An Odyssey into the Shamanic Roots of Popular Entertainment.

Driven by a chance encounter with a forty-year old ‘lost’ book – The Death and Resurrection Show – and fuelled by the grief of his parents’ passing, David Bramwell dives into the tropes and treats of live performance artistry, of popular entertainment, as it reshaped itself through the twentieth and twenty-first century.

He explores how its greatest artists, performers and celebrities morphed into shaman-like leaders and how we, an audience, are a congregation in search of healing.

Bramwell visits the darkened yurts of circuses, pantomimes, cinemas and music concerts in search of evidence that the tricks and skills of the shaman’s ‘show’ remain hidden in plain sight in everything from theatre and magic to rock’n’roll.