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

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selective inattention
order: if the lovers were commoners their plight would be as moving
(as in West Side Story) but its repercussions more limited. The lovers’
story is richer for being played out against and within the war of their
parents. But West Side Story also embodies the politics of its social milieu,
albeit one fascinating to audiences in love with America’s democratizing
myths. All tragedies, probably all dramas, have under their personal
and idiosyncratic surfaces deep social sub-structures that guide the
sequence of events.
At another level there is cross-feed. Ford took techniques from the
theater: how to release news, how to manipulate the public’s reactions,
how to disarm his enemies; even how to make up his face, wear his
costume, deliver his sentences. This is not a new preoccupation of
political leaders. Nor is it restricted to the Louis XIVs of the world:
Lenin, a New Guinea village headman, and George Meany practice
stagecraft. Shakespeare, like the Greeks, is a master at deploying his
dramas of persons in the field of state events. Like a spider’s web, what
touches one part sends vibrations through the whole. It is this wide
field that Brecht understood and used but which the psychological
naturalists and absurdists avoid or reject. This field is not an abstract
legendary community – my objection to some of the Open Theater’s
and Bread and Puppet Theater’s work is that it mythologizes and generalizes
political power which is always and everywhere specific and
concrete, dripping with local customs. The field is always the polis, full
of castes, classes, cross-interests, rivalries, and struggle; this is true of
drama in society not only in the west, but everywhere. Nor do certain
eras have more social structure than others: systems change, they don’t
disappear. The “spontaneous communitas” Turner sees as antistructure
is temporary, liminal, a special performative circumstance
carefully hedged. One of the beautiful ironies of theater is that it is a
communitas infiltrated by structure, a liminal event refracting the tensions
of social order and disorder. The conventions of performance are a
latticework supporting the liberties of theatrical communitas.
THE INTEGRAL VS. THE ACCIDENTAL AUDIENCE
The best way to understand the relationship between ritual theater –
such as initiation rites, marriage ceremonies, funerals, etc. – and