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

from ritual to theater and back 143
aspect of the ceremony was privatized and done not with an eye to its
prettiness but to its correctness. Time gaps between elements were
longer and more irregular; many long discussions centered on how to
do certain things – these conferences delayed the ceremonies. The
subject matter of the Abuang – if I can use that phrase – is the presentation
of all the unmarried females to all the unmarried males. The
daytime dances showed everyone off; the night-time ceremonies
concerned actual betrothal.
Surely the tourist trade has influenced so-called “authentic” performances
in Bali and elsewhere. I don’t have contempt for these
changes. Changes in conventions, themes, methods, and styles occur
because of opportunism, audience pressures, professionalism (itself
often a new concept), new technology, and other fallout from culture
contact. Tourism has been really important and worldwide only since
the advent of cheap air travel. Before that for centuries mass migrations
have taken place due to economic circumstances, war, and colonialism.
And from the start of the human species people have been on the move.
But tourism on a mass scale is unique because the people moving are
seeking pleasure, including entertainment; and their travels are temporary
excursions. This means that the entertainments set up for tourists
often amalgamate the qualities of “away” with those of “home.”
The job of the tour manager is to make the strange familiar, a kind of
reverse Verfremdung. Theater historians will regard tourism as of as much
importance as the exchange between England and the Continent was in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theater people imitate popular
imported modes, and the local respond to the demands of rich visitors
– or local audiences demanded changes because they’ve adopted the
tastes of alien cultures. From one point of view these changes are
corruptions – a clamor is raised to establish culture zoos in which the
“original” versions of “age-old” rituals can be preserved. But even
traditional performances vary greatly from generation to generation –
an oral tradition is flexible, able to absorb many personal variations
within set parameters. And the culture-zoo approach is itself a variant
of colonial aesthetics. I hate the genocide that has eradicated cultures
such as the Tasmanian, but I see nothing wrong with what’s happening
today in Bali and New Guinea, where two systems of theater coexist.
The relationship between these is not a simple division between the