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

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from ritual to theater and back
Latin America, Asia, and Africa pockets of avant-garde work like that in
the First World can be identified. Names and groups like the Gardzienice
Theater Association, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed,
Indonesia’s Rendra, Badal Sircar and Habib Tanvir in India, and Wole
Soyinka of Nigeria can be added to a growing list.
This work is not atavistic, not a wild attempt to dismantle industrialism,
or halt its spread. It is an active seeking to find places within
industrial societies – even within the industrial process itself – for
small-scale communities to exist. And to demand a restructuring of the
social order to meet the needs of communities for person-to-person
interactions or “meetings,” as Grotowski says. The problems of alienation,
reification, and anomie are clearly not problems of capitalism
alone. Experiments of the kind I’ve been talking about are taking place
in socialist states too. These experiments, still relatively scattered and
tentative, and always being pressed back by a hostile establishment, are
showing signs of taking root. They address themselves to the audience
not as sticks of money-paying individual strangers, or as forced participants
in a show of solidarity (as in mass rallies, parades, or coercive
church-going), but as a community, even a congregation. The goal of
such performances is to entertain, to have fun, and to create what
Victor Turner calls “spontaneous communitas,” the dissolution of
boundaries shutting people off from each other. The resulting
experience is of collective celebration. This contemporary tendency
originated in the experimental theater as a movement toward ritual.
Performance doesn’t originate in ritual any more than it originates
in entertainment. It originates in the binary system efficacy–entertainment
which includes the sub-set ritual–theater. From the beginning,
logically as well as historically, both terms of the binary are
required. At any historical moment there is movement from one pole
toward the other as the efficacy–entertainment braid tightens and
loosens. This oscillation is continuous – performance is always in an
active state.
The whole binary continuum efficacy/ritual–entertainment/theater
is what I call “performance.” Performance originates in impulses to
make things happen and to entertain; to get results and to fool around;
to collect meanings and to pass the time; to be transformed into
another and to celebrate being oneself; to disappear and to show off; to