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

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toward a poetics of performance
and deeper, view of what’s real. Modern western theater is mimetic.
Traditional theater, and again I include the avant-garde in this category,
is transformational, creating or incarnating in a theater place what cannot
take place anywhere else. Just as a farm is a field where edible foods are
grown, so a theater is a place where transformations of time, place, and
persons (human and non-human) are accomplished. Aborigine scenography
creates theater out of a combination of natural and built elements.
Each rock, waterhole, tree, and stream is embedded in a matrix of
legend and dramatic action. Thus a particular place is where a ceremony
takes place, where a mythic event has happened in the past,
where beings manifest themselves through songs and dances, and
where everyday and special actions converge – for example, a waterhole
is both a place where people come to drink and where ceremonies
are enacted. Simple modifications of space transform the drinking
place (or some other multiple-use space) into a theater: clearing the
area of small rocks, doing sand or rock paintings, for example; or a
space may become a theater by being “learned” – a novice is taught the
legends, songs, and dances associated with a particular place: geography
itself is socialized; the uninitiated see nothing but an outcropping
of rock or a waterhole; while the initiated experience a dense
theatrical setting. This technique of creating a theater place by poetic
means is used by Shakespeare and the makers of guerrilla theater alike.
TRANSFORMANCES
Victor Turner (1974) analyzes “social dramas” using theatrical terminology
to describe how disharmonic or crisis situations are dealt
with. These situations – arguments, combats, rites of passage – are
inherently dramatic because participants not only do things, they show
themselves and others what they are doing or have done; actions take on a reflexive
and performed-for-an-audience aspect. Erving Goffman (1959) is as
direct as Turner in using the theatrical paradigm. Goffman believes all
social interactions are staged – people prepare their social roles (various
personae or masks, different techniques of role playing) “backstage”
and then enter the “main stage” areas in order to play out key
social interactions and routines. For both Turner and Goffman the basic
human plot is the same: someone or some group begins to move to a