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

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from ritual to theater and back
head-dress of cassowary and peacock feathers. The women cook and
tend to the children. About four hours later the meat, still nearly raw, is
taken from the ovens and displayed in long rows. Each family lays out
its own meat – the women doing most of this work – like so much
money in the bank. Pork is wealth in the Highlands. As more and more
men finish dressing they emerge from the huts to show off and admire
each other in a grudging way – the adorning is very competitive. Some
women also adorned themselves, dressing much like the men. I
couldn’t tell if this was traditional or an innovation or why some
women did it and not others. A man invited Joan MacIntosh 11 and me
into his hut to watch him put on his makeup. He set out a mirror and
some tins of pigment (bought from a trading store run by Japanese).
Then he applied blue, red, and black to his torso, shoulders, arms, and
face. He painted half his nose red and the other half blue. I asked him
what the patterns meant. He said he chose them because he liked the
way they looked. The Australian Aborigines, by contrast, adorn their
bodies with patterns each detail of which is linked to ancestral or
Dreamtime beings, sexual magic, or recent events. Aborigine body
painting is map-making and story-telling.
Our performer-host showed us his head-dress of four-foot-long
feathers. Then he stepped out from the darkness of the hut into the
brilliant glare of the sunshine to try it on. As he emerged his casual air
vanished and he literally thrust his chest forward and up, gave a long
whooping call, put on his head-dress, and displayed himself. He was
costumed for a social not a dramatic role – that is, not to present a
fictional character whose life was separable from his own, but to show
himself in a special way: to display his feathers, his strength, his authority,
his power, his wealth, his position among the people. It is not easy
to distinguish between these kinds of roles. They are not binary opposites.
In drama the script is already fixed in its details, the precise gestures
of the role are rehearsed for a particular occasion (and other
occasions, other “productions,” might eventuate in different gestures),
while “in life” the script is “replaced by an ongoing process, this
process is set in motion by the objective demands of the role, and the
subjective motives and goals of the actor.” 12 An awareness that social
and dramatic roles are indeed closely related to each other, and locating
their points of convergence in the mise-en-scène rather than in the mind