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

toward a poetics of performance 193
some are more decisively involved than others. In aesthetic drama
everyone in the theater is a participant in the performance while only
those playing roles in the drama are participants in the drama nested
within the performance (see chapter 3). The performance as distinct
from the drama is social, and it is at the level of performance that
aesthetic and social drama converge. The function of aesthetic drama is
to do for the consciousness of the audience what social drama does for its participants:
providing a place for, and means of, transformation. Rituals carry participants
across limens, transforming them into different persons. For
example a young man is a “bachelor” and through the ceremony of
marriage he becomes a “husband.” His status during that ceremony,
but only then, is that of “groom.” Groom is the liminal role he plays
while transforming from bachelor into husband. Aesthetic drama
compels a transformation of the spectators’ view of the world by rubbing
their senses against enactments of extreme events, much more
extreme than they would usually witness. The nesting pattern makes it
possible for the spectator to reflect on these events rather than flee from
them or intervene in them. That reflection is the liminal time during
which the transformation of consciousness takes place.
The situation for the actor in aesthetic drama is complicated because
the drama is repeated many times and each time the actor is supposed
to start from nearly the same place. In other words, in western theater
at least, although spectators come and go, and they are encouraged to
change, techniques have been developed to prepare actors for, and
bring them down from, the experience of playing relatively unchanged
– no more changed than any ordinary career changes a person. Metaphorically
speaking, the actor is a circular printing press who, in rolling
over makes an impression on her audience; but she is not ready to
roll over again until she is back in her original position. For each
performance there is a new audience on whom an impression is to be
made. The actor makes a journey that ends where it began, while the
audience is “moved” to a new place. In aesthetic drama techniques
have been developed to transform the actor into the role and other
techniques are used to bring her back to her ordinary self. In some
ritual theater the officiators are very like actors in aesthetic drama: the
shaman working a cure must effect change in the patient, and often
does this by transforming into another being; but at the end of the