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

shuns the actors who play Oedipus or Richard III. Among the Kogu the
guilty often gained status when they were forced to perform their
punishments publicly. Real-life criminals become celebrities – especially
when given the chance to tell their stories publicly; that is, to
theatricalize their lives.
Ethological thinking is the application of evolutionary theory to
behavior and culture. On several levels human and animal performances
converge and/or exist along a continuum: 1) on the structural
level where performances are redirected activities, displacement activities,
and/or improvements of signal functions; 2) on a processual
level of dream-work/joke-work; 3) on the level of technique where
drumming, rhythmic vocalization, dancing, and visual displays are
used to create, spread, and share moods; 4) on a cultural level where
performances are means of social control providing avenues for the
discharge of aggression or providing ways of mobilizing people either
to maintain or change a given social order; 5) on a mimetic level where
animals imitate animals and people imitate animals – even appropriating
skins, feathers, faces, gaits, gestures, and sounds; 6) on a theoretical
level where animals and humans are included in reciprocal social structures
as in totemism. (Ironically, a criticism of ethologists is that they
anthropomorphize.) These similarities and convergences offer a basis
for re-examining human theater from the perspective of animal performances.
A re-examination not of two opposing systems but of a
single bio-aesthetic web.
NOTES
ethology and theater 287
1 There is a question of whether performances excite or discharge violent feelings.
My experience as a theater director and spectator tells me that performances
do both. They uncover hidden feelings, arousing them in the extreme.
But this arousal does not lead to action, rather to a cathartic discharge and
ultimate calm. Even when extremely worked up – as by the Living Theater in the
1960s and 1970s – spectators did not seriously agitate in the streets. Rather
they went outside to play.
2 See Rainer (1974), Forti (1974), and TDR, The Drama Review 16 (3) (1972) and
19 (1) (1975).
3 See the References for specific titles. The unifying idea is the belief that visible
behaviors, and what we can learn of deep behaviors through analysis of
brain structure and activity, skin temperature, glandular secretion, and so on,