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

magnitudes of performance 295
9 In December, 1979 I observed Dianichi-do Bugaku in northern Japan (Kazano City) at a Shinto
shrine. Peasants, wearing traditional masks, including a famous golden one said to possess great
power, dance for about three hours on a makeshift square, elevated stage – like a boxing ring
without ropes – set up in the center of the interior of the shrine. It was said that this same
performance is done each year, and dates back many hundreds of years.
10 In 1960 I staged Sophocles’ Philoctetes on the beach of Truro, Massachusetts (near Provincetown,
where I was running a summer theater). The audience had to walk over a mile of sand dunes to
reach the place where the performance took place. Philoctetes himself roamed the dunes;
Neoptolemus and Odysseus arrived by boat (we had launched them about a half-mile further down
the beach). The Truro dunes really conveyed the sense of desert island that the Sophocles play
asks for.
the Cambridge thesis.) But the “origin” of the theater, dance, and
music could as well be healing, or fun-making, or story-telling, or
initiations, or nothing at all. Performance may be coexistent with the
human species. 2
Ritual has a broader scope than the Cambridge group supposed.
Ethological and neurological approaches to ritual are extremely
important for performance studies. From the ethological perspective,
rituals are behavioral displacements, exaggerations, repetitions, and
transformations that communicate and/or symbolize meanings not
ordinarily associated with the behavior displayed. As Irenaus Eibl-
Eibesfeldt writes, “ritualization is the process by which noncommunicative
behavior patterns evolve into signals. . . . In a ritual
expressive movements are integrated in a more complex event which is
structured in a rule-governed way” (1979: 14, 10).
But let me back up.
Figure 8.1 lays out the time, space, and event parameters of performances
without regard to culture or genres. I wanted to take an
intergeneric, intercultural perspective and see what the “limits” of
performance were. I tried to think of performances of different magnitudes,
from the very longest, lasting months or even years, to splitsecond
events; from the largest, spanning millions of miles, to the
smallest “brain events” of conceptual art – performances making no
spatial claims at all; from clear examples of theater, dance, and music to
what Clifford Geertz might lift his eyebrows at as the blurriest of
genres: the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–80, a bar mitzvah, famous
murder trials (like those of Klaus von Bulow or Jean Harris), Hindu
temple services, title boxing matches, TV soap operas, the Yaqui Easter
Passion play, orthodox Euro-American theater and dance, noh drama,
ramlila, etc. Some of these performances are one of a kind while others