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

toward a poetics of performance 205
differently. For example, Notre Dame in Paris has only one “finished”
tower; but how “wrong” it would be to finish the “incomplete” structure.
As an ideal cathedral the building lacks a tower; as Notre Dame it
is complete only as it now stands. In all cases the process of solidification,
completion, and historical ratification is a process of rehearsal:
how a work is reworked until it crosses a threshold of “acceptability”
after which it can be “shown.”
The theater is unique in that all its works, even the most traditional,
are produced by means of the rehearsal process. That is, all theatrical
works change over time as they are adjusted to immediate circumstances.
Sometimes these changes are tectonically slow when a dogma
is fixed as, say, the Roman Catholic Mass is. But even the Mass has been
suddenly readjusted, most recently by Vatican Council II. And, on the
local level, the Mass is always accommodating the given circumstances
of its various celebrations. In the aesthetic genres such as modern Euro-
American theater delight is taken in reinterpreting the classics; but
there are also unspoken limits – if a theater group goes beyond these
it is not praised for being inventive but attacked for “violating” the
material. Such was the reaction of some critics and spectators to
The Performance Group’s productions of Dionysus in 69 (Euripides’ The
Bacchae) and Makbeth (Shakespeare’s Macbeth). But even when doing
a brand new play tensions arise between the author’s intentions
and what finally happens on the stage. This happened in TPG’s production
of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime (see chapter 3). Sometimes,
as in the famous disputes between Anton Chekhov and
Stanislavsky, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, these tensions reach
a breaking point.
But what exactly is the “rehearsal process”? At the Macy Conference
W. Gray Walter commented on Birdwhistell’s model:
Grace may be the result of efficiency in a goal-directed movement. In
the case of an artificial animal or guided weapon, the early guided
weapons and some modern ones, when they are searching and are
not goal-directed, have a trajectory with a messy curve like B [203].
They perform a hunting movement, which looks quite random and is
certainly not very graceful. It is jerky and disjointed, incoherent, often a
series of cycloid loops. But the moment the goal or target is perceived,