FROM THEATRE TO RITUAL, FROM RITUAL TO THEATRE... EURIPIDES' 'BACCHANTS' AND GENET'S 'THE BLACKS'

The authoress refers to an essay by Richard Schechner 'From Ritual to Theatre and Back', and to his fundamental thesis about fluidity and the vagueness of the border between ritual and theatre. Euripides' 'Bacchants' and 'The Blacks' by Jean Genet document, in different ways, the kinship between ritual and theatre. The basis for comparing these two plays is that they both show the interference of ritual and theatre, and introduce into the theatrical space the significantly codependent relationship created by the object of ritual sacrifice, the figure of the Other and the play on illusion-disillusionment, which appears both in the aesthetic and theatrical contexts as well as in the epistemological one, which is related to the appearance of a metatheatrical level in both texts. Decontextualization of structural elements of ritual sacrifice and their subsequent recontextualization in both plays' fictional sphere shows how theatre functions as a medium that addresses the problem of ritual sacrifice's cultural significance.