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

from ritual to theater and back 151
The bam audience had to be told that what they paid money to see as
an entertainment retained enough of its ritual basis to require a change
in conventional theatrical behaviour. Or was bam’s announcement a
P. T. Barnum ploy? Telling the audience why they were not to applaud
was signaling the importance and rarity of what they were about to see.
The fact that “dervishes” is an imposed but recognizable name, not
what the dancers call themselves, provides part of the answer. The
performance itself was simple and moving – I suppose a fairly accurate
presentation of the Sufi Mevlevi ritual. I know that several groups in
New York were influenced by it. At the Byrd Hoffman space run by
Robert Wilson and in The Performance Group which I led people
experimented with whirling. Laura Dean developed many dances based
on whirling.
In October, 1973 Shingon Buddhist monks came to bam with
“ceremonies, music, and epics of ancient Japan.” The dervishes
whirled on a stage facing the 2,000-seat opera house. The monks performed
in the Lepercq Space, an open room about 75 feet by 40 feet
with a height of about 30 feet. The night I was there the audience
numbered around 200, seated on cushions scattered on the floor and
on bleachers. As at Makehuku and Kenetisarobe the Buddhist rituals
were not long enough to constitute an entertainment by western
standards. So the program was augmented by performances of Japanese
contemporary music and a recitation of Japanese war tales from the
twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Only after the intermission did the
monks perform their temple service. The program distributed to the
spectators described in detail what the monks were doing, what it
meant, and how the ceremony is used in Japan. Thus the audience was
treated as if it were attending Grand Opera where the libretto is summarized
– or maybe a new sport where the rules, equipment, and
structure need to be explained. It seemed to me that the monks, like the
dervishes, were deeply into what they were doing. They were “in character”
– and it was impossible to distinguish what they were doing
from what Stanislavsky required of actors. I was convinced: these dervishes
were Dervishes, these monks were Monks. A defined interface
between spectators and performers existed: on one side was authenticity,
efficacy, and ritual, on the other side was entertainment
and theater.