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

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toward a poetics of performance
performance the shaman must return to her/his ordinary existence. It
is the ability to “get into” and “get back from” that makes the shaman
a continually useful person, not a person to be used once only. Thus
there are at least three categories of performance: 1) aesthetic, where
the audience changes consciousness while the performer “rolls over”;
2) ritual, where the subject of the ceremony is transformed while the
officiating performer “rolls over”; 3) social drama, where all involved
change (see Schechner 1985: 117–50).
The ambiguity of theater since 1960 regarding whether or not an
event is “really happening” is an outcome of the blurring of the
boundaries between the categories of performance. Television has
made it possible to theatricalize experience by editing even the most
intimate or horrendous events into “news” so that people feel nothing
strange about a complementary actualization of art (see Schechner
1985: 295–324). The boundaries between “art” and “life” are blurry
and permeable. When people watch extreme events knowing these are
1) actually happening and 2) edited to make the events both more
dramatic and more palatable, fitting them into a “showtime” format,
but also knowing 3) that as observers they are stripped of all possibility
of intervention – that is, they are turned into an audience in the formal
sense – the reaction of anger quickly dissolves into paralysis and despair,
or indifference. Maybe appetites are aroused, but these can’t be
satisfied except by going on the shopping sprees the commercials insist
are necessary for happiness. Emotional feedback is not possible while
watching TV. TV is not a two-way communications system as live
theater is. Some people react by making and/or enjoying art
that’s more “real,” introducing into aesthetics the interventions and
feedback eliminated from ordinary life.
Thus it is no longer strange in theater or performance art to involve
the audience directly in the story, to stage actual encounters among
people, and to use theatrical events as the first step in a process of
religious retreats and meetings (as Grotowski did). These are attempts
to regain some balance between information – which today overwhelms
people – and action, which seems more and more difficult to
effect. Terrorism, as opposed to ordinary street violence, is a way of
getting the attention of society, of making a show; it is a symptom of
the basic dysfunction of the communication–feedback–consequent