The performing body of The Škofja Loka Passion Play

Krpič, Tomaž (author)

In this article, I focus on the material and symbolic forms of the performing body of Škofjeloški pasijon (The Škofja Loka Passion Play) and its theatrical discoursing. The article is based on empirical evidence I collected during my encounters with The Škofja Loka Passion Play produced in 1999, 2000, 2009, and 2015. The first section provides a description of The Škofja Loka Passion Play in relation to its historical development and the reasons for the re-establishment of interest in its restaging at the beginning of the 1990s in Slovenian society. In the second section, aesthetic elements of the performing body of the passion play are identified: postures, gestures, and bodily spectacle. Accentuation is on the body of Jesus Christ, whose phenomenal body is gradually annihilated during the passion play, and at the end, the audience is left only with his semantic body. In the third section, I introduce the concept of theatrical discoursing – the use of a distinct communication with the audience that takes place on the stage during the passion play as a mechanism through which the gap between the poorly developed bodily grammar/language of the participants and the spectators’ interpretations of the passion play is successfully crossed. The article concludes with a list of five theatrical discourses and shows how the text of The Škofja Loka Passion Play expresses misogyny through them. The bottom line is that the performing body is transformed from a predominantly phenomenal body to a predominantly semantic body during The Škofja Loka Passion Play.

• Language: English
• Keywords: performing body, theatre discoursing, theatre community, passion play
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 461–479
• Numbering: Vol. 34, no. 4
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-168482
• UDC: 792.246(497.4Škofja Loka)
• ISSN on article: 1477-2264
• DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2024.2413471
• COBISS.SI-ID: 231996163
• Publication date in RUL: 15.04.2025

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Contemporary theatre review
• Shortened title: Contemp. theatre rev.
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• ISSN: 1477-2264
• COBISS.SI-ID: 521470233

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Description: The most restrictive Creative Commons license. This only allows people to download and share the work for no commercial gain and for no other purposes.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: nastopajoče telo, gledališki diskurz, gledališka skupnost, Škofjeloški pasijon, uprizoritve, pasijonske igre, ljudsko gledališče, Škofja Loka, Slovenija, pasijoni, gledališče