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

a performance condition the performers’ way of working and interactions
with each other. These are only a few of the many combinations
and outcomes possible.
Mimetic theater has given us great masterpieces. Mimetic acting is a
major tradition. There are other kinds of performances, however. Of
these, actuals relate practices among tribal “whole-seeking” peoples
and parts of our own population. Parallels can be misleadingly overdrawn.
But I think people in the west are whole-seeking in ways and
on a scale not experienced in our culture for hundreds of years. What
we are undergoing is not a neo-primitive movement, but a postmodern
one.
NOTES
actuals 63
1 Kaprow’s work, more than any other I know, has the simple quality of “happening”
– of something that is. By ever so slight a change or heightening he
converts everyday actions into “mysteries.” See his Assemblages, Environments
and Happenings (1966b), also his “poster-scenarios” which are both
announcements of his pieces and their scenarios.
2 For a popular explanation of earth art, see Bongartz (1970: 166 ff.). Earth art
develops from some very old impulses and is based on two principles: 1) art
includes the arrangement of natural objects or the confrontation between a
natural object and a man-made object – for example, draping a cliff for 1 mile
with cloth; 2) art is autonomous and can therefore be “displayed” anywhere,
even where it is not likely to be seen by human beings such as under water or
deep in a desert.
3 Aristotle’s view of the world is organic – he sees all growth and development
modeled on what he observed in plants and animals. He believed that every
event contained at the beginning the virtuality of its entire career. He believed in
“fulfillment” rather than “transformation.”
4 Shamanism has both a technical and a broad meaning. Its technical meaning is
that of a certain kind of magico-religious system originating with hunter
peoples in Central Asia. The word is of Siberian origin. The techniques of
shamanism spread westward across the northern tier of Europe and to the
north shores of the Mediterranean and eastward across Siberia into Alaska and
down into both North and South America. Shamanism in its more general
meaning includes all kinds of ceremonial systems combining curing by means
of spirit-journey and exorcism with techniques drawn from the performing arts.
It is in this wider sense that I use the word.
5 Shamanism is not “magic” in our debased sense of the word. It is religious
technique that assumes communication and transformation among several