Theatre as Religious Practice

What theatre and religion have in common is to be first and foremost practices: there is no religion without rites, no theatre (whether in Indian or Western conceptions) without performance; that is to say, without putting drama into production and into play. So teaches the Nāṭyaśāstra, the great founding treatise on Indian dramatic art of the second century CE, not only in the myth of origin narrated in the first five and the last two chapters but also in most of the other ones dedicated to the ‘making’ of theatre, in particular the extensive analysis of the registers of acting (abhinaya) whose highly complex theory is expounded by Bharata, the mythical author of the Treatise and first of the sūtradhāras. This chapter examines these developments and their origins.