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

actuals 65
manuscript scenario which Ortiz distributed about two weeks before the event
which took place at the Middle Atlantic States regional meeting of the American
Educational Theater Association held at Temple University in January, 1970. The
event itself was modified the night before performance and some changes were
made improvisationally during the performance. I arrived too late to see the
performance. I walked through the aftermath in the Ritual Destruction Room
and took part in a discussion of the performance. Ortiz told me of the changes
made from scenario to performance. Most important of these were: 1) Song –
my atrocity posters were distributed on the campus and the piece took on a
definite anti-Vietnam war tone. Interrogations focused on killing and atrocities;
the eggs were called “enemy foetuses”; each preliminary act of destruction was
identified with killing Vietnamese; initiates were treated as draftees and their
participation in the event called “a tour of duty”; the destruction of the piano
was identified with the destruction of a Vietnamese village – and the Indian
goddess of destruction Kali was identified with Lieutenant Calley; 2) When the
chickens/babies were delivered the participants divided into two groups, one
shouting “Kill the enemy!” and the other, “Let them live!” The chickens were
identified as Vietcong babies. The Shamans left the theater and ran through the
campus pursued by the two groups. The goal was to run through the city
streets and then back into the Ritual Destruction Room – this goal was
achieved and the chickens were not killed; 3) The audience sat in the large
Temple University theater and watched the event over TV – the “six o’clock
news,” Ortiz calls it. The pursuit of the Shamans with the chicken/babies
included climbing over and through the audience watching on TV. Just prior to
this a man was brought out and dumped on the stage. He was bloody and his
role was to create empathy for his plight as a victim of brutalization. He
dragged himself to the edge of the stage. He vomited, drooled, writhed. Brutalizers
returned from time to time to lift this man’s face, spit in it, throw blood on
him. People in the audience thought the man had freaked out. Several
demanded that a doctor be called. But no one acted. And when the man tried to
crawl off the stage and sit with the audience he was pushed back by people
from the audience, who said, “There’s something wrong with this man – don’t
let him get off the stage.”
Since writing my impressions of The Sky is Falling I have spoken at length to
Ortiz. He is interested in provoking “skizoid” reactions in participants in his
events – he believes that the “paleologic” of schizoid ritual-making is basic to
“visceral acting.” He feels that the individual is capable of producing his own
private systems; he makes distinctions between societies that are whole and
have social ritual systems and societies, like ours, that are alienating and force
people to make their own ritual systems.
13 The Dani engage in ritual warfare. See Gardner and Heider (1968) and
Gardner’s movie, Dead Birds (1963).