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

ing into a special place a transcendent Other who exists then-andnow
and later-and-now; to be in a trance and to be conscious; to focus
on a select group sharing a secret language and to broadcast to the
largest possible audience of strangers; to play in order to satisfy a felt
obligation and to play only under an Equity contract for cash. These
oppositions, and others generated by them, comprise performance: an
active situation, a continuous turbulent process of transformation. The
move from ritual to theater happens when a participating audience
fragments into a collection of people who attend because the show is
advertised, who pay admission, who evaluate what they are going to
see before, during, and after seeing it. The move from theater to ritual
happens when the audience is transformed from a collection of
separate individuals into a group or congregation of participants.
These polar tendencies are present in all performances. Brecht, and
Meyerhold before him, worked to keep alive the tensions between
these extremes. They wanted to move audiences back and forth
moment to moment. The way Brecht’s Verfremdung works is to unexpectedly
shift mode, style, rhythm, perspective so that at the moment and
place of change, when an emotional scene is abruptly halted, or a
“cold” scene suddenly becomes moving, the dramatist, director, or
performer (whoever is “authoring” the moment) can insert her or his
own “statement,” an ironic or telling comment that encourages the
spectator to think about what’s been seen and/or felt. The performance
structure is broken open by its anti-structure and in that liminal space a
direct communication, a potentially deep contact, connects author to
audience. Of all the experiments with theatrical structure over the past
century this one is most likely to stick. In it are resonances of medieval
theater as well as of many folk theaters existing now.
CONCLUSIONS
from ritual to theater and back 157
I can best summarize by drawing four simple models, explaining each
in turn.
A meeting takes place at a market or on a battlefield. Goods are traded,