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

magnitudes of performance 321
internal brain states. Although artistic and scientific creativity have long
been thought to be similar, there is this decisive difference: scientists
focus their work on external phenomena; even a neurobiologist
works on somebody else’s brain. Performing artists – and, I would
say, meditators, shamans, and trancers too – work on themselves, trying
to induce deep psychophysical transformations either of a temporary
or of a permanent kind. The external artwork – the performance
the spectators see – is the visible result of a trialog among: 1) the
conventions or givens of a genre, 2) the stretching, distorting, or
invention of new conventions, and 3) brain-centered psychophysical
transformations of self.
PERFORMATIVITY, THEATRICALITY, AND NARRATIVITY
In other writings (Schechner 1985) I have described in detail the
deconstruction/reconstruction process that performers use to effect
transformations of self. This process, present in different cultures and
genres under various names, is the “ritual process” Van Gennep first
specified and Turner explicated. D’Aquili, Lex, and Fischer investigate
the same process from a neurological perspective. From a theatrical
perspective what happens is that a person enters training or workshop
as a “fixed” or “finished” or “already-made” being. The training consists
of specific methods of “beaking down” the neophyte, of rendering
her/him psychophysically malleable. Quite literally the performer
in training (or workshop) is taken apart, deconstructed into bits. The
“bit” is not only computer jargon but a venerable theater term meaning
the smallest repeatable strip of action. Bits are as important to
commedia dell’arte as they are to naturalistic or even formalistic acting; a
bit is a molecule of action. The boys learning kathakali repeat the same
bits over and over. Directors are always telling actors to “take that bit
again” because it is at the bit level that acting can be “worked on” from
the outside. Stanislavsky, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater and
progenitor of the first and still the most influential school of modern
acting and directing, broke down the scores of his mises-en-scène into bits
(sometimes translated into English as “beats” 17 ).
Once bits are freed from their attachment to larger schemes of
action, they can be rearranged – almost as the frames of a film being