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

from ritual to theater and back 137
spatial field of the performance from the church to the roadways to the
homes of the participants. Yet for all this I still would call the Mass a
ritual rather than theater. Why? Because it was efficacious. As Hardison
says, “The service . . . has a very important aesthetic dimension, but it
is essentially not a matter of appreciation but of passionate affirmation”
(Hardison 1965: 77). The Mass was a closed circle which included
only the congregation and those officiating. There was literally and
figuratively no room for appreciators. The Mass was an obligatory
action, entered into either joyfully or sullenly, by means of which
members of the congregation signaled to each other and to the hierarchy
their continued participation in the Holy Roman Church. What I
say of the medieval Mass, Rappaport, drawing on Durkheim, says of
the Tsembaga:
While the scope of the social unity is frequently not made explicit, it
would seem that in some studies it is what Durkheim called a
“church,” that is, “a society whose members are united by the fact that
they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its
relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate
these common ideas into common practices.” . . . Such units, composed
of aggregates of individuals who regard their collective wellbeing
to be dependent upon a common body of ritual performances,
might be called “congregations”.
(Rappaport 1968: 1)
Because of its all-inclusive hold on its congregation and its guarantee of
efficacy, the Mass was not theater in the classical or modern sense. It
used theater but did not become theater. Theater comes into existence
when a separation occurs between spectators and performance. The
paradigmatic theatrical situation is a group of performers soliciting an
audience who may or may not respond by attending. The audience is
free to come or stay away – and if they stay away it is the theater that
suffers, not its would-be audience. In ritual, staying away means rejecting
the congregation, or being rejected by it, as in schism, excommunication,
or exile. If only a few stay away, it is they who suffer; if
many stay away, the congregation is in danger of schism or dissolution.
To put it another way: ritual is an event upon which its participants