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

toward a poetics of performance 197
handle: audience participation, environmental staging, multi-focus,
etc. These were combined with the traditional theatrical means of our
culture: narration and characterization.
WHAT PERFORMERS DO: THE ECSTASY/TRANCE WHEEL
Looking at performing worldwide, two processes are identifiable. A
performer is either “subtracted,” achieving transparency, eliminating
“from the creative process the resistance and obstacles caused by one’s
own organism” (Grotowski 1968a: 178); or s/he is “added to,”
becoming more or other than s/he is when not performing. S/he is
“doubled,” to use Artaud’s word. The first technique, that of the
shaman, is ecstasy; the second, that of the Balinese dancer, is trance. In
the west we have terms for these two kinds of acting: the actor in
ecstasy is Ryszard Cieslak in The Constant Prince, Grotowski’s “holy
actor”; the actor in trance possessed by another, is Konstantin
Stanislavsky as Vershinin, the “character actor.”
To be in trance is not to be out of control or unconscious. The
Balinese say that if a trance dancer hurts himself the trance was not
genuine. In some kinds of trance the possessed and the possessor are
both visible. Jane Belo describes a Balinese horse dance where
the player would start out riding the hobbyhorse, being, so to speak,
the horseman. But in his trance activity he would soon become identified
with the horse – he would prance, gallop about, stamp and kick as
a horse – or perhaps it would be fairer to say that he would be the
horse and rider in one. For though he would sit on the hobbyhorse, his
legs had to serve from the beginning as the legs of the beast.
(Belo 1960: 213)
This is the centaur; and it is an example of the performer’s double
identity. When, in western theater, we speak of an actor “portraying a
role,” using a metaphor from painting where the artist studies a subject
and produces an image of that subject, we slide away from the main
fact of theatrical performance: that the “portrayal” is a transformation
of the performer’s body/mind – the “canvas” or “material” is the
performer. Interviewing Balinese performers of sanghyangs, village trance