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

toward a poetics of performance 191
actually murdered, 10 are deceiving themselves if they think they are
approaching a deeper or more essential reality. All of these actions –
like the Roman gladiatorial games or Aztec human sacrifices – are as
symbolic and make-believe as anything else on stage. What happens is
that living beings are reified into symbolic agents. Such reification is
monstrous, I condemn it without exception. It is no justification to
point out that modern warfare does the same, killing “things” at a
distance. Nor will these blood performances act as a cathartic: violence
replicated, or actualized, stimulates more violence. It also deadens
people’s abilities to intervene outside the theater when they see
violence being done.
Turner locates the essential drama in conflict and conflict resolution.
I locate it in transformation – in how people use theater as a way to
experiment with, act out, and ratify change. Transformations in theater
occur in three different places, and at three different levels: 1) in the
drama, that is, in the story; 11 2) in the performers whose special task it
is to undergo a temporary rearrangement of their body/mind, what I call a
“transportation” (Schechner 1985: 117–51); 3) in the audience where
changes may either be temporary (entertainment) or permanent (ritual).
All over the world performances are accompanied by eating and
drinking. In New Guinea, Australia, and Africa feasting is at the very
center of theater; in modern western theater a show without something
to eat or drink at intermission or just before or after the theater is
unusual. This action recalls not only the chimpanzee carnivals but the
hunting circuit; it suggests that theater stimulates appetites, that it is an
oral/visceral art (see Kaplan 1968). And, as Lévi-Strauss has shown, the
basic transformation from raw to cooked is a paradigm of culturemaking:
the making of the natural into the human. 12 At its deepest level
this is what theater is “about,” the ability to frame and control, to
transform the raw into the cooked, to deal with the most problematic
(violent, dangerous, sexual, taboo) human interactions.
At all levels theater includes mechanisms for transformation. At the
level of the staging there are costumes and masks, exercises and incantations,
incense and music, all designed to “make believe” in the literal
sense – to help the performer make her/himself into another person or
being, existing at another time in another place, and to manifest this
presence here and now, in this theater, so that time and place are at least