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

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from ritual to theater and back
cycle was, in fact, an important – probably the most important – set of
events in an Arunta male’s life. 6
The subject matter of each brief dance-drama was events of Dreamtime
beings who populated the Aborigine world “in the beginning.” 7
These events were very important to the Arunta and constituted for
them a history and, since each Dreamtime event was connected to
specific places and landmarks, a geography. 8 To some extent the engwura
is familiar to us because it resembles western dramas and
religious rituals. But while we grant reactualizations only symbolic
status, the Arunta experienced the Dreamtime enactments as actual
presences, as an orthodox Catholic might regard the Eucharist.
The overall structure of the engwura is analogic, while its interior
structure is dramatic. The two structures are integrated because the
Arunta believed concretely in the Dreamtime and felt their own lives
moving from “ordinary” to “super-ordinary” reality. They experienced
the interaction between these realities: the engwura performances
were the navel, or link, or point of time and place where the two
realities intersected and meshed.
THE PIG-KILL AT KURUMUGL
I saw an ecological ritual similar to the konj kaiko (but much less
inclusive than the engwura) in March, 1972 in the Eastern Highlands
of Papua New Guinea. 9 Surrounding the performance of the kaiko is no
special self-consciousness. That is, the ritual is performed without the
Tsembaga being explicitly aware of its functions; and aside from praising
or critical comments on the dancing offered by anyone who cares
to, no aesthetic judgements are passed. In other words, there are neither
performance theorists nor critics in the western sense among the
Tsembaga. But at Kurumugl the people knew what the ritual does and
why it was established – to inhibit warfare among feuding groups. The
ritual at Kurumugl is already traveling along the continuum from ritual
toward theater.
It’s my purpose to outline a process through which theater develops
from ritual and, conversely, ritual develops from theater. My evidence
will not come from archeology or anthropological reconstructions. 10
I will document this process by referring to contemporary or near