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

actuals 49
spectators wisecrack and taunt the performers. This is not irrelevant –
each phase must pass through ordeals to achieve the next stop. Taunts
and mockery are also part of many tribal ceremonies. Even the notpaying-attention
is part of some solemn occasions – like the Yom
Kippur service of Hassidic Jews, from which the Living Theater took
elements of Paradise Now. Eventually Paradise Now arrives at the eighth
phase and the performers, accompanied by many spectators, confront
the police outside the theater. I am reminded of Irma’s little speech at
the end of The Balcony. “You must now go home, where everything –
you can be quite sure – will be even falser than here.” The Living
Theater turns Genet on his head.
Consequential, irremediable, and irrevocable acts. There are almost none of
these in our theater. Among some tribal peoples irrevocability is finely
expressed in the circumcision of initiates. But it could also be taken
from the exchanges of goods and people that vivify tribal life. Mauss
calls these each “a total social fact.” Lévi-Strauss interprets them as
events which have “significance that is at once social and religious,
magic and economic, utilitarian and sentimenal, jural and moral”
(Lévi-Strauss 1969a: 52). Even at Christmas and on birthdays or anniversaries
we are not likely to involve ourselves in such whole
exchanges. To demonstrate this I devised a classroom exercise. I asked
everyone to choose a partner and to exchange something for fun. Men
gave their wallets, shoes, pens; women their rings, cosmetics, handbags.
Then I said, “Now exchange something for real.” People gave
each other empty cigarette packages, blank paper, matches.
Ralph Ortiz’s The Sky is Falling includes elements that are irrevocable.
In it mice and chickens are killed, a piano axed to bits, and participants
doused with blood. Participants are divided into a small number of
Initiators and a large number of Initiates. The scenario is written in the
terminology of ceremony, freely using words like “ritual” and
“shaman.” Initiates are interrogated by the Initiators and verbally
abused when they refuse to participate in any detail of the piece. Violence
is combined with sexuality and scatology. The violence increases
through a series of overlapping and simultaneous “rituals” culminating
in the “Piano Destruction Rite” and the “Birth of Henny Penny
Rite.” Preparatory events include breaking eggs, killing mice, cutting
paper screens on which images of human dissections are projected,