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

metaphorically. The metabolisms of higher animals are ill-equipped
for long-term storage. Instead, play keeps in practice, on call, a regular,
crisis-oriented expenditure of kinetic energy. In play, energy is spent in
behavior that is not only harmless but fun. Decisively, play allows kinetic
potential to be maintained not by being stored but by being spent. Playing is also
adaptive in the “creative” ways mentioned earlier. When a crisis arises,
the animal is able to meet it by switching play energy into fight energy,
for example.
Crisis – the sudden and unstinting spending of kinetic energy – is
the link among performance, hunting, ritual, and play. Each gives rise
to the others; together they comprise a system through which the
animal maintains its ability to spend kinetic energy irregularly, according
to immediate, even unexpected, needs (figure 3.5).
The problem remains: How do animals (and persons) tell the difference
between play and “for real”? Ritualized behavior, including performances,
are a means of continually testing the boundaries between
play and “for real.” The “special ordering of time and place” –
Bateson’s (1972: 177–93) “play frame” – which most observers note
in both human and animal play are signals that the behavior taking
place within the brackets is “only play.” Even so, mistakes and confusions
happen, so placating gestures, or the presence of a referee, are
necessary to keep play in hand.
What might the relationship be between hunting and play, hunting
and ritual, ritual and play, play and theater? Earlier I suggested some
connections between Paleolithic cave art and hunting/fertility rituals;
Figure 3.5
drama, script, theater, and performance 105