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

actuals 61
around seventy-five before the show and told them they could move
during the performance.
If you are noisy or block the performers’ movements, you can bust this
thing up. If you take off your shoes so that you are absolutely silent
and move from carpeted area to carpeted area, you can intensify your
own and our experience. Try to understand the action and go with it.
Think of yourselves as witnesses, or people in the street. Something
happens – you go to see what. But you can’t interfere or change
what’s happening.
The audiences were beautifully cooperative and some impressive
things occurred. During the banquet scene the empty table swiftly
filled with people who became guests at Dunsinane. The murder of
Banquo under a platform was witnessed by a few. During the prophecy
scene in the trench where Makbeth learns of Macduff and Birnam
Wood, fifty spectators stood or crouched, as around a bear-pit, while
Makbeth talked to the Dark Powers who dangled upside down from
pipes. Duncan’s funeral cortege and Makbeth’s coronation parade were
augmented by people linking the ramp and joining in the processions.
The soldiers advancing through Birnam Wood found allies. In many
ways the performance found focus as crowds condensed and dispersed;
as a few people showed up here and there; as many silently and swiftly
tiptoed stocking-footed through this open but secretive castle. The
audience became the soldiers, the guests, the witnesses, the crowds –
the powerless but present and compliant public.
Elements exchange, interpenetrate, and transform – but there is no
hierarchy that permanently or a priori puts any life-process “above”
any other. To dream is as “real” and as “vital” as to eat or dance or make
love or war. Different contexts will of course make one activity more
important within a given circumstance and time. The model is not
ethical or personal – that is, it does not distinguish between right and
wrong, good and bad, your taste and mine. Ethics, values, and tastes are
always making hierarchies – but these are contingent, not fundamental.
It has been customary to view theater hierarchically. For the writer the
text is first and most important; to the performer his/her own presence
on stage is the center of the event; the director knows that the theater