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

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from ritual to theater and back
resolving the contradiction between the two “origin stories” of the mudmen
turned up. Finally, the people in New Guinea referred me to the Museum of
Natural History in New York – where Margaret Mead was curator and from
whom I had got the “threatened-by-attack-evil-spirit” hypothesis in the first
place (Mead 1970).
24 Brook’s anecdote is a fine example of what I mean by “preparations” rather
than rehearsals. Rehearsing is a way of setting an exact sequence of events.
Preparing is a constant state of training so that when a situation arises one will
be ready to “do something appropriate” to the moment. Preparations are what
a good athletics team does. Too often those wanting to improvise feel that an
improvisation can arise spontaneously out of the moment. Nothing is further
from the truth. What arises spontaneously is the moment itself. The response
to that moment is selected from a known repertory, rearranged, adapted to the
immediate given circumstances; when done without anxiety this response
joins with the moment to give the impression of total spontaneity. Many ritual
performances are not rehearsed, they are prepared.
25 The headman’s invitation was based on my reputation on the island for being a
clown. Although I was in Bali for only two weeks, I used to play games with
children in which I would imitate animals. I did one act that especially amused
the kids: making my hands into horns, I would charge them as if I were an
enraged bull. On several occasions while riding a bus to a remote village some
children would spot me and make the horn gesture while laughing. Probably I
was regarded as an outlandish foreigner, a bit crazy. At Tenganan the dance I
did at the public performance was a variation on the animal game. MacIntosh’s
professional-level singing was appreciated everywhere. People would get angry
if she refused to sing. In New Guinea especially, almost anything – an object, a
relationship, an event, a performance – can be an item of trade; there are no
neutral or valueless occurrences.
26 The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a number of performances based on this
premise. A family in Greenwich Village sold admission to their apartment
where spectators watched them in their daily lives. Of course the Loud Family
epic on television carried this style of documentary drama to its logical end:
the feedback from the weekly series actually affected the life the Louds lived,
and so we watched the family change under the impact of their knowledge that
they were being watched. In the 1980s performers like Linda Montano and
Allan Kaprow are further breaking down the “art/life” barrier or, perhaps it is
better to say, interdigitating the two kinds of experience (see Montano 1981 and
Kaprow 1983).
27 This kind of overlapping non-exclusivity is increasingly in use in the sciences.
“Classifications need not be hierarchic and the clusters may overlap (intersect).
The whole idea of hierarchic, nonoverlapping (mutually exclusive) classification
which is so attractive to the human mind is currently undergoing reexamination.
From studies in a variety of fields the representation of taxonomic structure
as overlapping clusters or as ordinations appears far preferable” (Sokal