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

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magnitudes of performance
looking at the “finished product” toward examining the “whole performance
sequence”: training, workshop, rehearsal, warm-up, performance,
cool-down, and aftermath. When this whole sequence is
considered, it becomes clear that the ritual process is identical to what I
call “restored behavior,” “twice-behaved behavior,” behavior that can
be repeated, that is, rehearsed (see Schechner 1985: 3–150). Ritual
process is performance.
From this perspective, performance magnitudes are not only about
time and space but also about extensions across various cultural and
personal boundaries. Thinking this way raises provocative questions:
When is a performance a performance? How long does a strip of
behavior have to be before it can be said to be performable in the ritual
or aesthetic sense? When strips of behavior are taken from one context
and played in another does it make any difference if, in the replaying,
the strip means something entirely different from what it meant “originally”?
These transformations of meaning are inevitable if context
determines meaning. But it’s not so simple, because every strip, no
matter how small, brings some of its former meanings into its new
context. That kind of “memory” is what makes ritual and artistic
recombinations so powerful.
To jump still farther ahead, it seems to me that the human community
taken as a whole is entering a postmodern phase where the
construction of intercultural aesthetics and ritual is essential. This ethnopoetics
19 occurs on three levels simultaneously: at the panhuman
Ekman level where research might lead to the confirmation of the
existence of some kind of behavioral version of Jungian archetypes; at
the sociocultural level of diverse, particular performances: what
anthropologists and performance theorists have until now focused
on; at an emerging posthumanist, postmodern level of the exchange
of information through multiplex channels – a kind of intercultural
reflexivity. 20
Stay with me a bit longer. Are we to call the facial gestures Ekman
described “performances”? Why not? Can’t they be brought under
conscious control? So, too, we can call the vast social dramas that
Turner describes as “performances” – even though they may involve
whole societies for years. Surely the events in Lebanon over however
many decades make a well-knit Turnerian social drama, one that can