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

from ritual to theater and back 167
is separate from life and everything else, while lifelike art holds that art is
connected to life and everything else. . . . The root message of all artlike
art is separateness and specialness; and the corresponding one of all
lifelike art is connectedness and wide-angle awareness.
(Kaprow 1983: 36, 38)
Kaprow goes on to enunciate eight points that “summarize the characteristics
of an emerging lifelike art.” Key among these is the shift in locale of where art
can take place – away from museums, theaters, concert halls to “anywhere else
in the real world”; the intentional blurring of the “possible boundaries between
lifelike art and the rest of life”; and the “therapeutic purpose” of lifelike art: “to
reintegrate the piecemeal reality we take for granted. Not just intellectually, but
directly, as experience – in this moment, in this house, at this kitchen sink”
(Kaprow 1983: 39).
21 Of many documents available, see especially Emile Zola’s “Naturalism in
Theater” (1880) and August Strindberg’s “Naturalism in Theater” (1888), both
reprinted in Becker 1963.
22 fact met in Princeton June 2–6, 1974. It brought together more than two
hundred leaders of the American theater, very heavily tilted toward producers,
managers of regional theaters, and professional administrators. Only a relatively
few actors, directors, and designers were there. Also the conference was
weighted toward New York, organized as it was by Alexander H. Cohen, the
New York producer. Eleven panels discussed various problems confronting the
theater, but the real action went on offstage where individuals and interest
groups exchanged – or failed to exchange – ideas and opinions. The Theatre
Communications Group (TCG) has taken up where fact left off, organizing
once every two years or so meetings of alleged theater leaders. The problem
with these meetings is that they are self-perpetuating. People never included in
any numbers are those who work with community groups, who are politically
radical, who are experimental. A few such always attend, to season the sauce.
But the preponderance are regional theater people. Underlying fact and the
TCG meetings is a growing awareness of a contradictory reality: theater is
marginal economically speaking but it has enduring roots in society. Means are
therefore necessary to bring the disparate wings of the theater together for a
common rumination on basically economic issues relating to the survival of
theater at the institutional level. Whether politics can, or should be, kept out of
such meetings is another question. As for aesthetics, forget it.
23 As I later learned, things are not, nor can they ever be, so simple. Anthropologist
Edmund Carpenter wrote me a letter in which he said that the performance
of the mudmen does not originate in Makehuku practice at all. “These [mudmen]
were invented by a TAA [Australian] travel agent. They have no antiquity,
no foundation in New Guinea aesthetics, no parallels elsewhere.” Wanting to
resolve the matter, I wrote to the National Library in Boroko, Papua New
Guinea. The response didn’t help. The reference librarian checked holdings in
Boroko and contacted both local anthropologists and theater people. No data