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

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from ritual to theater and back
Toward the end of supper the “Song of the Great Capitulation” is sung
cabaret-style by Courage. This is all TPG played of scene 4, and there
was no insistence that everyone in the theater pay close attention.
When the drama resumed with scene 5 after supper I think it was
experienced differently by both spectators and performers because of
the hour of mingling, talking, and sharing of food and drink. 28
By having open rehearsals, by opening the Garage door, by serving
supper as part of the performance, Mother Courage was treated as a drama
nested in a larger performance event. The ideas behind TPG’s production
of Courage are common in ritual performances: to control, arrange,
or manipulate the whole world of the performance, not just present the
drama at its center. In this way a theatrical event in SoHo, New York
City, was nudged a little way from the entertainment end of the
continuum toward efficacy. Without diminishing its theatricality, The
Performance Group worked to enhance Courage’s ritual aspects.
Orthodox theories say that ritual precedes theater, just as efficacy and
monism (“primitive oneness”) precede entertainment. It is a cliché of
interpretations of Paleolithic cave art that some kind of “ritual” generated
the art – and by ritual is meant a serious, efficacious, resultoriented
performance whether to insure fertility, to placate the powers
who control the hunt, to maintain a balance between male and female,
to initiate, or something. These things, or some of them, may be true;
but they are not the whole truth. Entertainment, the passing of time
in play and fun (not the passive and cut-off feeling of “art for art’s
sake,” but an active involvement with the process of making art), is
interwoven with and inseparable from any efficacious aspects of the
earliest art.
The idea of primitive oneness combines Edenic fantasy with the
Protestant work ethic. This combination was supported by the projections
of early ethnographers too many of whom were missionaries.
Accumulating evidence from Paleolithic, early historical, classical,
Asian, African and contemporary communal peoples suggests that a
complex social life and rich, symbolic art are coexistent with the
human condition. There is no “simple primitive,” either noble or
savage. Shamans are artists and performers and doctors and trancepossessed
ecstatics and priests and entertainers. To argue that because
several roles are played simultaneously by one person or that because a