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

know. In the rasic system, each person enjoys according to her abilities;
the higher the level of knowledge, the greater the enjoyment (or disappointment,
if the performance is not up to standards). Japanese noh
actors study the audience immediately before entering the stage and
then adjust their performances to the particular partakers on hand. All
performers know this. The best performers save their best performances
for the most discerning partakers and those who know the most
expect the best. In India, at least, the active response of the partakers is
expected. At dance or music concerts people quietly beat out the tal, or
rhythm, sing under their breath, and sometimes move their hands in
harmony with the mudras, or hand-gesture system. At the Ramlila of
Ramnagar, many persons carry texts of Tulsidas’s Ramcaritmanas, following
along, even singing, as the Ramayanis chant. The same is true of
sports or pop music connoisseurs. The “home team advantage” is a
direct measurement of how the active participation of the crowd can
impact the level of performance.
ORAL PLEASURES, RASICALLY
rasaesthetics 343
Fundamentally, the attainment of pleasure and satisfaction in a rasic
performance is oral – through the snout, by combining various flavors
and tastes; and the satisfaction is visceral, in the belly. How can this be
since the Indian theater, like the western theater, is presented visually
and sonically? First, the Indian theater, both in earlier times and today,
is not based on the agon, on formally determining winners and losers,
either within the dramas (in classic Indian plays often everyone wins)
or in terms of competitions among dramatists and actors. There were
no judges formally ensconced on front marble benches as in the
Theatre of Dionysus. Thus there is no attempt to quantify the performing
experience, to bring it under the theatron’s aegis of visuality. Second,
many performances were part of the feasts of the rich or royal,
and continue to be offered at weddings or other happy celebrations.
Religion itself has a feasting quality that interweaves performing, worshiping,
and eating. Separating work from play, and the sacred from the
profane, has always been more a western than an Indian phenomenon.
Third, until the Mughal conquest and then the English, there was no
anti-theatrical prejudice or Puritanism in India. Far from it – the arts,