ABSTRACT
Valere Novarina’s destructive and constructive theater, interrogating anthropoglyphs in real time, also relies on the result-orientation of ritual; indeed, in the above sense it also has a liturgical objective. A recurrent scene in Valere Novarina’s works is that of communal eating—the supper—just as the central recurrent theme is the consumption of words. The beckoning emptiness of presence is the fundamental paradox not only of Novarina’s conception of God but also of his entire oeuvre. The Swiss literary and theatrical historian Marco Baschera sees the same enactor of ritual in the Novarina-actor and the priest: the priest also disappears during the ritual’s final act, the distribution of the Eucharist. Novarina discovers multiplicity in the Bible, in the Old and New Testament stories that respond to each other, in their ability to be set in correspondence with each other, and in their variations.
