4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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drama, script, theater, and performance
“real time” performances of Commune in which audiences were invited
to come to the theater at the same time the performers did. About
twelve people showed up at 6 p.m., watched the Group clean up, set
props, get into costume, do warm-ups, establish the box office, admit
the regular audience, do the play with spectators, remove costumes,
clean up, and shut the theater. Two different performances occurred
simultaneously: one for the “real time” audience and one for the
“regular” audience. For the “real time” audience the “regular” audience
was part of the theater, as were a number of events not normally
included in the production of Commune.
As a theater director I am attempting to make both performers and
audiences aware of the overlapping but conceptually distinct realities of
drama, script, theater, and performance. Also to make myself more
aware. Others have gone further than I in the process of breaking one
realm from another, but often at the expense of one part or another. I
want to find ways of keeping three or all four in living tension. I believe
that none has a priori precedence over the others.
In many rural areas, especially in Asia and Africa, the performance is
the most important thing: the whole panoply of events at the center of
which is theater or a script. (I distinguish a “performance” from a
simple “gathering,” such as for a party, by the presence in a performance
of a theatrical event guided by a script – something planned,
designed for presentation, following a prescribed order. Parties are
prototheatrical events, performances that sometimes may contain
theater or even drama. For example, the dancing of a kathakali
sequence by a professional troupe at an Indian wedding is a theatrical
dance-drama included within a wedding-performance.)
I know these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary. Taxonomy in a
social science is based on structures that tend to blend into each other
on a continuum rather than exist as compartmented “species” of
events. Thus, the exact points to set boundary markers distinguishing
performance, theater, script and drama from each other are somewhat
arbitrary, but the center of each is very different from that of any of
the others.
In 1972 I attended a pig-kill, dance, and meat-exchange at Kurumugl
in the Highlands of Eastern New Guinea (see chapter 4).
Although the dancers exhibited considerable skills, and the music was