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Ritual, play, and performance Performances – whether in the performing arts, sports, popular music,or everyday life – consist of ritualized gestures and sounds. Even when we think we’re being spontaneous and original, most of what we do and utter has been done and said before – by us even. Performing arts frame and mark their presentations, underlining the fact that artistic behavior is “not for the first time” but enacted by trained persons who take time to prepare and rehearse.A performance may feature highly stylized behavior such as in kabuki, kathakali, ballet, or the dance-dramas of Indigenous Australians. Or it may be congruent to everyday behavior as in naturalism. A performance may be improvised – but as in jazz or contact improvisation dance,most improvisations consist of arranging and moving through known materials.

In Chapter 2, I pointed out that performances consist of twice-behaved, coded, transmittable behaviors.This twice- behaved behavior is generated by interactions between ritual and play. In fact, one definition of performance is: Ritualized behavior conditioned and/or permeated by play.

Rituals are collective memories encoded into actions. Rituals also help people (and animals) deal with difficult transitions, ambivalent relationships, hierarchies, and desires that trouble, exceed, or violate the norms of daily life. Play gives people a chance to temporarily experience the taboo, the excessive, and the risky.You may never be Oedipus or Cleopatra, but you can perform them “in play.” Ritual and play lead people into a “second reality,” separate from ordinary life.This reality is one where people can become selves other than their daily selves. When they temporarily become or enact another, people perform actions different from what they do ordinarily. Thus, ritual and play transform people, either permanently or temporarily. Rituals that transform people permanently are called “rites of passage.” Initiations, weddings, and funerals are rites of passage – from one life role or status to another. In play, the transformations are temporary, bounded by the rules of the game or the conventions of the genre.The performing arts, sports, and games combine ritual and play. In this chapter, I consider ritual and in the following chapter, play.

Varieties of ritual Every day people perform dozens of rituals. These range from religious rituals to the rituals of everyday life, from the rituals of life roles to the rituals of each profession, from the rituals of politics and the judicial system to the rituals of business or home life. Even animals perform rituals.

Many people equate ritual with religion, with the sacred. In religion, rituals give form to the sacred, communicate doctrine, open pathways to the supernatural, and mold individuals into communities. But secular public life and everyday life are also full of ritual. Great events of state often combine sacred and secular ritual, as in the coronations, inaugurations, or funerals of leaders. Less marked, the rituals of everyday life can be intimate or even secret; sometimes these are labeled as “habits,” “routines,” or “obsessions.” But all rituals – sacred or secular, public or hidden – share certain formal qualities (see Rappaport box). Performing rituals seems to go back to the very earliest periods of human cultural activity. Numerous cave and burial sites dating back 20,000–30,000 years before the present show a cere- monial care with handling the dead as well as wall paintings and sculptings that seem to be of ritual significance. Nor has this need to deal ritually with the big events of life dimin- ished. Present-day life throughout the world is saturated with ritual observances.To specify only a few of the myriad of religious rituals: the Passover Seder of the Jews, the five daily prostrations toward Mecca of Muslims, the Roman Catholic Eucharist, the waving of a camphor flame at the climax of a Hindu puja, the dances, songs, and utterances of a person possessed by an orixa of Umbanda or Candomble – and too many more to list even a small fraction (see figure 3.1). Religious rituals are as various as religion itself.

Nor is religion limited to the normative practices of the “world religions” – Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism.There are many local, regional, and sectarian variations of the world religions.There are Shaman,Animist, Pantheist, and New Age religions. Most people, even if they don’t openly admit it, actually follow more than one religion. A devout Christian may carry in her pocket a “good luck charm” or regularly consult her horoscope. Diasporic,

3 RITUAL

Schechner, Richard, and Richard Schechner. Performance Studies : An Introduction, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=1128311. Created from pensu on 2020-01-26 11:11:33.

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formerly colonized and missionized peoples combine the religions of their homelands with what was imposed on them. When under stress, people who ordinarily would not do so seek out healers and seers.

Sacred and secular Rituals are frequently divided into two main types, the sacred and the secular. Sacred rituals are those associated with, expressing, or enacting religious beliefs. It is assumed that religious belief systems involve communicating with, praying, or otherwise appealing to supernatural forces. These forces may reside in, or be symbolized by, gods or other superhuman beings. Or they may inhere in the natural world itself – rocks, rivers, trees, mountains – as in Native American and Native Australian religions (see figure 3.2). Secular rituals are those associated with state ceremonies, everyday life, sports, and any other activity not specifically religious in character.

But this neat division is spurious. Many state ceremonies approximate or include religious ritual, with the State playing the role of the transcendent or godly other. Hitler and his Nazi party were particularly adept at this kind of quasi-religious performance of the State. The great party rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s were secular-sacred ritual performances of party-state power (see Chapter 6 for more discussion of the Nazi rallies).The Memorial Day observance

at the US Arlington National Cemetery is a secular-sacred state ritual. On the other side of the coin, many religious rituals include activities that are decidedly worldly or non- transcendent, such as the masking, playing, drinking, and sexuality of Carnival (see figure 3.3).Additionally, many, perhaps most, rituals are both secular and sacred.A wedding, for example, is the performance of a state-sanctioned contract, a religious ceremony, and a gathering of family and friends. The rituals of a typical American wedding are both secular and sacred. Secular wedding rituals include “cutting the cake,” “throwing the bridal bouquet,” “the first dance with the bride,” and so on (see figure 3.4). Sacred wedding rituals include clergy performing the ceremony and prayers. Some weddings are officiated by a judge or a ship’s captain – in these cases state rituals are performed. Sometimes, the sacred portion of a wedding is separated from the secular by having the wedding ceremony in a temple or church and the party elsewhere. Mixing the secular with the sacred is common to many observances, cele- brations, and life-passage events such as birthday parties, job-related celebrations honoring years of service or retirement, and the numerous holidays punctuating the calendar.

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Roy A.Rappaport The obvious aspects of ritual

I take ritual to be a form or structure, defining it as the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and

utterances not encoded by the performers. [. . .] No single feature of ritual is peculiar to it. It is in the conjunction of its

features that it is unique. [. . .] Rituals tend to be stylized, repetitive, stereotyped, often but not always decorous, and they

also tend to occur at special places and at times fixed by the clock, calendar, or specified circumstances. [. . .] Performance

is the second sine qua non of ritual. [. . .] Performance is not merely a way to express something, but is itself an aspect of

that which it is expressing. [. . .R]itual not only communicates something but is taken by those performing it to be “doing

something” as well. [. . .] However, that which is done by ritual is not done by operating with matter and energy [. . .] in

accordance with the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology. The efficacy of ritual derives [. . .] from “the occult.” The occult

differs from “the patent” in that the patent can be known in the last resort by sensory experience, and it conforms to the

regularities of material cause. The occult cannot be so known and does not so conform.

1979, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion, 175–78.

Carnival: period of feasting and revelry which precedes the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday. The term “Carnival” includes, but is not limited to, Mardi Gras celebrations.

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fig 3.1. Religious rituals of various faiths.

Muslims praying outside the Registan complex of mosques in Samarakand, 1996. Photograph by Shamil Zhumatov. Copyright Reuters.

An Animist Ndembu woman in trance, possessed by a spirit during a girl’s initiation rite, Zambia 1985. Copyright Edith Turner, Victor and Edith Turner Collection, Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School Image Bank.

Worshippers at a Christian “mega church,” www.urbanchristiannews. com/ucn/2010/02/what-is-the-big-deal-with-mega-churches.html.

Worship of the Hindu goddess Durga during Durga Puja, Kolkata, 1980s. Photograph by Richard Schechner.

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http://www.urbanchristiannews.com/ucn/2010/02/what-is-the-big-deal-with-mega-churches.html

fig 3.2. Uluru, sacred to Indigenous Australians, is the world’s largest monolith, with a height of 318 meters and a circumference of 8 kilometers. This same formation is called “Ayer’s Rock” by non-Native Australians. Photograph courtesy of Ernest Bial.

fig 3.3. Trinidad Carnival combines the secular and the sacred, the ecstatic and solemn, the celebratory and the erotic.

A line of young people “wining” – rotating the hips and rubbing up close to one another – during Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1990s. Photograph by Pablo Delano.

Maskers “bloody” and ecstatic celebrate Carnival in Trinidad, 1990s. Photograph by Jeffrey Chock.

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Many cultures do not enforce a rigid separation between the sacred and the secular. Sometimes there is no separation whatsoever.To those Native Australians who continue to live traditionally, every thing and every place has a sacred quality to it (see Gould box). This idea of the sacredness of the ordinary is a major theme of New Age religions and of some performance art. Dancer-choreographer-ritualizer Anna Halprin works with many different kinds of groups to locate and consciously perform the rituals of everyday life – eating, sleeping, greeting, touching, moving – and to invent new rituals that “honor” the body and the Earth. For example, Halprin’s 1987 Planetary Dance, a two-day “dance ritual,” consisted of groups of dancers in 25 countries moving in synchrony to make a “wave” of dance circling the Earth.The dance was repeated in 1994.

Structures, functions, processes, and experiences Rituals and ritualizing can be understood from at least four perspectives:

1 Structures – what rituals look and sound like, how they are performed, how they use space, and who performs them.

2 Functions – what rituals accomplish for individuals, groups, and cultures.

3 Processes – the underlying dynamic driving rituals; how rituals enact and bring about change.

4 Experiences – what it’s like to be “in” a ritual.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

fig 3.4. Mara Hoberman and Sam Schechner cutting their wedding cake, one of the secular rituals of an American wedding. Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, September 2011. Photograph by Richard Schechner.

Richard A. Gould Ritual is an inseparable part of the whole

The daily life of the Aborigines is rewarding but routine.

There is a kind of low-key pace to the everyday round

of living. In their ritual lives, however, the Aborigines

attain a heightened sense of drama. Sharp images appear

and colors deepen. The Aborigines are masters of

stagecraft and achieve remarkable visual and musical

effects with the limited materials at hand. [. . .]

Gradually I experienced the central truth of Aboriginal

religion: that it is not a thing by itself but an inseparable

part of a whole that encompasses every aspect of

daily life, every individual and every time – past, present,

and future. It is nothing less than the theme of existence,

and as such constitutes one of the most sophisticated

and unique religious and philosophical systems known to

man.

1969, Yiwara, 103–04

Anna Halprin (1920– ): American dancer and choreographer. A pioneer in the use of expressive arts for healing and ritual-making. Her work in the 1960s had a profound influence on postmodern dance. Halprin continues to explore the uses of the arts in/as therapy – see her Returning to Health with Dance, Movement, and Imagery (2002, with Seigmar Gerken).

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These four aspects of ritual have been explored from many angles by ethologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. All of these approaches are relevant to performance studies. Throughout this book, I will be referring to them. In brief: Ethologists study the conti- nuities between animal and human rituals – particularly how rituals are used to control and redirect aggression, to establish and maintain hierarchy, to determine access to mates, and to mark and defend territory. Neurologists investigate what effects certain ritual practices have on the brain. Performing actions rhythmically and repetitively can put people into trance. While in trance, people are “possessed,” “swept away,” or have “out of body experiences.” I will discuss trance performing in Chapter 6.Anthropologists observe, describe, and theorize living ritual practices. Archaeologists are forensic anthropologists who reconstruct extinct societies by reasoning from surviving evidence ranging from bones, ruins, pottery shards, and midden heaps to artworks and implements, weapons, and tools.

How ancient are rituals? The evidence shows that human ritual practices go back many thousands of years. The paintings and sculptings found in caves such as Lascaux and Altamira in today’s France and Spain date from as recent as 9,000 BCE to as far back as 40,000 years ago. Archaeologists studying this cave “art” surmise that rituals were probably performed in association with the paintings and sculptings. (I put quotation marks around the word “art” because no one knows for sure what the makers of these works thought of them or meant them to be or do.) Some paintings are abstract patterns, others are stenciled handprints. Many are reasonably accurate representations of animals such as bison, horses, boar, and deer. A few depict dancing humans wearing masks. Taken both individually and as a whole, these works speak to modern humans across a great expanse of time. But what exactly are they saying to us today? Even more important, what were they saying to the people who made them? The “art” probably was a repository of group memory, desire, and imagination. At least some of the cave spaces were used for performances: there are footprints preserved in clay indicating dancing. Whatever the caves were, they were not art galleries in the modern sense – they are hard to access and even with torches the paintings and sculptings are difficult to illuminate clearly. Probably the caves were sites of hunting magic, initiations, and other kinds of per- formed rituals – behavior that concretely embodied the

“as if ” (see Montelle box). The paintings and sculptings were more likely to be “action works” – items executed to get some result – than visual art designed for viewing in a mood of appreciation or reflection as in a museum. Still, we today can appreciate the power and beauty of the “art” – and this argues for a continuity of human consciousness and aesthetic design from prehistoric times to the present.That is, not only were the “artists” who made the works in the caves fully human biologically, they were our contemporaries culturally as well. I will discuss the cave performances again in Chapter 7.

Eleven themes relating ritual to performance studies From the vast literature on ritual, I suggest eleven themes especially relevant to performance studies:

1 ritual as action, as performance 2 human and animal rituals 3 rituals as liminal performances 4 communitas and anti-structure 5 ritual time/space 6 transportations and transformations 7 social drama 8 the efficacy–entertainment dyad 9 origins of performance

10 changing or inventing rituals 11 using rituals in theatre, dance, and music

During the remainder of this chapter, I will explore these themes.

Rituals as action, as performance The relationship between “ritual action” and “thought” is complex (see Bell box). The idea that rituals are performances was proposed nearly a century ago. Émile Durkheim theorized that performing rituals created and sustained “social solidarity.” He insisted that although rituals may communicate or express religious ideas, rituals were not ideas or abstractions, but performances enacting known patterns of behavior and texts. Rituals don’t so much express ideas as embody them. Rituals are thought- in/as-action. This is one of the qualities that makes ritual so theatre-like, a similarity Durkheim recognized (see Durkheim box).

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57 Schechner, Richard, and Richard Schechner. Performance Studies : An Introduction, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=1128311. Created from pensu on 2020-01-26 11:11:33.

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Yann-Pierre Montelle Paleoperformance: theatricality in the caves

Upper Paleolithic cave users laid out the paradigmatic foundations for a social process which has remained characteristic of

our species to the present: the subjunctive world of the self-consciously constructed “as if.” [. . .] Theatricality, as practice,

finds its first tangible evidence in the deep caves of the Upper Paleolithic, at least 17,000 years ago. It is my belief that a direct

line of interrelated “landmarks” can be established between the cave and the theatron (or cavea). [. . .] Pleistocene use of caves

and iconography can be found in the Americas, Australia, China, India, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This global

phenomenon helps confirm the emergence and ubiquity of theatricality on a worldwide scale. [. . .] The undeniable sense of mise-

en-scène and the degree of planning indicate that the cave was a sophisticated place where “otherness” was explored, explained,

and contained. It was also a place where societal segregation took place in order to guarantee stability and survival. Knowledge

was variably disseminated during initiatory procedures that were carefully choreographed. [. . .] Exoteric visual displays were

a “visible” body of information positioned at specific locations, and standardized (in order to be “read” by all interested parties

of a band or group). Esoteric visual displays were an in/visible body of formulaic information (mnemonics) restricted to specific

“readers” of a band. The variations in the volume of exoteric and esoteric visual display per cave indicate an interesting shift

in the processual approach to information exchange and the mechanisms used to enforce adherence to arbitrary sets of

standardized rules. The degree of visibility and invisibility in these systems of information suggests that the “passing on” and

sharing of knowledge externally and internally was mediated by a rigid and ideological structure. It is in the junctions between

the components of this controlled repartition of cognition that [. . .] performativity and theatricality emerge(d).

2009, Paleoperformance, 2–4, 15, 47

Émile Durkheim Ritual and theatre

We have already had occasion to show that they [rites

performed by Native Australians] are closely akin to

dramatic representations. [. . .] Not only do they employ

the same processes as real drama, but they also pursue an

end of the same sort: being foreign to all utilitarian ends,

they make men forget the real world and transport them

into another where their imagination is more at ease; they

distract. They sometimes even go so far as to have the

outward appearance of a recreation: the assistants may

be seen laughing and amusing themselves openly. [. . .]

Art is not merely an external ornament with which the

cult has adorned itself in order to dissimulate certain of

its features which may be too austere and too rude; but

rather, in itself, the cult is something aesthetic.

1965 [1915], The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 424, 426–27

Catherine Bell Highly symbolic actions in public

[What has ritual] in common with theatrical performances,

dramatic spectacles, and public events [?. . .] the per-

formative dimension per se – that is, the deliberate, self-

conscious “doing” of highly symbolic actions in public – is

key to what makes ritual, theater, and spectacle what they

are. While a performative dimension often coexists with

other characteristics of ritual-like behavior, especially in

rule-governed sports contests or responses to sacral

symbols, in many instances performance is clearly the more

dominant or essential element [. . .] [T]he ritual-like

nature of performative activities appears to lie in the

multifaceted sensory experience, in the framing that

creates a sense of condensed totality, and in the ability to

shape people’s experience and cognitive ordering of the

world. In brief, performances seem ritual-like because they

explicitly model the world.

1997, Ritual, 159–60, 161

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Arnold van Gennep also recognized the theatrical dynamics of ritual. In his study of the “rites of passage,” Gennep proposed a three-phase structure of ritual action: the preliminal, liminal, and postliminal. He pointed out that life was a succession of passages from one phase to another and that each step along the way was marked by ritual (see Gennep box). In the 1960s, Victor Turner developed Gennep’s insight into a theory of ritual that has great importance for performance studies. Later in this chapter, I will discuss Gennep’s and Turner’s work. But first I need to explain ritual from an evolutionary perspective.

Human and animal rituals All animals, including Homo sapiens, exist within the same ecological web subject to the same evolutionary processes. But animals are not all alike. Homologies and analogies must be put forward cautiously. It is not correct to call the abdominal waggle and footwork of honeybees communicating to other bees the whereabouts of nectar “dances” in the human

sense.The bees cannot improvise, change the basic patterns of movement, or express their feelings. Bees don’t have feelings in any human understanding of that word.Where everything is genetically determined, where there is no learning, where no improvisation is possible,where error and/or lying cannot occur, art is not. So what are the bees doing? They are communicating by means of a system of movements.This kind of communication suggests a connection, one of very many, linking human and animal rituals.

Charles Darwin not only proposed the evolutionary development of species in terms of anatomy but also in terms of behavior. In his 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin theorized that the similarities in behavior between humans and animals indicated an evolutionary development of feelings and the expression of emotions. Darwin’s idea led Julian Huxley to assert that human and animal rituals are related through evolution. This idea has been developed by many ethologists, sociobiologists, and ritual theorists (see Lorenz box,d’Aquili et al.box,and Wilson box).

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Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957): French ethnographer and folklorist who analyzed rituals that change a person’s status in society. Gennep’s notion of the liminal has been very influential. Author of The Rites of Passage (1908, Eng. 1960).

Arnold van Gennep The rites of passage

The life of an individual in any society is a series of pass-

ages from one age to another and from one occupation to

another. [. . .] Life comes to be made up of a succession

of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social

puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advance-ment to a higher

class, occupational specialization, and death. For every

one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential

purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one

defined position to another which is equally well defined.

1960 [1908], The Rites of Passage, 3

Charles Darwin (1809–82): English naturalist who developed the theory of evolution by natural selection. In addition to his landmark The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin also wrote the increasingly influential The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

Julian Huxley (1887–1975): English biologist, author of Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) and Essays of a Humanist (1964) among many other works.

Konrad Lorenz (1903–89): Austrian ethologist, winner (with Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen) of the 1973 Nobel Prize in medicine. His books include On Aggression (1963, Eng. 1966) and The Foundations of Ethology (1978, Eng. 1981).

E. O. (Edward Osborne) Wilson (1929– ): American entomologist and pioneer of sociobiology. His works include Sociobiology (1975), On Human Nature (1978), and Consilience (1998).

Konrad Lorenz Ritualization in animals and humans

[Julian] Huxley discovered the remarkable fact that

certain movement patterns lose, in the course of

phylogeny, their original specific function and become

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917): French social scientist. One of the founding theorists of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Author of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1911, Eng. 1915).

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purely “symbolic” ceremonies. He called this process

ritualization and used this term without quotation

marks; in other words, he equated the cultural processes

leading to the development of human rites with the

phylogenetic processes giving rise to such remarkable

“ceremonies” in animals. From a purely functional point

of view this equation is justified, even bearing in mind the

difference between the cultural and phylogenetic

processes. [. . .]

The triple function of suppressing fighting within the

group, of holding the group together, and of setting it

off, as an independent entity, against other, similar units,

is performed by culturally developed ritual in so strictly

analogous a manner as to merit deep consideration.

[. . .]

The formation of traditional rites must have begun

with the first dawning of human culture, just as at

a much lower level phylogenetic rite formation was a

prerequisite for the origin of social organization in higher

animals. [. . .] In both cases, a behavior pattern by means

of which a species in the one case, a cultured society in

the other, deals with certain environmental conditions,

acquires an entirely new function, that of commu-

nication. The primary function may still be performed,

but it often recedes more and more into the background

and may disappear completely so that a typical change

of function is achieved. Out of communication two

new equally important functions may arise, both of which

still contain some measure of communicative effects. The

first of these is the channeling of aggression into innocu-

ous outlets, the second is the formation of a bond between

two or more individuals. [. . .] The display of animals

during threat and courtship furnishes an abundance of

examples, and so does the culturally developed cere-

monial of man. [. . .] Rhythmical repetition of the same

movement is so characteristic of very many rituals, both

instinctive and cultural, that it is hardly necessary to

describe examples. [. . .]

This “mimic exaggeration” results in a ceremony

which is, indeed, closely akin to a symbol and produces

that theatrical effect that first struck Sir Julian Huxley

as he watched his Great Crested Grebes. [. . .] There is

hardly a doubt that all human art primarily developed

in the service of rituals and that the autonomy of “art for

art’s sake” was achieved only by another, secondary step

of cultural progress.

1966, On Aggression, 54–55, 72–74

Eugene G. d’Aquili, Charles D. Laughlin Jr., and John McManus The biological foundations of ritual

We may say then that the primary biological function

of ritual behavior is cybernetic: ritual operates to

facilitate both intraorganismic and interorganismic

coordination. Such coordination is necessary to form

coherent, corporate responses, with common motive and

drive, for the completion of some effect or task that could

not be completed by conspecifics acting alone. Human

ceremonial ritual is not a simple institution unique

to man but rather a nexus of variables shared

by other species. [. . .] One may trace the evolutionary

progression of ritual behavior from the emergence

of formalization through the coordination of formal-

ized communicative behavior and sequences of ritual

behavior to the conceptualization of such sequences and

the assignment of symbols to them by man.

1979, The Spectrum of Ritual, 33, 36–37

Edward O. Wilson Tribalism, religion, ritual

The shamans and priests implore us, in somber cadence,

Trust in the sacred rituals, become part of the immortal

force, you are one of us. As your life unfolds, each step

has mystic significance that we who love you will mark

with a solemn rite of passage, the last to be performed

when you enter that second world free of pain and fear.

If the religious mythos did not exist in a culture, it

would be quickly invented, and in fact it has been

everywhere, thousands of times through history. Such

inevitability is the mark of instinctual behavior in any

species. That is, even when learned it is guided toward

certain states by emotion-driven rules of mental

development. To call religion instinctive is not to suppose

any particular part of its mythos is untrue, only that its

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The evolutionary scheme of ritual can be depicted as a “ritual tree” (see figure 3.5).Animals with simple nervous systems, such as insects and fish, enact genetically fixed rituals. Further up the evolutionary ladder, mammal and bird species – dogs and parrots, for example – elaborate on what is genetically given.These animals are able to learn, mimic, and improvise. Much closer to humans are the non-human primates. Chimpanzees and gorillas perform in ways quite like humans but with nowhere near the complexity, diversity, or cognitive qualities of humans. In terms of ritual, humans have developed ritual into elaborate and sophisticated systems divisible into three main categories: social ritual, religious ritual, and aesthetic ritual. As noted earlier, these are not locked out from each other, but often overlap or converge.

To glimpse just how close some of the higher primates are to humans, one must turn both to field studies and to laboratory experiments, especially those concerning lan- guage acquisition and use. From the field, Jane Goodall described a performance by a juvenile male chimpanzee in the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania in which a young animal challenged the alpha male not by means of combat,but through ritual display (see Goodall box 1). Not long after his show, “Mike” replaced “Goliath” as the troupe’s alpha male. Note that the animals Goodall observed were not trained or tamed. Goodall gave them names for iden- tification purposes only. Where does ritual come in? Like so many other encounters among animals concerning domi- nance, mating, territory, and food, Mike’s challenge was played out as a ritual, as symbolic display, not as the “real thing,” deadly combat. Goodall observed other performances by chimpanzees that she thought were very like human theatre (see Goodall box 2).

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sources run deeper than ordinary habit and are in fact

hereditary, urged into birth through biases in mental

development encoded in the genes. [. . .] There is

a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a

powerful group united by devout belief and purpose. Even

when individuals subordinate themselves and risk death

in common cause, their genes are more likely to be

transmitted to the next generation than are those

of competing groups who lack equivalent resolve.

1998, Consilience, 257–58.

everday life sports politics

observances, celebrations

rites of passage

codified forms

ad hoc forms

Social ritual: nonhuman primates

Fixed & free: birds, mammals

Genetically fixed: insects, fish

RITUALIZATION

HUMAN RITUALIZATION

SOCIAL RITUAL RELIGIOUS RITUAL AESTHETIC RITUAL

fig 3.5. The evolution of ritual from an ethological perspective can be depicted as a “tree.” The further up the tree, the more complex the rituals. Nonhuman primates enact social rituals, but only humans enact religious and aesthetic rituals. Drawing by Richard Schechner.

Jane Goodall (1934– ): British ethologist, known for her research among the chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. Her books include In the Shadow of Man (1971) and The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986).

Jane Goodall Chimpanzee ritual challenge

All at once Mike [a young male chimp] calmly walked

over to our tent and took hold of an empty kerosene can

by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and,

walking upright, returned to the place where he had been

sitting. Armed with his two cans Mike continued to stare

toward the other males. After a few minutes he began

to rock from side to side. At first the movement was

almost imperceptible, but Hugo and I were watching

him closely. Gradually he rocked more vigorously, his

hair slowly began to stand erect, and then softly at first,

he started a series of pant-hoots. As he called, Mike got

to his feet and suddenly he was off, charging toward the

group of males, hitting the two cans ahead of him. The

cans, together with Mike’s crescendo of hooting, made

the most appalling racket: no wonder the erstwhile

peaceful males rushed out of the way. Mike and his cans

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George Schaller, who studied the mountain gorilla in Uganda, also underscores similarities between human and non-human primates. Schaller shows how cheering, stomping, waving, and throwing things by involved fans at sports events is very much like what gorillas do (see Schaller box) (see figure 3.6). Recent studies confirm that sports fans are involved to such a degree that they undergo both physiological and psychological changes (see McKinley box). Enthusiastic, even violent displays are not infrequent at football games and wrestling matches. In sports such as golf and tennis, impulses to full-fledged emotional displays are dampened by the traditions of the game. But the situation is not static. In recent years, tennis fans (and players) have become more demonstrative, if not rowdy.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

vanished down a track, and after a few moments there

was silence. [. . .]

After a short interval that low-pitched hooting began

again, followed almost immediately by the appear-

ance of the two rackety cans with Mike closely behind

them. Straight for the other males he charged, and

once more they fled. This time, even before the group

could reassemble, Mike set off again; but he made

straight for Goliath [the alpha male] – and even he

hastened out of Mike’s way like all the others. Then Mike

stopped and sat, all his hair on end, breathing hard.

1971, In the Shadow of Man, 122–23

Jane Goodall

Chimpanzee theatre

At about noon the first heavy drops of rain began to

fall. The chimpanzees climbed out of the tree and

one after the other plodded up the steep grassy slope

toward the open ridge at the top. There were seven adult

males in the group [. . .], several females, and a few

youngsters. At that moment the storm broke. The

rain was torrential, and the sudden clap of thunder, right

overhead, made me jump. As if this were a signal, one of

the big males stood upright and as he swayed and

swaggered rhythmically from foot to foot I could just

hear the rising crescendo of his pant-hoots above the

beating of the rain. Then he charged flat-out down

the slope toward the trees he had just left. He ran some

thirty yards, and then, swinging round the trunk of a

small tree to break his headlong rush, leaped into the

low branches and sat motionless.

Almost at once two other males charged after him.

One broke off a low branch from a tree as he ran and

brandished it in the air before hurling it ahead of him.

The other, as he reached the end of his run, stood upright

and rhythmically swayed the branches of a tree back and

forth before seizing a huge branch and dragging it farther

down the slope. A fourth male, as he too charged, leaped

into a tree and, almost without breaking his speed, tore

off a large branch, leaped with it to the ground, and

continued down the slope. As the last two males called

and charged down, so the one who had started the whole

performance climbed from his tree and began plodding

up the slope again. The others, who had also climbed into

trees near the bottom of the slope, followed suit. When

they reached the ridge, they started charging down all

over again, one after the other, with equal vigor.

The females and youngsters had climbed into the

trees near the top of the rise as soon as the displays had

begun, and there they remained watching throughout the

whole performance. As the males charged down and

plodded back up, so the rain fell harder, jagged forks

or brilliant flares of lightning lit the leaden sky, and the

crashing of the thunder seemed to shake the very

mountains.

My enthusiasm was not merely scientific as I watched,

enthralled, from my grandstand seat on the opposite side

of the narrow ravine, sheltering under a plastic sheet.

[. . .] I could only watch, and marvel at the magnificence

of those splendid creatures. With a display of strength

and vigor such as this, primitive man himself might have

challenged the elements.

1971, In the Shadow of Man, 52–53

George B. Schaller (1933– ): American ethologist, author of The Mountain Gorilla (1963) and The Serengeti Lion (1972).

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RITUAL

fig 3.6. The expressive displays of humans and the great apes can be very similar.

A mountain gorilla displaying, Congo (Zaire). Photograph by D. Parer and E. Parer Cook. Copyright Ardea, London Ltd.

George Schaller Gorillas and sports fans

Various aspects of the chest-beating display sequence are present in the gibbon, orangutan, chimpanzee, and man, although

the specificity is sometimes lacking.

[. . .] Man behaves remarkably like a chimpanzee or a gorilla in conflicting situations. Sporting events are ideal locations

for watching the behavior of man when he is generally excited and emotionally off-guard. A spectator at a sporting

event perceives actions which excite him. Yet he cannot participate in them directly, nor does he want to cease observing

them. The tension thus produced finds release in chanting, clapping of hands, stamping of feet, jumping up and down,

throwing of objects. This behavior is sometimes guided into a pattern by the efforts of cheerleaders who, by repeating similar

sounds over and over again, channel the displays into a violent, synchronized climax. The intermittent nature of such behavior,

the transfer of excitement from one individual to the next, and other similarities with the displays of gorillas are readily

apparent.

1963, The Mountain Gorilla, 235

Liverpool football fans displaying, Wembley Stadium, London. Copyright Popperfoto.

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And not only sports events. Large-scale rhythmic formations of many kinds – marching, movement choirs, hymn singing, disco dancing, and parades, to name some of many – are examples of the same kind of group behavior. Only a few of these allow for individual expression. Mass demonstrations and rallies, religious revivals, the streets of Tehran crowded with people chanting their support for or in opposition to the mullahs, party conventions in the UK and USA, the gathering of thousands of people in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square – all trade in the same emotional currency (see figure 3.7).When mood displays are ritualized into mass actions, individual expression is discouraged or prohibited and replaced by exaggerated, rhythmically

coordinated, repetitive actions and utterances.Aggression is evoked and channeled for the benefit of the sponsor, team, corporation, politician, party, religion, or state.

But what exactly happens to ordinary behavior when it is ritualized? Are there any patterns? Is there a non-ideological system to ritual? Ethologists say that rituals are the result of a process that over millions of years evolved behaviors that

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

James C. McKinley Jr. Root, root, root for the home team!

It has long been assumed that ardent sports fans derive excitement and a sense of community from rooting for a big-time

team. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that for some fans, the ties go much deeper. [. . .]

One theory traces the roots of fan psychology to a primitive time when human beings lived in small tribes, and warriors

fighting to protect tribes were true genetic representatives of their people, psychologists say.

In modern society, professional and college athletes play a similar role for a city in the stylized war on a playing field, the

theory goes. Even though professional athletes are mercenaries in every sense, their exploits may re-create the intense

emotions in some fans that tribal warfare might have in their ancestors. It may also be these emotions that have in large

part fueled the explosion in the popularity of sports over the last two decades. [. . .]

Some recent studies suggest that some fans experience physiological changes during a game or when shown photos of their

team. A study in Georgia has shown, for instance, that testosterone levels in male fans rise markedly after a victory and drop

just as sharply after a defeat. The same pattern has been documented in male animals who fight over a mate: biologists theorize

that mammals may have evolved this way to ensure quick resolutions to conflicts.

James Dabbs, a psychologist at Georgia State University, tested saliva samples from different groups of sports fans before

and after important games. In one test, Dr. Dabbs took saliva samples from 21 Italian and Brazilian men in Atlanta before

and after Brazil’s victory over Italy in soccer’s 1994 World Cup. The Brazilians’ testosterone rose an average of 28%, while

the Italians’ levels dropped 27%. [. . .]

Among zealous male and female fans, Dr. Hillman’s study found, the levels of arousal – measured by heart rate, brain

waves, and perspiration – was comparable to what the fans registered when shown erotic photos or pictures of animal

attacks, he said. [. . .]

Edward Hirt of Indiana University has demonstrated that an ardent fan’s self-esteem tends to track a team’s performance.

[. . . M]en and women who were die-hard fans were much more optimistic about their sex appeal after a victory. They were

also more sanguine about their ability to perform well at mental and physical tests, like darts and word games, Dr. Hirt found.

When the team lost, that optimism evaporated. [. . .]

In most cases, this deep attachment to a team can be healthy, studies have shown. Daniel Wann, a psychologist at Murray

State University in Kentucky, has done several studies showing that an intense interest in a team can buffer people from

depression and foster feelings of self-worth and belonging.

2000, “It Isn’t Just a Game: Clues to Rooting,” 1–7

mood display: an ethological term indicating how an animal communicates through movements, postures, sounds, and faces that it is happy, angry, sad, etc.

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have an “adaptive advantage.” In other words, rituals help animals survive, procreate, and pass on their genes.All rituals share certain qualities:

• some ordinary behaviors (movements, calls) are freed from their original functions;

• the behavior is exaggerated and simplified; movements are often frozen into postures; movements and calls become rhythmic and repetitive;

• conspicuous body parts for display develop, such as the peacock’s tail and the moose’s horns. In humans, these are artificially provided – uniforms, costumes, masks, sound-makers, etc.;

• the behavior is “released” (performed) on cue according to specific “releasing mechanisms” (stimuli releasing conditioned responses).

One can see similarities to “restoration of behavior.” As in restored behavior, rituals are “strips of behavior” that are repeated regardless of their “origins” or original func- tions. The movements, utterances, and postures of human rituals are often ordinary actions that have been exaggerated, simplified, and then repeated. Humans have not developed conspicuous body parts, but are extremely skilled at masks, costumes, makeup, jewelry, scarification, cosmetic surgery, and other ways to modify the body either temporarily or permanently. The “important parts” of the human body have been replicated in untold, often highly exaggerated, representations. Exactly what is “important” varies culturally, though there are some favorites – phallus, breasts, buttocks, and face.

These qualities of ritual enhance its functions. From an ethological perspective, the functions are to reduce deadly fighting within a group, to determine and maintain hierarchy, to enhance group cohesion, to mark out and protect territory, to share food, and to regulate mating. Ethologists argue that these functions carry over into human cultures, where they are overlaid by beliefs, ideologies, and cognition (“we do this because”). In other words, human rituals accomplish the same tasks as animal rituals – but in addition, human rituals are meaningful. Exactly what those meanings are depends both on the specific ritual practice and on the specific culture, religion, society, or kin group.

Are ethologists begging the question? Do they call some animal behavior “ritual” because it looks like what people do? Are those female and juvenile chimps sitting in the trees watching the big males perform really spectators in any human sense? Are the chimps at the theatre? Or was Goodall projecting? Is there really a link connecting human behavior with the behavior of other animals analogous to the evolutionary development of body structure? This is not an easy question to settle.

In both animals and humans rituals arise or are devised around, and to regulate, disruptive, turbulent, dangerous, and ambivalent interactions. In these areas faulty communi- cations can lead to violent or even fatal encounters. Rituals enhance clear communications because they are overdeter- mined, redundant, exaggerated, and repetitious. Ritual’s insistent metamessage is, “You get the message, don’t you?!” This message is both imploring and problematic. Is God listening? Is the trance real? Was that a miracle or a hoax?

Human rituals go beyond animal ritualization in two key regards. Human rituals mark a society’s calendar. Human rituals transport persons from one life phase to another. Animals are not conscious of puberty, Easter, Ramadan, marriage, or death as “life passages.”Animals do not wonder about life after death or reincarnation. Animals don’t take oaths of fealty, or exchange gifts on a birthday. Human rituals are bridges across life’s troubled waters.

RITUAL

fig 3.7. A multitude of Chinese citizens – mostly young – in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square demanding democracy, May 1989. Photograph Reuters, Ed Nachtrieb.

metamessage: a message that refers back to itself. For example, a message that says, “This is a message.” A metamessage of prayer would be praying in such a way that everyone knows, “Now I am praying.” The idea is based on Gregory Bateson’s notion of “metacommunication,” which I will discuss in Chapter 4.

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PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Rituals as liminal performances Everywhere people mark the passing from one life stage to another – birth, social puberty (which may occur before or after the biological changes associated with the onset of adolescence), marriage, parenthood, social advancement, job specialization, retirement, and death.As I pointed out earlier, Gennep noted that these rites of passage move through three phases – the preliminal, liminal, and postliminal. The key phase is the liminal – a period of time when a person is “betwixt and between” social categories or personal identities (see Turner box 1). During the liminal phase, the work of rites of passage takes place.At this time, in specially marked spaces, transitions and transformations occur. The liminal phase fascinated Turner because he recognized in it a possibility for ritual to be creative, to make new situations, identities, and social realities.

During the liminal phase of a ritual two things are accomplished: First, those undergoing the ritual temporarily become “nothing,” put into a state of extreme vulnerability where they are open to change. Persons are stripped of their former identities and positions in the social world; they enter a time-place where they are not-this-not-that, neither here nor there, in the midst of a journey from one social self to another. For the time being, they are powerless and identityless. Second, during the liminal phase, persons are inscribed with their new identities and initiated into their new powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Persons may take oaths, learn lore, dress in new clothes, perform special actions, be scarred, circumcised, or tattooed. The possibilities are countless, varying from culture to culture, group to group, ceremony to ceremony. As I will explain later in this chapter, the workshop-rehearsal phase of performance composition is analogous to the liminal phase of the ritual process.

At the conclusion of the liminal phase of a ritual, actions and objects take on, and radiate, significances in excess of their practical use or value. These actions and objects are symbolic of the changes taking place. The “I do” and exchange of rings at a wedding, the snipping of an eight-day-old Jewish boy’s foreskin in a circumcision, the handful of earth thrown on the coffin at a funeral, the giving of a diploma at a graduation, the placing of a red cap on a new-made cardinal’s head – each signifies a change in status, identity, or what-have-you. Each marks the transformation that is taking place.

But liminality need not require pomp or the use of valuables in order to signify. In Hindu India, the corpse is wrapped in plain cloth, carried on a wooden pallet to the burning grounds, and set ablaze.The body must be consumed, the skull cracked open to release the atman, the ashes scattered. Only then, when all the rituals have been performed,can the self fly free from the body – to final release or on its way to another reincarnation. The Zoroastrian Parsis of Mumbai expose their dead atop the Doongarwadi, the Tower of Silence, where vultures swiftly consume the flesh and smaller bones. Bones too large for the birds are buried or crushed to dust.

Limens, lintels, and stages A limen is a threshold or sill, a thin strip neither inside nor outside a building or room linking one space to another, a passageway between places rather than a place in itself. In ritual and aesthetic performances, the thin space of the limen

Victor Turner Liminality

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are

betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed

by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such,

their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are

expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many

societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions.

Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to

being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bi-

sexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the

sun or moon. Liminal entities, such as neophytes in

initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as

possessing nothing. [. . .] Their behavior is normally

passive or humble; they must obey their instructors

implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without

complaint. It is as though they are being reduced

or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned

anew and endowed with additional powers to enable

them to cope with their new stations in life. Among

themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense

comradeship and egalitarianism.

1969, The Ritual Process, 95

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is expanded into a wide space both actually and conceptually. What usually is just a “go-between” becomes the site of the action. And yet this action remains, to use Turner’s phrase, “betwixt and between.” It is enlarged in time and space yet retains its peculiar quality of passageway or temporariness. Architecturally, the empty space of a limen is bridged at the top by a lintel, usually made of lumber or stone.This provides reinforcement. Conceptually, what happens within a liminal time–space is “reinforced,” emphasized.

This conceptual-architectural detail remains visible in the design of many proscenium theatres.The front frame of a proscenium stage, from the forestage to a few feet behind the curtain, is a limen connecting the imaginary worlds performed onstage to the daily lives of spectators in the house.The house is permanently decorated, while the stage is often fully dressed in settings indicating specific times and places. But most of the world’s stages are empty spaces, to use Peter Brook’s phrase (see figure 3.8). An empty theatre space is liminal, open to all kinds of possibilities: a space that by means of performing could become anywhere. The orchestra circle of the ancient Greek amphitheatre was unadorned and empty except for the altar of Dionysus at its center. The noh stage is made of smoothed hinoki, Japanese cypress. The only decorations are a painting of bamboo to the side and a backdrop painting of a large pine tree – the Yogo Pine at the Kasuga Shrine in Nara – where each year since the fourteenth century Okina, the “first” noh play, is performed. Under every noh stage large hollow earthen jugs are positioned so that when the actors stamp on the wooden stage a deep reverberation swells.The Elizabethan stage was likewise simple and empty, hardly more than “two boards and a passion.” The dancing ground of an African village and the temporary erection of a screen for Javanese wayang kulit (shadow puppets) are both liminal spaces ready to be populated by imagined realities. Illusionistic stage sets, so familiar in the West since the nineteenth century, are actually the exception to the rule. The spaces of film, television, and computer monitors are more traditional. Apparently full of real things and people, they are actually empty screens, populated by shadows or pixels.

Turner realized that there was a difference between what happens in traditional cultures and in modern cultures.With industrialization and the division of labor, many of the functions of ritual were taken over by the arts, entertainment, and recreation.Turner used the term “liminoid” to describe ritual-like types of symbolic action that occurred in leisure activities. If the liminal includes “communication of sacra” and “ludic recombinations and inversions,” the liminoid includes the arts and popular entertainments (see figure 3.9).Generally, liminoid activities are voluntary,while liminal rites are obligatory.

Turner felt that the counter-culture of the 1960s was in part an attempt to recuperate the force and unity of traditional liminality. Shortly before his death in 1983,Turner recognized that the counter-culture had moderated into the New Age with its alternative religions and medicines, concerns for ecology, and increasing tolerance of different sorts of non-traditional lifestyles.Turner was an optimist, if not an outright utopian. He predicted that “the liberated and disciplined body itself, with its many untapped resources for pleasure,pain, and expression,”would lead the way to a better world.

The decades since Turner’s death indicate that his utopianism was unjustified. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, sacred and secular rituals, staged in central, symbolically loaded places – major avenues, civic centers, cathedrals, stadiums, and capitols – reinforce officialdom and mainstream values.Various fundamentalisms – Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and even Buddhist (in Sri Lanka) – attract adherents by the hundreds of millions. Liminoid artistic and social activities take place at the margins

RITUAL

limen: literally a threshold or sill, an architectural feature linking one space to another – a passageway between places rather than a place in itself. A limen is often framed by a lintel, which out- lines the emptiness it reinforces. In performance theory, “liminal” refers to “in-between” actions or behaviors, such as initiation rituals.

Peter Brook (1925– ): British director who, after heading the Royal Shakespeare Company, moved to Paris in 1970 where he founded the International Centre for Theatre Research. Among Brook’s many productions are Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (1964), A Midsummer’s Night Dream (1970), The Mahabharata (1985), Don Giovanni (1998), and Tierno Bokar (2004). His books include The Empty Space (1968), The Shifting Point (1987), The Open Door (1995), and The Threads of Time (1998).

liminoid: Victor Turner’s coinage to describe symbolic actions or leisure activities in modern or postmodern societies that serve a function similar to rituals in pre-modern or traditional societies. Generally speaking, liminoid activities are voluntary, while liminal activities are required. Recreational activities and the arts are liminoid.

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fig 3.8. The empty space of performance in different cultures.

The Greek theatre at Epidaurus, 4th–2nd centuries BCE. This theatre, still in use, holds up to 17,000 spectators. Copyright Ancient Art and Architecture Collection.

The interior of the Swan Theatre as drawn in Elizabethan times by Johannis de Witt. Notice how close the audience is to the performers. Copyright British Museum.

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Scene 8 of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, with The Performance Group, directed by Richard Schechner, in the New School Gymnasium, New Delhi, 1976. Stephen Borst as The Chaplain threatens Jim Griffiths as The Cook. The surrounding audience focuses the otherwise empty space. Photograph by Pablo Bartholomew. Photograph courtesy of Richard Schechner.

A Bira village dancing ground in Congo (Zaire), 1950s. Here ordinary space is transformed into a performance arena by the action taking place. The women are performing a maipe ritual dance. Photograph by Colin Turnbull. Photograph courtesy of Richard Schechner.

Paul Claudel’s La Femme et son Ombre (A Woman and Her Shadow) as performed by Izumi Yoshio, left, and Izumi Yasutake in Nagoya, 1972. Performing in an empty space emphasizes the performers, not the scenery. Photograph by Tanaka Masao. Photograph courtesy of Karen Brazell.

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and in the creases of established cultural systems, off the beaten track in “bad” neighborhoods, and in remote rural areas.The internet pulls these distant and disparate venues and tendencies together, allowing for unity and dispersal at the same time.The question remains whether or not official cultures – by means of regulation, commercialization, and globalization – will reign in the vibrancy and diversity of the internet. Struggles over “intellectual property” indicate that the internet will not be as free – in all senses of that word – as it has been.And even the vaunted freedom of the internet is a double-edged sword. Freedom of speech has spawned a plethora of hate sites whose goal is to shut down the very liberties the sites depend on.These issues will be explored further in Chapter 8.

Communitas and anti-structure Rituals are more than structures and functions; they are also among the most powerful experiences life has to offer.While in a liminal state, people are freed from the demands of daily life.They feel at one with their comrades; personal and social differences are set aside. People are uplifted, swept away, taken over.Turner called this liberation from the constraints

of ordinary life “anti-structure” and the experience of ritual camaraderie “communitas” (see Turner box 2).

“Communitas” is a complex term. As Turner defined it, communitas comes in several varieties, including the “norma- tive” and the “spontaneous.” Normative communitas is what happens during communion in an Episcopal or Roman Catholic service. The congregation is united “in Christ” by the Eucharist. However, not every congregant may feel “in Christ” at that moment. The communitas is “official,” “ordained,” “imposed.” Spontaneous communitas – Turner’s favorite – is different, almost the opposite. Spontaneous communitas happens when a congregation or group catches fire in the Spirit. It can also be secular, as when a sports team is playing so well that each player feels inside the others’heads.

Spontaneous communitas abolishes status. People encounter each other directly, “nakedly,” in the face-to-face intimate encounter that Martin Buber called the dialogue of “I–you” (ich–du). Once, during a theatre workshop I was leading, we reached a state of high spontaneous communitas. A man looked deeply and at length at each of the ten or so of us standing in a circle. “There’s a little bit of you in each of me,” he said. I never knew whether he intended to say what he said or its opposite – but he truly expressed the feeling in the circle at that moment.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

1. In “leisure” time 2. In “special” place 3. Rehearsals, workshops, etc.

1. Communication of “sacred,” “archaic,” “mythical,” texts as quasi-sacra (noh, kutiyattam, kathakali, gospel drama) 2. Ludic recombination: experimental theatre, surrealism, comedy, clowning (develops rules and structures of subversion), misemono (grotesque spectacle) 3. a. Authority of director b. “Chorus line” communitas

1. “Cooling down” ritualized behavior 2. Post performance suppers, etc.

Separation Liminal Reaggregation

(In technologically “simpler” societies)

LIMINAL

Communication of sacra

Ludic recombination and inversion

a. Absolute authority between social categories b. Communitas within social categories

ReaggregationSeparation (from secular, mundane space-time)

(In technologically “complex” societies)

“LIMINOID”

Innumerable types and genres of cultural performance including

THEATRE

fig 3.9. Victor Turner’s diagram of the ritual process in relationship to the liminal, liminoid, and theatre. Figure from On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, by Victor Turner. Copyright The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

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Spontaneous communitas rarely “just happens.” It is generated by the ritual process.Across a ritual limen, inside of a “sacred space/time,” spontaneous communitas is possible. Those in the ritual are all treated equally, reinforcing a sense of “we are all in this together.” People wear the same or similar clothing; they set aside indicators of wealth, rank, or privilege. Formal titles are done away with; sometimes even first names are not used. Instead, people call each other “sister,” “brother,” “comrade,” “you,” or some other generic term. In workshops (liminoid experiences), I encourage people to give themselves new names. More than once, a new name sticks: a transformation takes place.

Ritual experiences are not always pleasant or fun. It can

be terrifying to encounter group forces and face memories, demonic or divine. When in the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna glimpses Krishna in his true form, the unmatched warrior turns to jelly. It is not “good” or “evil” that frightens Arjuna, but coming face to face with the Absolute: “I see no end, or middle, or beginning to your totality [. . .] I am thrilled and yet my mind trembles with fear at seeing what has not been seen before.” Initiation rites are often frightening for the neophytes who are taken to strange and forbidding locations where they are forced through ordeals, some of which may be painful or bloody. Even a celebratory ritual occasion such as a wedding can be very scary to the bride and groom, and, for the parents, a time of high anxiety mixing sadness and joy.

Ritual time/space

Because rituals take place in special, often sequestered places, the very act of entering the “sacred space” has an impact on participants. In such spaces, special behavior is required. One must remove one’s shoes before entering a mosque or a Hindu

RITUAL

Victor Turner A total, unmediated relationship

In liminality, communitas tends to characterize relationships between those jointly undergoing ritual transition. The bonds

of communitas are anti-structural in the sense that they are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, extant, nonrational,

existential, I-Thou relationships. Communitas is spontaneous, immediate, concrete – it is not shaped by norms, it is not

institutionalized, it is not abstract. [. . .] In human history, I see a continuous tension between structure and communitas,

at all levels of scale and complexity. Structure, or all that which holds people apart, defines their differences, and constrains

their actions, is one pole in a charged field, for which the opposite pole is communitas, or anti-structure [. . .] representing

the desire for a total, unmediated relationship between person and person, a relationship which nevertheless does not

submerge one in the other but safeguards their uniqueness in the very act of realizing their commonness. Communitas does

not merge identities; it liberates them from conformity to general norms, though this is necessarily a transient condition if

society is to continue to operate in an orderly fashion.

1974, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 274

In the workshop, village, office, lecture-room, theatre, almost anywhere people can be subverted from their duties and

rights into an atmosphere of communitas. [. . .] Is there any of us who has not known this moment when compatible people

– friends, congeners – obtain a flash of lucid mutual understanding on the existential level, when they feel that all problems,

not just their problems, could be resolved, whether emotional or cognitive, if only the group which is felt (in the first person)

as “essentially us” could sustain its intersubjective illumination? [. . .]

In industrial societies, it is within leisure, and sometimes aided by the projections of art, that this way of experiencing

one’s fellows can be portrayed, grasped, and sometimes realized.

1982, From Ritual to Theatre, 45–48

Martin Buber (1878–1965): Jewish philosopher and Zionist. Buber was born in Austria, raised in the Ukraine, and was teaching in Frankfurt, Germany, when Nazism forced him in 1938 to emigrate to Israel where he became the first president of the Israeli Academy of Science and Humanities. Author of many books, including: I and Thou (1922, Eng. 1937), Eclipse of God (1952), and The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism (1960).

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temple. In the synagogue men are asked to wear yarmulkas (skull caps) and talisem (prayer shawls). In some parts of the world, it is customary for women in Roman Catholic churches to cover their heads. When the sacred space is a natural place – a sacred tree, cave, or mountain, for example – one approaches and enters the space with care.But ordinary secular spaces can be made temporarily special by means of ritual action. Dance and yoga classes often require a careful preparation of the space and special clothes for the participants. When I lead a performance workshop, daily life is left behind. Once participants enter the workshop space, there is no socializing.We begin by changing into our work clothes – plain shirts and loose pants.No shoes, jewelry, or timepieces.Without watches, duration is defined by our mutual experiences. Each session begins with a careful and silent cleaning of the floor. The simple actions of sweep- ing and mopping transport the participants to a different place mentally and emotionally.These rites of entry create communitas even before the exercises begin.

Transportations and transformations Liminal rituals are transformations, permanently changing who people are. Liminoid rituals, effecting a temporary change – sometimes nothing more than a brief communitas experience or a several-hours-long playing of a role – are transportations. In a transportation, one enters into the experience, is “moved” or “touched” (apt metaphors), and is then dropped off about where she or he entered. Figure 3.10 is a model of a transportation performance from the point of view of a performer in a dance, play, or sports contest; or even a deeply religious person at a church service or an adherent of the Afro-Brazilian Candomble religion in trance.

In transportation performances, a person can fall into a trance, speak in tongues, handle snakes, “get happy” with the Spirit – or perform many other actions that result in experiencing overwhelmingly powerful emotions. But no matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, most people return to their ordinary selves. At the Institutional Church of God in Christ in Brooklyn, New York, I have seen women go into trance and dance, speak in tongues, and tremble with the Spirit at 11 o’clock in the morning, while by 1 in the afternoon they are chatting and joking in the church kitchen as they prepare the “fellowship lunch.” In a suburb of Rio de Janeiro I witnessed a young Brazilian man being seized by an orixa (god) of Candomble, sing, speak in an

African language, dance, and yank others into trance with him. After four hours of intense performing, the orixa left his body,he came back to himself, and he served supper to the many neighbors assembled in his mother’s home, which was also her terrero (sacred place).

These examples are more complex than they may at first appear.The entranced Brooklyn women and the Candomble filho de santo (initiated medium), at the moment of their decisive life-changing experience – not at the time I saw them – were transformed.The women had “declared for Christ” and were “twice born.” The man became a Candomble filho de santo. But once they were transformed, they were enabled to participate in any number of transportation perfor- mances. The two kinds of performing are not mutually exclusive, but they do occur with different frequencies. A person is transformed only a few times in life, if ever. However, a person may experience transportations on an almost daily basis.

Transportations occur not only in ritual situations but also in aesthetic performances. In fact, this is where all kinds of performances converge. Actors, athletes, dancers, shamans, entertainers, classical musicians – all train,practice, and/or rehearse in order to temporarily “leave themselves” and be fully “in” whatever they are performing. In theatre, actors onstage do more than pretend.The actors live a double negative. While performing, actors are not themselves, nor are they the characters. Theatrical role-playing takes place between “not me . . . not not me.” The actress is not Ophelia, but she is not not Ophelia; the actress is not Paula Murray Cole, but she is not not Paula Murray Cole. She performs in a highly charged in-between space-time, a liminal space-time. Spectators help by not reminding Cole who

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Ordinary world

Performance world

warmup cooldown

PERFORMING

preparations

putting on street clothes, having a drink, etc.

START/FINISH

fig 3.10. A “transportation performance” from the point of view of a performer. A performer leaves her daily world and by means of preparations and warm-ups enters into performing. When the performance is over, the performer cools down and re-enters ordinary life. For the most part, the performer is “dropped off” where she entered. She has been “transported” – taken somewhere – not “transformed” or permanently changed. Drawing by Richard Schechner.

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she “really is” in her ordinary life. But during the curtain call, they applaud Cole, not Ophelia. Or rather they applaud Cole’s ability to perform Ophelia.

Of course, it’s not so simple. Many actors train hard in order to believe in the actuality of whom and what they are representing. And from the mid-1950s, happeners and performance artists have explored many different ways of performing themselves. But even someone so insistent on performing his own life as Spalding Gray played a character called “Spalding,” a persona who was a framed and edited version of the “real” Spalding. Gray developed his life-narratives by tape recording early in-process appear- ances, listening to the recordings, and editing his text. By the time Gray appeared onstage at Lincoln Center, his apparently casual self-presentation was honed in every detail, including slips and “mistakes.” The audience enjoyed “Spalding” as presented by Gray.

There are performers – actors as well as musicians – who improvise, for whom each instance is “original.” But even in these cases, the restoration of behavior applies. A careful comparison of a number of instances would reveal strips of behavior repeated regularly as well as recurring patterns of presentation (timing, tone of voice, gestures). It is the manipulation of these repetitions that give each performer her or his own style.

Transformation performances bring together two kinds of performers – those who are being transformed and those who manage the transformation. Rites of passage such as initiations are transformation performances. Every initiation

rite is a system worked by those who are being transported, the initiators, on those who are being transformed, the initiates. Let me make this clear by looking at a specific example of an initiation rite.

Asemo’s initiation In the 1950s, Asemo was a boy of the Gahuku people living in Susaroka, a settlement in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea. Asemo’s initiation is described in detail by Kenneth E. Read in The High Valley. Read tells how Asemo, then about ten years old, was abruptly snatched from his mother’s house and secluded along with his age- mates in the bush for two weeks, where they underwent extreme ordeals such as forced vomiting and nose-bleeding. During this phase of the initiation, the boys were literally being emptied, prepared to receive the knowledge of their tribe.

After two weeks, the tired,bedraggled boys were brought back to the village. Riding on the shoulders of the men, they ran a gauntlet of women wielding stones, wood, an axe or two, and even bows and arrows.The attacks were “ritualized,” but severe nonetheless, terrifying the boys. Read writes, “There was no mistaking the venom in the assault of the women,” which “teetered on the edge of virtual disaster.” On the edge, but not over: the attack was contained within its performative boundaries, much the way a bloody hockey game barely but reliably remains a game.

Next, the boys were taken back to the bush for six more weeks of indoctrination and training.They were in a liminal time–space during the process of being transformed into Gahuku men. Read was not allowed to witness the details of this education. But the outcome made it clear that what happened during the six weeks was enough to make a real change in Asemo.The day Asemo and his age-mates returned to Susaroka was a time of feasting and dancing (see figure 3.11). This time the women did not attack the men, but greeted them with a “rising chorus of welcoming calls.” The newly conferred men, the initiates, danced without the assistance or protection of the older men (see Read box).

RITUAL

Paula Murray Cole (1964– ): American actor, co-head of East Coast Artists education program. Cole is a master teacher of the rasaboxes technique of emotional training. With ECA, Cole has worked with Schechner on several productions, including Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1997) and Hamlet (1999).

Spalding Gray (1941–2004): American monologist, author, and actor. A member of The Performance Group (1970–80) and then The Wooster Group (1980–2004). His autobiographical performances began with the ensemble works, Three Places in Rhode Island (1975–80). In his monologues, Gray wryly told the story of his life – from his childhood through his acting career to his experiences as family man. Many of his monologues are published, including: Swimming to Cambodia (1985), Sex and Death to the Age of 14 (1986), Morning, Noon, and Night (1999), Life Interrupted (2005), and The Journals of Spalding Gray (2011).

Kenneth E. Read (1917–95): Australian anthropologist special- izing in Papuan New Guinea cultures. His books include The High Valley (1965) and Return to the High Valley (1986).

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Read wrote in 1965 that he felt he had seen the last Gahuku initiation rite. If that was so, then this signals a big shift in the basis of Gahuku society. That is because the initiation rites didn’t merely “mark” a change – as, say,

graduation ceremonies in Western-style schools do.Asemo’s initiation, taken as an eight-week whole, was the machine that transformed Asemo from a boy into a Gahuku man.This status – whatever its personal meanings and effects, whatever private styles it accommodates – is at its heart social, public, and objective. It did not determine what kind of Gahuku man Asemo became, or even how he felt about it, any more than a wedding ceremony determines what kind of husband the groom will be. But definite acts were performed that forever made Asemo into a Gahuku man.These acts were not symbolic of a change accomplished elsewhere.The ritual acts were themselves the system of transformation.

All the same, the men training Asemo and his cohort were not transformed. They had been transformed earlier in life, at the time of their own initiations.At Asemo’s initia- tion their job was to see that Asemo and his age-mates were properly instructed and made it through. They were the boys’ teachers, guides, models, protectors, tormentors, and elders. They were the transporters of those who were transformed. The relationship between transporters and transformers is depicted in figure 3.12. The transporters were experienced performers.They shared in the bleeding, vomiting, gauntlet-running, and dancing. But when the performance was over, the previously initiated Gahuku men re-entered ordinary life approximately where they left it. If any change occurred among them, it was subtle: some achieved more respect, or lost it, through performing what was required of them.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

fig 3.11. Men and newly initiated boys – one can be seen in the center – dancing on the final day of Asemo’s initiation. Photograph by Kenneth E. Read.

Kenneth E. Read Asemo transformed

They moved unsteadily under the ungainly decorations,

and I failed to see the splendid stirring change that

had been apparent to their elders’ eyes. But dignity

touched them when they began to dance, a slow measure

based on the assertive stepping of the men but held to

a restrained, promenading pace by the weight [of

their headdresses . . .] For a moment I was one with the

crowd of admirers. [. . .] Asemo was in the front rank of

the dancers, his legs moving in unison with his age-mates,

his face, like theirs, expressionless, his eyes fixed on some

distant point only he could see.

1965, The High Valley, 177

Ordinary world

Performance world

Experienced performers

transported

Initiates transformed

Status 1: Boys Status 2: Men

A B C

fig 3.12. The transportation-transformation system works like a printing press. At point B – where the “press” meets the “paper” – permanent impressions are imprinted by the transporters on the transformed. In Asemo’s case, the already initiated men, all experienced performers, temporarily leave their ordinary lives and enter a performance world where they lead the boys through their initiation. During the initiation period, Asemo and his cohorts move from point A to point B again and again. Each ordeal or instruction makes a permanent impression on them. Finally, at the conclusion of the initiation period they enter the village dancing – for the first time as men, C. Drawing by Richard Schechner.

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Social drama One of Turner’s most fruitful yet problematic ideas was his theory of social drama (see Turner box 3). Every social drama develops in four phases, one following the other: Breach—Crisis—Redressive Action—Reintegration or Schism.

A breach is when a particular event breaks open an incipient situation that when activated threatens the stability of a social unit – family, corporation, community, nation, etc. A crisis is a widening of the breach into increasingly open or public displays. There may be several successive crises, each more public and threatening than the last. Redressive action is what is done to deal with the crisis, to resolve or heal the breach. Often enough, at this phase of a social drama, every crisis is answered by a redressive action which fails, evoking new, even more explosive crises. Reintegration is the resolution of the original breach in such a way that the social fabric is knit back together. Or a schism occurs.

Take, for example, the great social drama of sixteenth- century Europe called the Protestant Reformation. The conflict in this social drama was between the established Church of Rome and rebels such as Martin Luther and John Calvin.The decisive breach – that which let loose the great crisis in Christendom of the Reformation – was Luther

nailing his “95 Theses” to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church on 31 October 1517. Each attempt by Rome to redress, appease, or suppress the Protestants failed. Year by year, the Protestants grew stronger. Crisis by crisis, the breach widened, generating a schism yet to be healed. Other examples of social dramas are the ongoing conflicts in Northern Ireland or between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Social dramas can be extremely long-lived, bitter, and intractable. On the other hand, some social dramas are resolved relatively swiftly, at least on the surface.The long- festering conflict in the USA over slavery led to the secession of eleven southern states and the Civil War (1861–65).The war resolved the crisis in favor of the Union who enforced reintegration by arms. The underlying situation was the inability of slave states and free states to agree on the future of slavery and therefore on the future of the Union.The crisis erupted when the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. The Civil War that followed was one portion of the redressive action. The surrender of the Confederate army at Appomattox,Virginia in 1865 signaled the start of reintegration.However, the end of the war did not settle the matter.Questions of equality, civil liberties, racism, and economic justice brought to the fore in the Civil War era are still in the process of being resolved.The redressive action and reintegration phases are still going on, as evidenced by affirmative action, civil rights legislation, and litigation.

RITUAL

Victor Turner Social dramas

Social dramas are units of aharmonic process, arising in conflict situations. Typically, they have four main phases of public

action. [. . .] These are: 1. Breach of regular, norm-governed social relations. [. . .] 2. Crisis during which [. . .] there is a

tendency for the breach to widen. [. . .] Each public crisis has [. . .] liminal characteristics, since it is a threshold between

more or less stable phases of the social process, but it is not a sacred limen, hedged around by taboos and thrust away from

the centers of public life. On the contrary, it takes up its menacing stance in the forum itself and, as it were, dares the

representatives of order to grapple with it. [. . .] 3. Redressive action [ranging] from personal advice and informal mediation

or arbitration to formal judicial and legal machinery, and, to resolve certain kinds of crisis or legitimate other modes

of resolution, to the performance of public ritual. [. . .] Redress, too, has its liminal features, its being “betwixt and between,”

and, as such, furnishes a distanced replication and critique of the events leading up to and composing the “crisis.” This

replication may be in the rational idiom of a judicial process, or in the metaphorical and symbolic idiom of a ritual process.

[. . .] 4. The final phase [. . .] consists either of the reintegration of the disturbed social group or of the social recognition

and legitimization of an inseparable schism between contesting parties.

1974, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 37–41

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These brief applications of Turner’s theory expose its weaknesses.The theory reduces and flattens out events.The precise details, the ups and downs, the nuances and differ- ences that make cultural analysis interesting and enlightening are pressed into sameness. Any conflict can be analyzed “as” social drama – but what new insights does such an analysis yield? The one advantage to the theory is that it is helpful in distilling very complicated circumstances into manageable units. As a teaching device, the social drama theory has its good points. One can select a starting point and a finishing point, framing a set of social or historical events so that a cluster of occurrences that may at first appear inchoate become manageable “as” drama. It makes closure appear inevitable. Such framing is always arbitrary.

What Turner’s theory does is twist worlds of difference into the shape of a Western aesthetic genre, the drama.The progression from breach and crisis through redressive action to reintegration/schism is the underlying scheme of the Greek tragedies, the Elizabethan theatre, and modern realist drama. It is what Aristotle meant when he wrote “plot is the soul of tragedy” and “every tragedy has a beginning, middle, and end.” This is the theatre Turner was most familiar with. However, this diachronic structure is not so apparent in the theatre of the absurd or other counter-dramatic, non-narrative pieces, such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or even Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children with its episodic plot, each scene comprising a small drama in itself. It doesn’t apply at all to many Happenings or perfor- mance art. Nor is it present in the extended, episodic works of many non-Western cultures. Peter Brook was roundly criticized in the 1980s for turning the Mahabharata into a Western-style drama. Similarly, Turner can be taken to task for turning all the world’s conflicts into Western-style dramas. Perhaps today’s world of terrorism, guerrilla warfare, prolonged civil wars, and economic espionage are better modeled by performance art or the seemingly endless episodes of the Mahabharata. It may be that life

mirrors art as much as the other way round – and that social theorists need to choose very carefully what aesthetic genres they use as models.

Turner integrated his social drama theory into his theory of ritual process (see figure 3.13). During the redressive action phase of a social drama, people turn to: political process (from legislation to war), the legal process (from arbitration to formal trials), and the ritual process. The ritual process employs a wide range of devices – divination, sacrifice, and, in Turner’s words, the “ludic deconstruction and recombination of familiar cultural configurations.” In other words, art. But exactly how art helps resolve social conflict Turner does not make clear.

What is more useful than the social drama model is noting the very fluid relationship between aesthetic processes and social processes, including aesthetic and social dramas.This relationship can be depicted as a horizontal numeral 8 or infinity symbol (see figure 3.14). This model depicts an ongoing and never-ending process whereby social dramas affect aesthetic dramas and vice versa.That is to say, the visible actions of any given social drama are informed, shaped, and guided by aesthetic principles and performance/rhetorical devices. Reciprocally, a culture’s visible aesthetic practices are informed, shaped, and guided by the processes of social interaction (see Turner box 4). The politician, activist, lawyer, or terrorist all use techniques of performance – staging, ways of addressing various audiences, setting, etc. – to present, demonstrate, protest, or support specific social actions – actions designed to maintain, modify, or overturn the existing social order. Reciprocally, artists draw on actions performed in social life,“real events,” not only as materials to be enacted but as themes, rhythms, and models of behavior and representation.As figure 3.14 indicates with its arrows, there is a positive feedback flow between social and aesthetic drama. This model demands that each social drama, each aesthetic drama (or other kind of performance), be under- stood in its specific cultural and historical circumstances.The word “drama” is used not to assert Western hegemony, but as a cipher representing any kind of specific cultural enact- ment. Another way of putting this relationship is to say that every performance – aesthetic or social – is both efficacious and entertaining. That is, each event proposes something

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–64): the two most important leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Luther, a German, challenged the authority of the pope and the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. Calvin, a Frenchman, put forward his ideas on reform in The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). Luther’s famous “95 Theses” of 1517 protested the selling of indulgences: “when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased” (Thesis 28); and “The assurance of salvation by letters of pardon is vain, even though the commissary, nay, even though the pope himself, were to stake his soul upon it” (Thesis 52).

Samuel Beckett (1906–89): Irish-born playwright and novelist who spent most of his adult life residing in France. His works for the stage include Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (1961). Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

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to get done and each event gives pleasure to those who participate in it or observe it. Let me give a concrete example of what I mean.

The pig-kill dancing at Kurumugl In March 1972 at the “Council Grounds” in the vicinity of Kurumugl, a village in the Papua New Guinea highlands, I observed a two-day pig-kill celebration.The performance I saw was in danger of tipping over into actual combat. The dances and songs were adapted from combat movements and war chants.The armed dancers dressed partly for battle and partly for dancing (see figure 3.15).The first day consisted

RITUAL

Breach Crisis RedressiveProcess

Reintegration

Recognition of Irreparable Schism

Political Processes (from deliberation to revolution and war)

Legal-Judicial Process (from informal arbitration to formal courts)

Ritual Processes (divination, affliction rituals, prophylactic rituals, embedded or independent sacrifice, etc.)

RITUAL PROCESS

Rites of Separation

Rites of Limen or Margin

Rites of Reaggregation

1. Communication of sacra (sacerrima), secret symbols of community’s unity and continuity a. Exhibitions of objects b. Instructions (myths, riddles, catechisms) c. Actions (enactment of myths, dance, dramas, etc.)

2. Ludic deconstruction and recombination of familiar cultural configurations

3. Simplification of social-structural relationships a. Absolute authority of elders over juniors b. Communitas among initiands

SOCIAL DRAMA

fig 3.13. Victor Turner’s diagram of the relationship between social drama and the ritual process. Figure from On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, by Victor Turner. Copyright The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Hidden

Visible Actual

VirtualStaging Efficacious

StagingEfficacious

Social drama Aesthetic performance

Soc ial an

d political action Per forma

nce techniques

Performance techni que

s Social and political ac tion

fig 3.14. The mutual positive feedback relationship of social dramas and aesthetic performances. Drawing by Richard Schechner.

Victor Turner Social drama/aesthetic drama

Notice that the manifest social drama feeds into the

latent realm of stage drama; its characteristic form in a

given culture, at a given time and place, unconsciously,

or perhaps preconsciously, influences not only the form

but also the content of the stage drama of which it is the

active or “magic” mirror. The stage drama, when it is

meant to do more than entertain – though entertainment

is always one of its vital aims – is a metacommentary,

explicit or implicit, witting or unwitting, on the major

social dramas of its social context (wars, revolutions,

scandals, institutional changes). Not only that, but its

message and its rhetoric feed back into the latent

processual structure of the social drama and partly

accounts for its ready ritualization. Life itself now

becomes a mirror held up to art, and the living now

perform their lives, for the protagonists of a social

drama, a “drama of living,” have been equipped by

aesthetic drama with some of their most salient opinions,

imageries, tropes, and ideological perspectives. Neither

mutual mirroring, life by art, art by life, is exact, for

each is not a planar mirror but a matricial mirror; at

each exchange something new is added and something

old is lost or discarded. Human beings learn through

experience, though all too often they repress painful

experiences, and perhaps the deepest experience is

through drama not through social drama or stage drama

(or its equivalent) alone but in the circulatory or

oscillatory process of their mutual and incessant

modification.

1985, On the Edge of the Bush, 300–301

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of setting up house in long rectangular huts and digging cooking pits.The second day began with the slaughter of about 200 pigs. As each owner killed his animal he melodically orated a speech saying how hard it was to raise the pig, who it was promised to, what a fine animal it was, etc. These recitatives were applauded with laughs and roars, as they often were full of jokes and obscene invective.Then the pigs were gutted, butchered in halves, and lowered into the pits to roast over hot rocks.The guts were hung in nets over the ovens and steamed. Bladders were blown into balloons for children to play with.A festive scene.

As the cooking started, the men retired to their huts to get ready. I went inside with one who set up a mirror and applied blue, red, and black pigment to his arms, face, and torso. He painted half his nose red, the other half blue. I asked him what the patterns meant. He said he chose them because he liked the way they looked.When he was done he emerged, his casual air evaporating as he literally thrust his chest

forward and up, gave a long whooping call, put on his four- foot long peacock and cassowary feather headdress, and displayed himself.

He was costumed not for a fictional role in a play, but for a life role – displaying his strength, his power, his wealth, and his position in the group. He joined his comrades, whose costumes were like his, amalgams of traditional–local and new–imported: bones and sunglasses, cigarette holders and homemade pipes, khaki shorts under grass skirts. But despite what a purist might call intrusions, a traditional ritual of “payback” was being enacted.The pig-kill at Kurumugl was very like the kaiko that anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport witnessed in 1963 – a traditional performance enacted regularly at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. As at the kaiko, the dances at Kurumugl were adapted from military moves (see Rappaport box).

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

fig 3.15. Men dressed for dancing at Kurumugl, Papua New Guinea Highlands, 1972. Photograph by Richard Schechner.

Roy A. Rappaport (1926–97): American anthropologist who analyzed the ritual performances of the Tsembaga of Papua New Guinea. He also developed a general theory of ritual. His books include Pigs for the Ancestors (1968), Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (1979), and Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999).

Roy A. Rappaport From fighting to dancing

The visitors approach the [village] gate silently, led by men carrying fight packages [full of materials to give a warrior courage and improve his chances of killing an enemy], swinging their axes as they run back and forth in front of their procession in the peculiar crouched fighting prance. Just before they reach the gate they are met by one or two of those locals who have invited them and who now escort them over the gate. Visiting women and children follow behind the dancers and join the other spectators on the sidelines. There is much embracing as the local women and children greet visiting kinfolk. The dancing procession charges to the center of the dance ground shouting the long, low battle cry and stamping their feet, magically treated before their arrival [. . .] to enable them to dance strongly. After they charge back and forth across the dance ground several times, repeating the stamping in several locations while the crowd cheers in admiration of their numbers, their style, and the richness of their finery, they begin to sing.

1968, Pigs for the Ancestors, 187

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The visitors approaching the Council Grounds came not as friends to a party but as invaders seizing what they were owed.As the invaders – armed with fighting spears – danced their assault on the Council Grounds, they were repelled by armed campers – men plus about twenty fully armed women dancing their defense of the meat. The invaders launched vigorous assaults dozens of times. A valuable pea- nut field was trampled to muck. Each assault was met by a determined counter-attack. But foot by foot, the invaders penetrated to the heart of the Council Grounds, to the pile of meat and the altar of jawbones and flowers at its center. Once the invaders reached the meat they merged with their “enemies” forming one whooping, chanting, dancing doughnut of warriors. They danced around the meat for nearly an hour.

I was pinned against a tree, between warriors and meat.Then suddenly the dancing stopped. Orators plunged into the meat, pulling out a leg or a flank, shouting-singing things like (in pidgin English), “This pig I give you in pay- ment for the pig you gave my father three years ago! Your pig was scrawny, no fat on it at all! But my pig is enormous, with tons of fat, and lots of good meat – see! see! – much better than what you gave my father! My brothers and I will remember that we are giving you today better than what you gave us. If we call you to help us in a fight,you must come! You owe us bigtime!”

Sometimes the speechifying rose to song. Insults were hurled back and forth. The fun in orating, and the joking, teetered on the edge. Participants did not forget that not so long ago they were blood enemies. After more than an hour of orating, the meat was distributed. Hoisted onto sleds, the booty was carried shoulder-high as whole families, with much singing,departed with their share.This meat found its way by means of the network of ritual obligations to places far from Kurumugl and to many who were not present that day at the Council Grounds.

Instead of a secret raiding party there were dancers; instead of taking human victims, they took meat. Instead of entering enemy territory on the sly as would occur in war, the whole performance took place on the Council Grounds, a no man’s land. And instead of doubt about the outcome, everyone knew what was going to happen. A ritualized social drama – as war in the highlands had been – had been transformed into something approaching an aesthetic drama.

What are the differences between social and aesthetic dramas? Aesthetic dramas create symbolic times, spaces, and characters; the outcome of the story is predetermined by the drama.Aesthetic dramas are fictions. Social dramas have more variables, their outcomes are in doubt, and they are like

games. Social dramas are “real,” they happen “here and now.” But aspects of social dramas, as with aesthetic dramas, are pre-arranged, foreknown, and rehearsed. The celebration at Kurumugl was somewhere between a social and an aesthetic drama.

Figure 3.16 diagrams what happens at a successful pig-kill celebration. The transformations “above the line” convert dangerous encounters into mostly benign aesthetic and economic performances. Those “below the line” show how the situation existing between groups is changed by the ritual.The pig-kill and dancing at the Council Grounds managed a complicated and potentially dangerous exchange of goods and obligations with a minimum of danger and a maximum of pleasure.This success was due to performing. Performing was the way the participants achieved “real results.” The dancing, orating, and giving out meat did not mark or “represent” the results, but created the results they celebrated.Those at the Council Grounds performed in two senses: they put on a show, and they got something done.

As “above-line right-side” activities in figure 3.16 grow in importance, the entertainment value of the event increases relative to its efficacy value. Maybe the first times groups gathered at the Council Grounds, they danced so that they might exchange pigs to fulfill social obligations. But over time, they came to the grounds and exchanged pigs so that they could dance. Or at least the motives for the gathering blurred. It was not only that creditors and debtors changed positions, but also that people wanted to show off, dance, and have a good time. It was not only to “perform results” that the dances were staged, but because people enjoyed the sing-sing (festive celebration) for its own sake.

The efficacy–entertainment dyad Efficacy and entertainment are not binary opposites. Rather, they are the poles of a continuum (see figure 3.17).The basic polarity is between efficacy and entertainment, not ritual and theatre.Whether one calls a specific performance “ritual” or

RITUAL

war parties human victims battledress combat

dancing groups pig meat costumes dancing

two groups debtors creditors

one group creditors debtors

transformed into. . . . . .

become. . . . . .

fig 3.16. At a successful pig-kill celebration a set of transformations is effected. Those transformations “above the line” change potentially lethal encounters into aesthetic and economic performances. Those “below the line” depict the changes wrought by the ritual performance.

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“theatre” depends mostly on context and function. A performance is called one or the other because of where it is performed, by whom, in what circumstances, and for what purpose. The purpose is the most important factor determining whether a performance is ritual or not. If the performance’s purpose is to effect change, then the other qualities under the heading “efficacy” in figure 3.17 will also be present, and the performance is a ritual. But if the per- formance’s purpose is mostly to give pleasure, to show off, to be beautiful, or to pass the time, then the performance is an entertainment.The fact is that no performance is pure efficacy or pure entertainment.

Origins of performance: If not ritual, then what? Performance doesn’t originate in ritual any more than it originates in one of the aesthetic genres. Performance originates in the creative tensions of the binary efficacy– entertainment. Think of this figure not as a flat binary, but as a braid or helix, tightening and loosening over time and in specific cultural contexts. Efficacy and entertainment are not opposites, but “dancing partners,” each depending on and in continuous active relationship to the other.

No “first performance” will ever be identified either specifically or in terms of genre.That has not stopped Western scholars since the end of the nineteenth century trying to prove that the performing arts originated in ritual. The first scholars to propose such an origin were influenced by several factors.Early European and American anthropologists derived their theories from the observations of colonists, missionaries, and adventurers who wrote reports about so-called “primitive peoples” in Africa, Native America, Australia, and elsewhere performing rituals using dance, music, and theatre. In one of the distortions of social

Darwinism, “primitive peoples” were thought to be still “living in the stone age,” their practices evidence of how all peoples once lived. If these “primitives” performed rituals but had not yet “reached the level”of the aesthetic performing arts in the West, then this indicated that the arts originated in/as ritual. Second, a particular group of scholars centered at Cambridge University – Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford – believed they found in ancient Greek tragedy evidence of a “primal ritual” or sacer ludus (sacred game) re-enacting the sacrifice–rebirth of a god (see Murray box). Third, medievalists traced the origins of Renaissance theatre to church ritual.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Results Link to transcendent Other(s) Timeless time – the eternal present Performer possessed, in trance Virtuosity downplayed Traditional scripts/behaviors Transformation of self possible Audience participates Audience believes Criticism discouraged Collective creativity

For fun Focus on the here and now Historical time and/or now Performer self-aware, in control Virtuosity highly valued New and traditional scripts/behaviors Transformation of self unlikely Audience observers Audience appreciates, evaluates Criticism flourishes Individual creativity

EFFICACY/RITUAL ENTERTAINMENT/PERFORMING ARTS

fig 3.17. The efficacy/ritual-entertainment/aesthetic performance dyad. Although typeset as a binary, the figure ought to be read as a continuum. There are many degrees leading back and forth from “results” to “fun,” from “collective creativity” to “individual creativity,” and so on.

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), Gilbert Murray (1866– 1957), and Francis Cornford (1874–1943): British classicists based at Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the early part of the twentieth century who proposed several influential theories on the relationship of ritual to theatre. Their works included Harrison’s Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), Cornford’s The Origins of Attic Comedy (1914), and Murray’s Five Stages of Greek Religion (1925).

Gilbert Murray The ritual origins of Greek tragedy

The following note presupposes certain general views

about the origin and essential nature of Greek Tragedy.

It assumes that tragedy is in origin a Ritual Dance, a

Sacer Ludus [. . .] Further, it assumes in accord with

the overwhelming weight of ancient tradition, that the

dance in question is originally or centrally that of

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But each of these arguments is spurious. There is no such thing as “primitive” peoples. Social Darwinism mis- takenly assumes a hierarchy of cultures. Difference does not prove superiority.The “primal ritual” of the Cambridge Anthropologists (as Harrison, Cornford, and Murray were called) is provable only if one uses circular reasoning. The primal ritual exists because of remnants of it in Greek tragedy; Greek tragedy contains remnants of a primal ritual; therefore there must be such a ritual. As for the origins of modern European theatre in the Mass or other church celebrations such as the cycle plays of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries,doubtlessly these great civic and religious events influenced what was to become Renaissance theatre. But it is also true that the medieval period enjoyed many popular entertainments as well as a variety of “private” or indoor theatricals, dances, and musical performances.All of these impacted the Renaissance performing arts. The medieval epoch was full of performing arts, both within, nearby, and separate from the Church.

The fact is that at any given point in time, in every part of the world and in every culture, people were and are mak- ing dances, music, and theatre.They are using performances for a variety of purposes, including entertainment, ritual, community-building, and socializing. These functions can be summarized as the dynamic tension between efficacy and entertainment.The desire to imagine a “first performance” tells us more about what scholars of a certain culture desire than about what may have actually happened.

Theoretically, the “first performance” is a situation, not an event or a genre. Performance originates in the need to make things happen and to entertain; to get results and to fool around; to show the way things are and to pass the time; to be transformed into another and to enjoy being oneself; to disappear and to show off; to embody a transcendent other

and to be “just me” here and now; to be in trance and to be in control; to focus on one’s own group and to broadcast to the largest possible audience; to play in order to satisfy a deep personal, social, or religious need; and to play only under contract for cash. The shift from ritual to aesthetic performance occurs when a participating community fragments into occasional, paying customers.The move from aesthetic performance to ritual happens when an audience of individuals is transformed into a community. The ten- dencies to move in both these directions are present in all performances.

Changing rituals or inventing new ones Rituals provide stability. They also help people accomplish change in their lives, transforming them from one status or identity to another. But what about rituals themselves? They give the impression of permanence, of “always having been.” That is their publicly performed face. But only a little investigation shows that as social circumstances change, rituals also change (see Drewal box). Sometimes the change is accomplished informally as ritual practitioners – shamans, Hindu priests, tribal elders – adjust their perfor- mances to suit new circumstances. Introducing newer technology sometimes subtly and sometimes more obviously changes the ritual. Electric lighting, microphones, and more recently the use of the internet have all resulted in changes in the performance of rituals. In other circumstances, official changes are introduced to bring rituals into line with new social realities.Thus Vatican II, meeting in Rome from 1962 to 1965 with the stated purpose of bringing the Church more into harmony with the modern world, actually deeply changed Roman Catholic rituals.The liturgy was reformed in order to bring ordinary people closer to the service. Latin was replaced by the vernacular as the language of the Mass. Non-priests were given more of a chance to participate in services. On the other hand, many ingrained practices of the Church were retained, including priestly celibacy (in theory at least).

But rituals may also be invented – both by official culture and by individuals. In fact, one sleight of hand of official culture is to make relatively new rituals and the traditions they embody appear old and stable. Such an appearance helps support official culture’s claim to tradition and to assert that the status quo provides social stability. It is no accident that dictatorships thrive on state ceremony, much of it concocted to suit the needs of a particular regime.To a large degree, the

RITUAL

Dionysus, performed at his feast, in his theatre. [. . .] It

regards Dionysus in this connection as an “Eniautos-

Daimon,” or vegetation God, like Adonis, Osiris, etc.,

who represents the cyclic death and rebirth of the

earth and the world, i.e., for practical purposes, of

the tribe’s own lands and the tribe itself. It seems clear,

further, that Comedy and Tragedy represent different

stages in the life of this Year Spirit.

1912, “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in

Greek Tragedy,” 341

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emergence of the idea of a “nation” from the eighteenth century onward was buttressed by new rituals enacting national consciousness. Designating and singing a “national anthem,” “saluting the flag,” and even the pomp surrounding the British monarchy are not anywhere near as old or set as they appear to be (see Hobsbawm box). Schools are hotbeds of invented rituals pertaining to sororities and fraternities, “school spirit,” and the awarding of degrees at graduation. A set order of behavior and annual repeti- tion rather quickly ritualizes behavior such as hazings and initiations, academic processions, and cheers at sports matches (see figure 3.18). The fact that the student population turns over every few years helps establish new rituals swiftly. In real life a generation takes 20 or 30 years to turn over; at college it is four years.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Margaret Thompson Drewal Revising rituals

Practitioners of Yoruba religion are aware that when ritual becomes static, when it ceases to adjust and adapt, it becomes

obsolete, empty of meaning, and eventually dies out. They often express the need to modify rituals to address current social

conditions. Sometimes change is the result of long deliberations, oftentimes it is more spontaneous. Many revisions are not

particularly obvious, unless the observer is thoroughly familiar with the ritual process by having followed a number of its

performances, much in the same way a critic follows the productions of a dance or theatre piece.

1992, Yoruba Ritual, 8

fig 3.18. An academic procession at New York University in the 1990s. These kinds of processions are secular ritual celebrations. The music, pace of marching, kinds of robes, insignia, and hats worn by the participants indicate the school, degree, and other particulars fixed by the tradition. Photograph courtesy New York University.

Eric Hobsbawm Inventing traditions

Nothing appears more ancient, and linked into an

immemorial past, than the pageantry which surrounds

British monarchy in its public ceremonial manifestations.

Yet [. . .] in its modern form it is the product of the late

19th and 20th centuries. [. . .] “Invented tradition” is

taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by

overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic

nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms

of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies

continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they

normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable

historic past. A striking example is the deliberate choice

of the Gothic style for the 19th-century rebuilding of the

British Parliament and the equally deliberate decision

after World War II to rebuild the parliamentary chamber

on exactly the same basic plan as before. [. . .]

To establish the clustering of “invented traditions” in

western countries between 1870 and 1914 is relatively

easy. [These include] Bastille Day and the Daughters of

the American Revolution, May Day, [. . .] the Olympic

Games, the Cup Final, and the Tour de France as popular

rites, and the institution of flag worship in the U.S.A.

[. . .] Moreover, the construction of formal ritual spaces,

already consciously allowed for in German nationalism,

appears to have been systematically undertaken even in

countries which had hitherto paid little attention to it.

[. . .] New constructions for spectacle and de facto mass

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Individual artists, especially since the 1960s, have taken to inventing rituals. Anna Halprin calls some of her performances “rituals,” as do many other artists (see figure 3.19 and Halprin box).The impulse behind these claims is an attempt to overcome a sense of individual and social fragmentation by means of art.This need is exacerbated by the fact that certain groups feel excluded by organized religion. Gay Roman Catholics, for example, are not able to worship openly as gay people in the Church; similarly Islam,Orthodox Judaism, and many fundamentalist Protestant churches are homophobic. Many heterosexuals also feel excluded for various reasons.But these exclusions do not diminish people’s love of and need for ritual.The need to build community is fostered by ritual. And if official rituals either do not satisfy or are egregiously exclusive, new rituals will be invented, or older rituals adapted, to meet felt needs.

Using rituals in theatre, dance, and music

Not only have rituals been invented wholesale, but older rituals have long provided grist for the artistic mill or have been used as a kind of popular entertainment.There is a long history of importing “authentic rituals” and showing them at colonial expositions, world’s fairs, and amusement parks. Some of these presentations have had significant impact on Western theatre and dance – even when they were spurious.At the turn of the twentieth century, modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis saw “Indian dancing” at Coney Island’s “Hindu Village.” The Village was installed at the famous amusement park because of the great success of Little Egypt’s “nautch dance” at the 1893 Chicago Exposition. What St.Denis saw was vaguely connected to Indian sadir nac, itself related to ritual temple dancing – later reconstructed in India as bharatanatyam. Whatever St. Denis saw in the Hindu Village propelled her toward leading a revolution in modern dance. St. Denis and her partner Ted Shawn counted as their students and company members Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, both major modern dancers–choreographers who themselves had many influ- ential students. Similarly, what French performance theorist Antonin Artaud made of the Balinese ritual dancers he saw in Paris’s 1931 Colonial Exposition changed the history of modern Western theatre (see figure 3.20).

RITUAL

ritual such as sports stadia, outdoor and indoor, [. . .] and

the use of such buildings as the Sportspalast in Berlin or

the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris [. . .] anticipate the

development of formal spaces for public mass ritual (Red

Square from 1918 [in Moscow, Tiananmen Square from

1949 in Beijing]).

1983, The Invention of Tradition, 1–2, 303, 305

fig 3.19. Dancer and ritual-maker Anna Halprin takes a vehement step leading a line of performers during a workshop, 1990s. Photograph by Jay Grayam. Photograph courtesy of Anna Halprin.

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Sufi Mevlevi dancers – “whirling dervishes” – have appeared many times on concert stages.When I saw them perform in 1972 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, spectators were admonished in writing, “The program is a religious ceremony.You are kindly requested to refrain from applause.”The BAM audience was reminded that what they had paid money to see as entertainment retained enough of its ritual aura to require a change in conventional theatre response. Or, perhaps slyly, the spectators were being told that they were getting their money’s worth of something “authentic.” But it’s not only in the West that such reframing occurs. I have seen Bengali and other Indian folk-ritual put on stage before “high-art” audiences in Kolkata, New Delhi, and Mumbai. Similarly, in China, Mexico, and Cuba I have witnessed rituals reframed as aesthetic performances. This kind of reframing is taking place all around the world.That is because “First World” and “Third World” people exist cheek- by-jowl in many countries.Tourist shows draw on locals as well as foreigners for audiences.The distinction is no longer mostly “East/West” or “North/South” but increasingly “center/margin,” “metropolis/outlying areas,” and “tourist/ local.”

The reshaping of ritual materials into new “original works” is also widespread. Jerzy Grotowski synthesized rituals from several cultures to make his final performance,

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Anna Halprin The transforming power of dance

In these large group dances I noticed an exceptional phenomenon occurring, time and time again. When enough people moved

together in a common pulse with a common purpose, an amazing force, an ecstatic rhythm, took over. People began to move

as if they were parts of a single body, not in uniform motion but in deeply interrelated ways. This recurrence of spatial and

interrelated movement is no accident. It is an external version of the geometry and biology of our inner life – our bodies

extended in space. People form circles. They make processions. Spirals. Entrances and exits. They orient themselves in space

by using the four directions. They create a central axis. [. . .] In these archetypal movements people seemed to be tracing

out the forms and patterns of a larger organism, communicating with and being moved by a group body-mind or spirit.

[. . .] Had I discovered something new? Of course not! This large-scale group movement is an ancient phenomenon in

dance. [. . .] What was exciting was that we were learning how to generate this same tribal spirit and energy, this same sense

of group ritual with people whose culture contains little of such tradition in dance performances. We were learning how to

return to performers and spectators power which in this culture had often been taken from them and placed in the hands

of scientific experts and official artists. [. . .] More and more, in both workshops and public rituals, I encouraged people to

work with their own lives as material, to use real-life issues so that the transforming power of dance would have the opportunity

to effect real-life changes for them.

1995, Moving Toward Life, 228–29

Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968): American dancer and choreographer who along with Ted Shawn (1891–1972) founded the Denishawn Dance Company in 1915. Among Denishawn’s students and dancers were Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Louis Horst. St Denis specialized in “oriental” dances, including the Indian Radha (1906), the Japanese O-Mika (1913), and the Chinese Kuan Yin (1916).

Martha Graham (1894–1991): American modern dancer and choreographer. Graham choreographed more than 170 group and solo productions including Primitive Mysteries (1931), Appalachian Spring (1944), and Seraphic Dialogue (1955).

Doris Humphrey (1895–1958): American dancer and choreographer. Humphrey’s major works include Life of the Bee (1929), The Shakers (1930), and Song of the West (1940–42).

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948): French actor, director, theorist, and poet. Author of The Theatre and its Double (1938; Eng. 1958). wwwwww

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fig 3.20.

Several of the Balinese dancers Artaud saw at the Colonial Exposition of 1931 in Paris. The structure appears to be a Balinese temple, but it actually is the replica of one constructed for the Exposition. Photograph courtesy of Nicola Savarese.

The program of the performance Artaud saw. The picture is of a Balinese gamelan orchestra with the caption, “Instruments and players of the gong.” The rest of the text reads, “Participation of the Netherlands in the International Colonial Exposition of Paris. Program of music and dances performed by a group of men and women dancers from the island of Bali under the direction of Tjokorde Gde Rake Soekawati. At the Pendopo (theatre) of the Holland Pavilion.” Program courtesy of Nicola Savarese.

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Action (see Osinski box).Versions of Action are still being performed by Grotowski’s designated artistic heir, Thomas Richards. Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 5 fuses Australian Aboriginal and African music with Glass’s own distinct style. The sung texts come from more than 20 different cultures and epochs, ranging over 3,000 years, from the Rig Veda, the Bible, and the Qur’an to Hawaiian, Zuni, and Mayan myths, Persian poetry,Chinese philosophy, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Glass’s self-stated ambition was to create a “spiritual human history” from Creation to the future, a millennial version equal to one of the great Masses of Bach or Mozart. But, distinct from these earlier artists, Glass wanted to compose music that was not “localized” in the Christian tradition. This desire for cultural transcendence – or is it hybrid synthesis? – is a powerful, if problematic, outgrowth of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Using rituals to make new aesthetic performances is not a practice of European and Euro-American artists only. African-American chore- ographer Ralph Lemon, Indian theatre director Ratan Thiyam, and Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-Min are three among many artists importing and/or reshaping rituals in their productions (see figure 3.21). I will examine globalization, hybridity, and intercultural performance in Chapter 8.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99): Polish theatre director, performer trainer, and theorist. Founding director of the Polish Laboratory Theatre (1959–84), with which he explored environmental theatre staging, scenic and textual montage, and connections between ritual and theatre. After 1965, Grotowski investigated the links between ancient and modern rituals and the interior life of what he called the “doer,” the performer. His theatre works include Stanislaw Wyspianski’s Akropolis (1962), Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1963), Calderón de la Barca’s The Constant Prince (1965) and a work based on the New Testament, Apocalypsis cum Figurus (1969). Grotowski is the author of Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) and author/subject of The Grotowski Sourcebook (1997), edited by Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner.

Thomas Richards (1962– ): American actor whom Grotowski designated his “artistic heir.” At present, Richards heads the Grotowski Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy, where he works closely with Mario Biagini. The artistic output of the Workcenter includes: One Breath Left (1998), Dies Iræ: My Preposterous Theatrum Interioris Show (2005), and the Tracing Roads Across project (2003–06). Richards is the author of At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (1995).

Zbigniew Osinski Creating a ritual by means of theatre

Every day the ritual [of action or actions] is evoked

anew. Always the same and yet each time not just the

same. This ritual is [. . .] not just a theatre creation, or

an imitation or reconstruction of any of the familiar

rituals. [. . .] Nor is it a synthesis of rituals which, in

Grotowski’s opinion, would be impossible in practice.

[. . .] Grotowski’s work [. . .] has elements related

concomitantly to several traditions which are arche-

typal. These elements are set into a composition [. . .].

Grotowski defines the technical difference between

a theatre production and a ritual in relation to “the place

of montage.” In the production, the spectators’ minds

are the place of montage. In the ritual, the montage takes

place in the minds of the doers. The connection with old

initiation practices is very subtle, and the basic duty of

each doer is to do everything well. This should be

understood in a tangible, almost physical sense. The body

must respond properly and precisely, and must not pump

up emotions and expression. Therefore, Grotowski would

not ask anyone, “Do you believe?” but “You must do

well what you do, with understanding.”

[. . .] The Action is evoked and accomplished each day

in its totality. Sometimes it is executed every few days if

the technical work on details or the search for some

elements from scratch takes up too much time. The

theatre functions in relation to the spectators who come

to see a production. Here, the logic and clarity of the

Actions are essential and – through these Actions – the

process of participants bringing them to life. There is no

place for spectators as such.

1997, “Grotowski Blazes the Trails,” 391–92

Philip Glass (1937– ): American composer whose innovative compositions include collaborations with Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach (1976) and White Raven (1991) and David Henry Hwang, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988) and The Voyage (1992) as well as an opera trilogy based on the works of Jean Cocteau – Orphée (1993), La Belle et la Bête (1994), and Les Enfants Terribles (1996). Glass has composed the scores for many films including: The Truman Show (1992), The Hours (2002), The Fog of War (2003), and Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (2004).

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Conclusions Human ritual is of a piece with animal ritual. Rituals are used to manage potential conflicts regarding status, power, space, resources, and sex. Performing rituals helps people get through difficult periods of transition and move from one life

status to another. Ritual is also a way for people to connect to a collective, to remember or construct a mythic past, to build social solidarity, and to form or maintain a community. Some rituals are liminal, existing between or outside daily social life; other rituals are knitted into ordinary living. During their liminal phase, ritual performances produce communitas, a feeling among participants that they are part of something greater than or outside of their individual selves. On a larger scale, ritual plays an essential role in social dramas, helping to resolve crises by bringing about either the reintegration needed to heal or allowing a schism needed to form a new community. In either case, ritual is neces- sary for closure. If social dramas are “big productions,” the rituals of everyday life sometimes hardly make a ripple. We perform waking-up rituals, mealtime rituals, greeting rituals, parting rituals, and so on, in order to smooth out and moderate most of our ongoing social life. Understanding how these rituals operate gives us an insight into basic human interactions.

Although the belief is widespread that the performing arts originated in or as rituals, there is no historical or archaeological evidence to prove this assertion. More probably from the very earliest times the entertainment qualities of performance were as present as the ritual elements. Instead of thinking of the oppositional binary “ritual or art,” one should think of a spectrum or a dynamic braid. Every performance both entertains and ritualizes. The questions one ought to ask are to what degree does a performance entertain, give pleasure, is made so that it is beautiful; and to what degree is a performance effica- cious, made in order to accomplish something, please or appeal to the gods, mark or celebrate an important event or life milestone such as birth, puberty, marriage, or death? Although specific performances tend to emphasize one or the other, entertainment or efficacity, all performances are actually to some degree both entertaining and efficacious.

Artists of many cultures have long made art used in rituals – church music, altar pieces and devotional paintings, temple icons, masks, religious dances and dramas, and so on. Furthermore, at first influenced by colonialism and later by globalization, artists have drawn on the rituals of many cultures for use in their own new works. Some artists have investigated not just specific rituals but the ritual process itself in order to synthesize existing rituals or invent new rituals. In the not-so-distant past, colonial exhibitors brought rituals from “faraway” places as entertainments and exotic curiosities.This practice continues today under the rubric of “international festival.” These festivals occur in many parts of the world, not just in Europe or North America.

RITUAL

fig 3.21. A scene from Uttar Priyadarshi – a “meditation on war and peace” – as performed in the USA in 2000 by the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, directed by Ratan Thiyam. This performance combines Buddhist ritual, Manipuri music and dance, and Thiyam’s own invention. Photograph by Ratan Thiyam. Photograph courtesy of Erin Mee.

Ratan Thiyam (1948– ): Manipuri-Indian founder-director of the Chorus Repertory Theatre. Major productions include Thiyam’s play Chakravyuha (1986) and Uttar Priyadarshi (1996), concerning the life of the Indian Buddhist King Ashoka (second century, BCE).

Lin Hwai-Min (1949– ): Taiwanese choreographer and dancer. In 1973, he founded Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Taiwan’s foremost modern dance company. His works include: Dream of the Red Chamber (1983), Nine Songs (1995), Moonwater (1998), Bamboo Dream (2001), and the Cursive trilogy (2001, 2003, 2005).

Ralph Lemon (1952– ): American choreographer and dancer whose Geography trilogy – Geography (1997), Tree (2000), and Come Home Charley Patton (2004) – explores multicultural and intercultural themes, performers, musics, and dancing. Other works include Joy (1989) and Persephone (1991), Rescuing the Princess (2009), and How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere (2010). Lemon chronicles his experience on Parts 1 and 2 of Geography in his book Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance (2004).

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Not only artists, but also governments, sports teams, schools, and other entities invent rituals. These rituals are often passed off as venerable and traditional when, in fact, they are of recent vintage. National anthems, pledges to the flag, the carrying of the Olympic torch (and many other aspects of the modern Olympic games), and sorority or fraternity initiations are some examples of invented rituals. In fact, rituals and the ritual process enact a tension between new/old, conservative/innovative.Although many rituals are long-lasting and protective of the status quo, many others evolve and change – and promote change.The ritual process itself encourages innovation by opening up a space and time for anti-structure, a setting aside of restraints, a suspension of social rules or the temporary adherence to an alternative set of rules. Sometimes rituals change formally through the work of councils, assemblies of ritual specialists, or state authorities. But often, in many cultures and in widely variant situations, rituals evolve by means of changes introduced by individuals at a local level.

1. Consider your day. Describe some ordinary rituals you do. Do you also take part in, or witness, any sacred or official rituals? What are the similarities/differences between these two kinds of rituals? Do you consider both kinds to be “performances”? Why or why not?

2. Have you experienced communitas during an event that was not a ritual – for example, a concert, sports event, or party? Would analyzing the event that led to your experiencing communitas “as” a ritual add to your understanding of what you experienced?

1. Go to a synagogue, mosque, or church not of your own faith. Insofar as you can without feeling dishonest, participate in the rituals.What effect does this partici- pation have on you? Did you feel you were “playing a role” as in the theatre? Or did you experience something else?

2. Invent a ritual.Then perform it.Then teach it to others and perform it with them. Is what you did “really” a ritual? If so, why; if not, why not?

PERFORMANCE STUDIES

TALK ABOUT

PERFORM?

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