Catharsis at the Bekka. Mariacristina Cavecchi, Lisa Mazoni, Margaret Rose, and Giuseppe Scutellà’s SceKspir al BeKKa

Abstract

The book focuses on the use of performing chosen scenes from playwrights of the past – in this specific case William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – to exteriorise hidden emotional knots – so to compare the effects these produced before, and after being acted out. Love, rage, jealousy, violence, and other offences connected with the topics of the play are thus discussed, examined, and finally performed. The performing part is thus a real cathartic experience, in that the consequences of violence and death are tested via an always unique performance. The actors become the real Kantian ‘as if’– via the als ob experiential jump – as if they really were the enacted character. We also, as spectators, cathartically dissect the text via our emotions until our theatrical, hypothetical self – embodying a different other –, is given the possibility of becoming a new, and changed, self.

Keywords: performing arts; benefits of enacting deeply felt experiences; als ob Kantian theory; emotional-freeing catharsis; rage let-out; Shakespeare and the law