kristeva’s “third space” considered to be the space of theater and the locus of a dialogue with the dead as in the Nekyiomanteia of ancient Greece.
