schechner_the street is the stage.pdf - University of Georgia Libraries

THE FUTURE OF RITUAL
"classic" carnivals. As such, they exhibit little structural antipathy between
ruler and ruled. What inversions occur happen in an expected way.
Disruptions have the quality of riot or individual expression rather than
revolution. That is not to deny underlying hatreds and social contradictions
laid bare on these occasions. But there is no chance that Mardi Gras,
Gasparilla, or Spring Break will suddenly transmute into a revolution on a
par with the Chinese democracy movement or what happened in Germany.
In Ramlila, one feels the opposite of social tension. For the month of Ramraj
(King Rama's just reign), modern india's terrible disjunctions of caste,
religion, and class are suspended. Although the staging of all these direct
theatres is similar, their narratives are different. Those taking to the streets in
a classic or modern festival know beforehand they have only too short a time
to enjoy extraordinary uberties. The idea is to squeeze as much pleasure as
possible from a brief rime and a well-defined space. Oppositely, the pleasures
of the revolutionary carnival derive from its existence as an antiofficial
event, and the illusory but very strong desire to extend, into as long a time
and as big a space as possible, liberties taken.
Revolutionary street actions are not predictable because there are at least
two desired outcomes, one or more sought by the people taking to the
streets, the other by the authorities. It is not that Ramlila, Mardi Gras,
Gasparilla, Spring Break and other classic carnivals are devoid of political
content, but that this content is unitary rather than dialectical. Ramlila
affirms north Indian Hinduism and nationhood. Mardi Gras celebrates the
absorption of New Orleans Catholicism into American capitalism. The
divisions and conflicts played out in classic carnivals are ritually necessary,
temporary disruptions of an underlying unity. But the 1989 events in China
and Germany, and the 1970 protest in Washington, did not follow fixed
scripts, even if particular details of behavior- waving banners, marches, faceoffs
with the military, moments of rehearsed guerrilla theatre- were predictable.
Such predictable molecules of action give to direct theatre a ritual
quauty, the feel of a "destiny" being played out. But revolutionary street
actions are rare examples of history in its molten state; things really would be
different in China if Deng and Li were overthrown or in America if the
Nixon presidency, and the power of those sustaining Nixon, had ended in
1970. The 1989 action in the streets of Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, and Budapest
-with a climactic finale in Moscow in August 1991 -has made a difference.
When I call such events "direct theatre" 1 am not using the word "theatre"
metaphorically. The audiences for direct theatre are several, consisting of the
THESTREETISTHESTAGE
participants themselves, journalists, especially TV reporters, the mass spectatorship
TV enjoys, and high-level decision-makers watching in their
offices or bunkers. These high-level spectators are forced to participate in
direct theatre for fear of missing the worldwide audience TV gets to. Either
they go to where the action is - as Nixon and Zhou did - or they stage their
own shows as Saddam Hussein did during the 1990-1 Gulf War. The
dramaturgy is further compucated by the fact that the TV apparatus is far
from neutral. The medium asks for news to be "made" not "found." And in
many places, the same commercial sponsors who underwrite Spring Break
feed money to TV. This means that all programs - news, as well as sports,
dramas, sitcoms, talk, and game shows - are actually profit-making entertainments.
TV stations are owned or controlled by various corporations
with interests allied to those making high-level economic and poutical
decisions. Nor is TV news made- as movies are- to be kept and reshown
long after the events it records are over. TV news is a multilayered throwaway
flow of images and words received in homes, bars, hotels, community
centers, and offices. TV news combines on-the-spot action with sophisticated
editing and framing procedures to make a narrativized, ritualized,
short-take product (see "News, sex, and performance theory" in Schechner
1985).
The direct theatre is itself a reflexive first theatre, or raw material, for a
near-universally displayed second theatre, the television newscast which
includes (often improvised) responses to the first theatre. This direct theatre
is reflexive insofar as it is produced for the TV cameras and designed to force
a response. Events are immediate (being there), mediated (taking place on
the TV screen), and responsive (reactions to what happens on the screen).
Used this way, TV is hot, interactive. The millions of screens function as a
collective forum (though not a free forum). Criticism of the direct theatre is
provided not by aestheticians but by "pundits" who summarize apd explain.
Poutical direct theatre is different from neocarnival direct theatre such as
Mardi Gras, Gasparilla, or Spring Break. These have been drained of political
content, while the made-for-television (or at least highly "media aware")
direct theatre is mainly political. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, the
politics of Mardi Gras and Spring Break are hidden and static, conservative
and supportive of the status quo. Therefore, there is no "news" coming from
them except a feature story buried near the end of a telecast; or, if the
celebration gets out of hand, an account of rioting answered by the pouce.
The theme is that social order will be, must be, restored; the causes of the
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