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

selective inattention 225
they’re moved into the music not beyond it. The audience isn’t quiet. I
mean they not only accompany the music, they talk to each other – not
loudly, but there’s always a buzz. Also “tsk-tsk,” “oooos,” the slapping
of hands on the thighs keeping the rhythms, the bursts of applause
(always selective, that is, always just a portion of the audience), the
low talking. Somehow the collective effect of all this is not distracting
– it is natural, business-like: like eating hot dogs at a ball game.
In chapter 3 I described the rhythms of an all-night performance of a
thovil healing ceremony in Sri Lanka. The audience comes and goes,
and there are several hours when the performance all but stops as only
a few spectators listen to the music or watch occasional dances. In
Australia, Papua New Guinea, Africa, and American Indian villages this
same pattern exists. It is not necessarily tied to long performances or
cycle plays that take a long time to unfold, although these kinds of
episodic or loosely tied bundles of events seem to need selective
inattention.
In the American theater not only Wilson but Peter Schumann, Douglas
Dunn, other “new dancers,” and, in a modest way, The Performance
Group, have experimented with selective inattention. The parades
and outdoor spectacles of the Bread and Puppet Theater necessarily
encourage selective inattention. As a procession goes by a spectator
either follows it or not, and during large-scale performances such as
Domestic Resurrection (an annual show I saw in 1970) it isn’t possible to
keep your eye on all that’s going on. More than that, the outdoor
setting (a meadow in Vermont), the crowd shifting from place to place,
the people in the audience that I knew – going to Vermont to see the
piece was a pilgrimage – meant that greetings, short conversations, and
looking at rather than being swept away by was how I watched the performance.
Even when a boat was made from a great sail and streamers of
cloth, and I, along with many other spectators, accepted the invitation
to climb on board by walking inside the hull of cloth, as if we were
passengers escaping the great flood, I felt involved and separate,
celebratory and critical simultaneously.
Douglas Dunn’s 101 (1974) was a unique experience for me as a
spectator. In his 25 × 75 × 12 feet high loft Dunn built a maze/
honeycomb of loading sleds gleaned from the streets of SoHo. This