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

people thinks systematically in its own terms. Lévi-Strauss does not
resurrect the noble savage or blur differences with an archetypal smear.
We live under terrible stress. Politically, intellectually, artistically,
personally, and epistemologically we are at breaking points. It is a
cliché to say that a society is in crisis. But ours, particularly here on the
North American continent,* seems gripped by total crisis and faced
with either disintegration or brutal, sanctioned repression. The yearnings
of the young may be a combination of infantile wishes for the
wholeness of Mama’s breast and a thrashing toward an impossible
Utopian socialism. Or these yearnings may indicate a genuine alternative
to our horrific destiny. I cannot distinguish between the true and
the false. But I can identify yearnings which have triggered not only an
interest in primitive peoples but artistic movements that concretize that
interest and start to satisfy those yearnings.
Wholeness. Participatory democracy, self-determination on the local,
national, and international levels. Therapies which start from the oneness
of mind/body/feelings. “Getting it together.” Total theater,
intermedia, integrated electronic systems, McLuhanism. An end to
dichotomies, so that:
a whole person not mind/body
families not fragmented individuals
communities not government vs. governed
jobs like play not alienated work
art where we are not in museums far away
one world in peace not wars and international rivalries
human one with nature not ecological warfare
Process and organic growth. An end to the assembly-line approach to the
production of goods and the conformism of people. Animosity toward
the police, the military-industrial complex. “Process, not product.”
“Do your own thing.” “Turn people into artists, not on to art.” Turbulence
and discontinuity, not artificial smoothness. Organic foods.
Kicking out your feelings. Ritual art, all-night dances.
Concreteness. Down with theories, abstractions, generalizations, the
* In 1970, when this essay first appeared.
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