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

from ritual to theater and back 149
Each tribe can live for itself, talk about the other, praise or slander it.
But every time one of them rows over to the other shore it is to
exchange something. One does not row over to teach, to enlighten, to
entertain, but rather to give and take: a handful of salt for a scrap of
cloth, a bow for a fistful of beads. The goods we barter are cultural. . . .
In May 1976 Odin Teatret accepted a proposition from the Kurare
Film Cooperative (Caracas): a barter with the Yanomami, a meeting
between origins (rituals and dances) and historical development
(theater). In the middle of the shabono – the great house – the dances
presented by the Yanomami and the tales of their shaman alternate
with the Odin’s Book of Dances and Come! And the day will be ours, the
talk of how the white men destroyed the shaman. This barter took
place in the Kahori shabono, where the anthropologist Jacques Lizot
had been living for six years. They introduced Odin Teatret to the
Yanomami, showing them a new face of the nape, the white stranger.
(Barba 1986: 161, 166)
Barba’s method of barter systematizes what Brook did in Africa. What
is disingenuous about barter is that thus far at least the traffic is all oneway.
Residents of the First World travel to the Third World for the
purpose of barter. One wonders how well-received in New York, Paris,
or even Holstebro a Yanomami shaman in search of Odin-style barter
would be. That is, if the shaman arrived paying his own way, setting his
own agenda and calendar. The whole system of intercultural exchange
cannot escape history: it occurs in the aftermath of colonialism.
The analysis of that aftermath is the subject of another essay. For
now let it be noted that the kind of influencing through observation
and trading reflected in Barba’s letter and his later experiments with
barter, Brook’s trips, and my experiences is different from Artaud’s
reactions in the 1930s to Balinese theater. Artaud was influenced, but
the Balinese didn’t care. There was no exchange. In the more recent
examples work is being consciously traded as professionals seek to
expand their knowledge.
Whatever the ritual functions of kathakali in village life, the training
Barba saw at the Kalamandalam was to a certain degree professional in
the western sense (see Schechner 1985: 213–60 and Zarrilli 1984).
The Kalamandalam troupe performs for pay in India and overseas.