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DT+ FUNDAMENTALS

A Concise Introduction to: Ritual Ben Spatz

University of Huddersfield

INTRODUCTION When we talk about ritual in theatre, or ritual theatre, we draw on a complicated history of thinking about the relationship between the two. Does ritual come before theatre? If it does, then why do so many theatre artists dream of transforming theatre back into ritual? For some artists, ritual suggests a moment of great intensity. But ritual can also refer to mundane activities like shaking hands or brushing your teeth. The two senses of repetition – dull, mechanical habit and sacred, heightened action – give the idea of ritual theatre two edges. This short essay explores both dimensions of ritual and their application to theatre and performance.

Last update: 11/02/2019

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HISTORY Many 20th-century theatre artists took inspiration from stories told in the academic field anthropology, which has traditionally studied so-called ‘primitive’ peoples who lived without advanced technologies and often without writing. As part of their research, anthropologists often spend months or even years living with a specific group of people and then write about their lives, including their rituals. Artists living in technologically advanced societies and in densely populated cities have different reasons for being inspired by these accounts. Choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) travelled throughout the Caribbean studying the folklore, dance forms, and rituals of Black culture there. She drew on these sources to create her own works of dance theatre in the 1930s. Since then many African-American choreographers and theatre artists, from Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) to Ralph Lemon (1952- ), have drawn on folk and ritual sources in the creation of theatrical dance works. In this case, ritual is seen as an authentic expression of a culture which can be shared more widely when it is turned into theatre. White American and European artists in the 1960s and 1970s also took inspiration from anthropological sources. They less often conducted their own anthropological research and were not usually focused on the rituals of a particular culture. Instead, these artists tried to create a new kind of ritual that they felt was lacking in modern culture. The idea that modern society is alienated and that rituals could be part of its healing was widespread in the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Theatre artists and companies of that period, such as the Performance Group directed by Richard Schechner (1934- ), the Living Theatre directed by Judith Malina (1926-2015) and Julian Beck (1925-1985), and the experimental dance practices led by Anna Halprin (1920- ), attempted to create theatrical events that might serve this purpose. English director Peter Brook (1925-) describes ritual theatre or ‘holy theatre’ in his 1968 book The Empty Space. Brook describes modern theatre as searching largely in vain for the lost power of ritual and refers to the Polish theatre directed by Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) as one of the few in which the possibility of a genuine ritual or experience of the sacred could still occur. Today the idea that theatre can create healing rituals for society is less widely accepted. Although some artists still think of their work as therapeutic, there is also scepticism about the effectiveness of theatre to

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heal and about the relevance of ritual to theatre. In addition, anthropologists have become aware that the way they studied and analysed non-Western cultures was problematic. Although they often indicated respect for the cultures they studied, anthropology as an academic field contributed to negative stereotypes about non-western cultures and to the historical and ongoing violence of colonialism. Even when those stereotypes are positive – when other cultures are ‘romanticised’ as being more noble or pure than Europeans – they are part of a fantasy of otherness that denies full humanity to those who are studied as examples of primitive life. Despite these problems, the word ritual is still commonly used by theatre artists in several different ways.

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THEORY In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) describes the evolution of ancient Greek tragic drama out of earlier Dionysian rites. According to the well-established story of European theatre, Medieval drama was also born out of ritual, as a bit of spoken dialogue in the Catholic Easter service was gradually transformed into full- scale religious plays. In both of these stories, theatre is seen as a modern or mature development of primitive ritual. When ritual stops being purely religious and begins to create artistic works – so the story goes – theatre is born. However, the reality is more complicated. Theatre and ritual are interwoven. Sometimes ritual does gradually transform into theatre, but theatre can also give rise to ritual. All theatre, even the most commercial, can be analysed as ritual. After all, what are ticket booths, plush seats, red curtains, and dimming lights if not elements of an elaborate ritual? On the other hand, ritual can be analysed as a kind of theatre. Above all, there is no reason to treat ritual as if it were in the past. Both theatre and ritual or undeniably in the present, and both have histories. In a famous 1956 article, Horace Miner described ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’ people. He describes the Nacirema’s bizarre “magical beliefs and practices” in detail and concludes that it is “hard to see” how such “exotic customs” could have acquired meaning. At some point, the reader realises that Nacirema is just American spelt backwards and that the “unusual” rituals described in by Miner are commonplace North American routines such as brushing one’s teeth or receiving a vaccine. The first point made by this article is that familiar practices can be made to seem strange when described from an external perspective. An action that seems completely reasonable and intelligent to one person may look like a strange ritual to someone who is not part of the same cultural context. The second, more difficult point is that treating someone’s actions as exotic creates a difference in status or power. In the article, Miner does not merely describe the Nacirema’s rituals and respectfully wonder about their aims. Instead, he describes them as foolish and misguided, contrasting them to what ‘we’ now know about reality. Once the reader realises that the Nacirema are American, it becomes clear that this is a parody of how European and North American anthropologists have disrespectfully described the rituals of other cultures.

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To analyse the 1960s avant-garde theatres mentioned above, many theatre scholars drew on anthropologist Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book Rites of Passage. Drawing on examples from Africa, van Gennep described how a rite of passage such as that which turns a girl into a woman or a boy into a man involves three stages, which we can call: separation, transformation, and reintegration. First, the person is separated from everyday social life. Then they undergo a period of very different and especially intense activity in which their identity is transformed. Finally, they are reintegrated back into social life, now with their new identity. A later anthropologist, Victor Turner, along with theatre artist and scholar Richard Schechner, used this theory to compare theatre and ritual. They suggested that modern experimental theatre is less fully transformative than traditional rites of passage because it does not involve the whole society and because participation in it is voluntary. Turner described genuine, culturally grounded rites of passages as ‘liminal’, meaning that they bring participants all the way into a transitional or in-between state of being. In contrast, he said, the kinds of events we experience in urban, multicultural societies – even those that push the boundaries of participation, like Grotowski’s para-theatrical experiment – are merely ‘liminoid’, having some but not all features of liminal rites of passage. Today, there are many definitions of ritual, and debates still continue about how the word should be used. Ritual is often linked to religion, but we can also talk about secular or non-religious ritual. Ritual is often associated with intense and transformative experiences, including ‘trance’ experiences, but it can also refer to meaningless daily habits. Some scholars have even argued that ritual is, by definition, meaningless action which only has meaning because of the social life around it. Ritual studies is most often part of religious studies, but as we have seen, it overlaps with anthropology, sociology, theatre, and other fields. Many theories of ritual have been proposed but all of them have also been questioned, especially when it comes to applying the term cross-culturally. Probably the most recent major change in the theory of ritual is linked to the development of cognitive studies, which theorises the relationship between the mind and the body in light of new technological advances. One idea, suggested by Tamar Frankiel, is that ritual effectively reminds us – on a visceral, physical level – of the most basic cognitive structures of human life: relationships like UP/DOWN, INSIDE/OUTSIDE, or CENTRE/PERIPHERY, which philosopher Mark Johnson calls “image schemata”. Other cognitive scientists have attempted to measure the brain waves, changes in heart

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rate, and other biological markers that indicate meditation, trance, or other altered states. Cognitive studies continue to develop rapidly and seem likely to bring additional insights to our understanding of ritual.

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PRACTICE Many of the strategies which were associated with ritual theatre during that period continue to inform theatre in the 21st century, even if the word ‘ritual’ is not used in the same way. One of Grotowski’s early innovations was to include the audience in the physical space of the performance rather than separating them with an invisible ‘fourth wall’. Schechner borrowed this idea and called it environmental staging. Environmental staging may or may not also involve audience participation, where guests are invited to contribute to the performance as it unfolds. These ideas are being pushed further today in the genre of immersive theatre, where the audience enters into an entirely constructed physical space such as a building with many rooms. Grotowski also stated that it is difficult to give audiences a truly transformative experience in a culture where there are no universally shared myths. Everybody has heard of the ancient Greek gods today, but referring to Zeus or Apollo no longer carries religious force. On the other hand, contemporary religious rituals are sources of major political debate today. Gay marriage, the wearing of Islamic hijab, and the circumcision of male infants are all rituals which are currently under debate in European and North American societies. It is tempting to think that life would be easier or more fulfilling if society had more shared myths and rituals. Political protest marches do bring large numbers of people together and use rituals like chanting and marching to articulate common goals and shared identities. On the other hand, when a whole society seems to speak in a single voice, that is usually not because everyone agrees but because a powerful government compels everyone to participate in its rituals. Even apparently positive, non-religious, non-political rituals like the Olympics have negative aspects, as the cities where they take place are sometimes harmed rather than helped by having so many foreign visitors come and go in such a short time. To avoid the risks of group rituals, some theatre artists explore the possibility of enacting individual rituals in public. The performer in a work of performance art / live art may invoke the idea of ritual by working with nudity or with bodily fluids. Performance artists Marina Abramovic (1946- ) and Tehching Hsieh (1950- ) have made works that emphasise their own physical vulnerability. Autobiographical stories and personal revelations, on the other hand, may produce a different kind of psychological,

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emotional, or social vulnerability. Performance artists often also push the boundaries of duration by doing performances that last for many hours or even for weeks, months, or years. Durational performances always become rituals because of the way they interact with time, bringing the performer and witnesses into contact with daily and seasonal rhythms which are excluded within traditional proscenium and ‘black box’ theatre. Another strategy being used by contemporary artists is an engagement with place through site-specific performances that take place in natural settings like forests and coasts. Here again, theatre may cross over into ritual as it comes into contact with large forces of nature like the ocean. But perhaps the most common way in which contemporary theatre continues to produce ritual is in community-based or Applied Theatre and dramatherapy. In these situations, ritual does not need to involve highly intensive elements such as bodily fluids, long durations, or powerful site- specific environments. Instead, it simply indicates that the primary aim of a performance is to effect some kind of transformation, no matter how modest, in the performer and their witnesses. When theatre is created in a refugee camp, in a prison, or in a hospital, there may be a sense that the act of performance contains its own self-sufficient meaning, without depending on any understanding from the outside world. This, in a simple way, is both theatre and ritual.

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FURTHER READING Bell, C. (1992). Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Boal, A. (1992). Games for Actors and Non-actors. London: Routledge. Brook, P. (2008). The Empty Space. London: Penguin. Landy, R. (1996). Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, Therapy, and Everyday Life. New York: Guilford Publications. Schechner, R. (1995). The Future of Ritual. London: Routledge. Schechner, R. (2003). Performance Theory. London: Routledge. Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.