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

magnitudes of performance 331
traditions to which the West gave names like “pagan,” “gentile,” “tribal,”
“oral,” and “ethnic.” In its developed form, it moves toward an exploration
of creativity over the fullest human range, pursued with a regard for
particularized practice as much as unified theory.
(Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983: xi)
20 Efforts in this direction are visible both artistically and in terms of scholarship.
The series of three conferences in 1981 and 1982, culminating in the World
Conference on Theater and Ritual held in New York in August, 1982, is perhaps
the clearest example of this effort. Chaired by Victor Turner and me, the conference
brought together scholars and performing artists from Asia, Africa, Native
America, and Euro-America who, over a nine-day period, discussed and saw
performed examples of a number of genres. Attention was paid not only to the
finished performances but to techniques of training, workshops, rehearsals,
cool-down, and aftermath. The two other conferences in the series, involving
fewer participants, considered Yaqui performing arts and contemporary Japanese
theater. In the artistic sphere, a powerful “fusion movement” is combining
Asian with western performance. This has resulted in a number of interesting
productions and even a few new genres, such as Japanese butoh dance. And
one must not forget the extremely active tourist promotion of performances.
Most tourist performances are sub-genres sharing qualities of condensation
and simplification and playing to audiences who want to be entertained. Some
tours, however, blur into a kind of fieldwork, with qualified anthropologists and
other experts setting up the programs. In all cases, there is a double pressure:
to be “authentic” (a rotten term impossible to define), to modify what happens
to suit the needs of the visiting group. Finally, many performing groups leave
their home territories to bring their arts to strangers. This is not only a matter of
western impresarios and organizations importing “native arts.” Aboriginal
Australian groups hold festivals where they can see each others’ dances and
exchange techniques. Once every four years an all-Pacific festival is held. Similar
exchanges are increasing all around the world.
21 The “Rashomon effect” is named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film. In
Rashomon a number of narrators present their version of an event whose
“objective” truth can at best be vectored, not settled. As narrators change,
so does “truth.” But the “Rashomon effect,” like the movie, is neither a
celebration of relativism nor a skeptic’s complaint. It is an unfolding of
epistemological passion.
22 According to Burgess:
The Quiet Axis is an aesthetic structure that opens a benevolent revelation
into the cosmos from the far side of the moon to the Large Cloud of
Magellan. There are seven zones or aspects of its manifestation beginning
with the Inclined Galactic Light Pond in Bamiyan, Afghanistan (1968–
1974) passing through the earth to the second work called The Utopic
Vessel (1974–1979) in the South Pacific Ocean beside Easter Island and