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

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from ritual to theater and back
Aboriginals a strong say. In this regard the Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies, Canberra, has led the way.
5 This rhythm of relatively long preparations followed by a brief performance with
a series of performances given on a single day is common in Australia. See
Elkin, Berndt, and Berndt 1950, and Berndt and Berndt 1964. Although this
rhythm is acceptable in western music and dance, it is alien to western theater
where Aristotelian injunctions demand that a work be of a “certain magnitude”
with a clear “beginning, middle, and end.” Otherwise, the piece is not thought
“serious.” The emergence of performance art in the 1970s and 1980s has
successfully amended, if not wholly repealed, the Aristotelian law.
6 In Oceania it is not unusual – or was not until the eradication of traditional
ways – for ritual performances to be the core of a person’s life. Van Gennep’s
(1908, repr. 1960) classic analysis of rituals as crisis moments preceded and
followed by longish periods of relative calm describes the situation in Papua
New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia. The performances are peak experiences,
while preparations for them continue over months and years infiltrating and
frequently dominating the daily lives of the people. See my discussion in chapters
2 and 5 as well as Victor Turner 1969, 1974, 1982, and 1985.
7 See Eliade (1965) for a discussion of “reactualization” and its relation to the
Dreamtime.
8 An excellent account of the intimate association among events, landmarks,
and body decorations is given by Gould (1969: 120–8). See also Roheim
(1969). Aborigines continue to feel very strongly about the land, as do many
native Americans. The struggle for Uluru – Ayers Rock to European Australians
– is emblematic of the issue. The story of Uluru, and how finally in
November 1983 the Euro-Australians recognized Aboriginal title to it, is told
in Layton (1986).
9 The Eastern Highlands consist of a central valley and many spur valleys surrounded
by mountains rising to 15,000 feet. The whole area is about 300 miles
long and 150 miles wide. As of around 1970, the Highlands were populated by
less than 3 million persons with each village averaging 400 inhabitants.
Because of the terrain, many local groups have little contact with each other –
and there is much local warfare and feuding. There are about 500 languages
spoken, most of them mutually unintelligible, and the largest of them spoken
by only 130,000 people. English and pidgin are the basic lingua franca. For more
detailed information, see Ward and Lea (1970).
10 For a critique of the best-known of these archeological-anthropological
reconstructions – the theories of the “Cambridge anthropologists” – see chapter
1 of this book. For an alternative speculation concerning Greek theater, see
Dodds (1951).
11 Joan MacIntosh, a member of The Performance Group, was my partner on
the 1971–2 trip to Asia that forms the experiential ground of this essay. In
addition to Papua New Guinea we visited India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia,
Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan.