Abstract

Classical Bodies, Musical Throats and an Accommodating Religion explores the origins of the modern drama from a director’s perspective, with special focus on the “language of cry and gesture”, the acting language of the early Romantic repertory. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the acting codes of the melodrama, the first dramatic genre to appear on the Romantic stage, based on the workshops and subsequent productions of Witchcraft by Joanna Baillie (co-director
Louis Patrick Leroux) and Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner which I directed for the Concordia University’s D.B. Clarke Theatre in 2010-2011 and, respectively, for Le Théâtre de
l’Utopie in Montreal in 2013 (Büchner’s Bicentenary) in view of further applications to the modern repertory.