Spontaneous communitas abolishes status.

Ritual, play, and performance Performances – whether in the performing arts, sports, popular music,or everyday life – consist of ritualized gestures and sounds. Even when we think we’re being spontaneous and original, most of what we do and utter has been done and said before – by us even. Performing arts frame and mark their presentations, underlining the fact that artistic behavior is “not for the first time” but enacted by trained persons who take time to prepare and rehearse.A performance may feature highly stylized behavior such as in kabuki, kathakali, ballet, or the dance-dramas of Indigenous Australians. Or it may be congruent to everyday behavior as in naturalism. A performance may be improvised – but as in jazz or contact improvisation dance,most improvisations consist of arranging and moving through known materials.

In Chapter 2, I pointed out that performances consist of twice-behaved, coded, transmittable behaviors.This twice- behaved behavior is generated by interactions between ritual and play. In fact, one definition of performance is: Ritualized behavior conditioned and/or permeated by play.

Rituals are collective memories encoded into actions. Rituals also help people (and animals) deal with difficult transitions, ambivalent relationships, hierarchies, and desires that trouble, exceed, or violate the norms of daily life. Play gives people a chance to temporarily experience the taboo, the excessive, and the risky.You may never be Oedipus or Cleopatra, but you can perform them “in play.” Ritual and play lead people into a “second reality,” separate from ordinary life.This reality is one where people can become selves other than their daily selves. When they temporarily become or enact another, people perform actions different from what they do ordinarily. Thus, ritual and play transform people, either permanently or temporarily. Rituals that transform people permanently are called “rites of passage.” Initiations, weddings, and funerals are rites of passage – from one life role or status to another. In play, the transformations are temporary, bounded by the rules of the game or the conventions of the genre.The performing arts, sports, and games combine ritual and play. In this chapter, I consider ritual and in the following chapter, play.

Varieties of ritual Every day people perform dozens of rituals. These range from religious rituals to the rituals of everyday life, from the rituals of life roles to the rituals of each profession, from the rituals of politics and the judicial system to the rituals of business or home life. Even animals perform rituals.

Many people equate ritual with religion, with the sacred. In religion, rituals give form to the sacred, communicate doctrine, open pathways to the supernatural, and mold individuals into communities. But secular public life and everyday life are also full of ritual. Great events of state often combine sacred and secular ritual, as in the coronations, inaugurations, or funerals of leaders. Less marked, the rituals of everyday life can be intimate or even secret; sometimes these are labeled as “habits,” “routines,” or “obsessions.” But all rituals – sacred or secular, public or hidden – share certain formal qualities (see Rappaport box). Performing rituals seems to go back to the very earliest periods of human cultural activity. Numerous cave and burial sites dating back 20,000–30,000 years before the present show a cere- monial care with handling the dead as well as wall paintings and sculptings that seem to be of ritual significance. Nor has this need to deal ritually with the big events of life dimin- ished. Present-day life throughout the world is saturated with ritual observances.To specify only a few of the myriad of religious rituals: the Passover Seder of the Jews, the five daily prostrations toward Mecca of Muslims, the Roman Catholic Eucharist, the waving of a camphor flame at the climax of a Hindu puja, the dances, songs, and utterances of a person possessed by an orixa of Umbanda or Candomble – and too many more to list even a small fraction (see figure 3.1). Religious rituals are as various as religion itself.

Nor is religion limited to the normative practices of the “world religions” – Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism.There are many local, regional, and sectarian variations of the world religions.There are Shaman,Animist, Pantheist, and New Age religions. Most people, even if they don’t openly admit it, actually follow more than one religion. A devout Christian may carry in her pocket a “good luck charm” or regularly consult her horoscope. Diasporic,

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formerly colonized and missionized peoples combine the religions of their homelands with what was imposed on them. When under stress, people who ordinarily would not do so seek out healers and seers.

Sacred and secular Rituals are frequently divided into two main types, the sacred and the secular. Sacred rituals are those associated with, expressing, or enacting religious beliefs. It is assumed that religious belief systems involve communicating with, praying, or otherwise appealing to supernatural forces. These forces may reside in, or be symbolized by, gods or other superhuman beings. Or they may inhere in the natural world itself – rocks, rivers, trees, mountains – as in Native American and Native Australian religions (see figure 3.2). Secular rituals are those associated with state ceremonies, everyday life, sports, and any other activity not specifically religious in character.

But this neat division is spurious. Many state ceremonies approximate or include religious ritual, with the State playing the role of the transcendent or godly other. Hitler and his Nazi party were particularly adept at this kind of quasi-religious performance of the State. The great party rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s were secular-sacred ritual performances of party-state power (see Chapter 6 for more discussion of the Nazi rallies).The Memorial Day observance

at the US Arlington National Cemetery is a secular-sacred state ritual. On the other side of the coin, many religious rituals include activities that are decidedly worldly or non- transcendent, such as the masking, playing, drinking, and sexuality of Carnival (see figure 3.3).Additionally, many, perhaps most, rituals are both secular and sacred.A wedding, for example, is the performance of a state-sanctioned contract, a religious ceremony, and a gathering of family and friends. The rituals of a typical American wedding are both secular and sacred. Secular wedding rituals include “cutting the cake,” “throwing the bridal bouquet,” “the first dance with the bride,” and so on (see figure 3.4). Sacred wedding rituals include clergy performing the ceremony and prayers. Some weddings are officiated by a judge or a ship’s captain – in these cases state rituals are performed. Sometimes, the sacred portion of a wedding is separated from the secular by having the wedding ceremony in a temple or church and the party elsewhere. Mixing the secular with the sacred is common to many observances, cele- brations, and life-passage events such as birthday parties, job-related celebrations honoring years of service or retirement, and the numerous holidays punctuating the calendar.

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Roy A.Rappaport The obvious aspects of ritual

I take ritual to be a form or structure, defining it as the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and

utterances not encoded by the performers. [. . .] No single feature of ritual is peculiar to it. It is in the conjunction of its

features that it is unique. [. . .] Rituals tend to be stylized, repetitive, stereotyped, often but not always decorous, and they

also tend to occur at special places and at times fixed by the clock, calendar, or specified circumstances. [. . .] Performance

is the second sine qua non of ritual. [. . .] Performance is not merely a way to express something, but is itself an aspect of

that which it is expressing. [. . .R]itual not only communicates something but is taken by those performing it to be “doing

something” as well. [. . .] However, that which is done by ritual is not done by operating with matter and energy [. . .] in

accordance with the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology. The efficacy of ritual derives [. . .] from “the occult.” The occult

differs from “the patent” in that the patent can be known in the last resort by sensory experience, and it conforms to the

regularities of material cause. The occult cannot be so known and does not so conform.

1979, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion, 175–78.

Carnival: period of feasting and revelry which precedes the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday. The term “Carnival” includes, but is not limited to, Mardi Gras celebrations.

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fig 3.1. Religious rituals of various faiths.

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Muslims praying outside the Registan complex of mosques in Samarakand, 1996. Photograph by Shamil Zhumatov. Copyright Reuters.

An Animist Ndembu woman in trance, possessed by a spirit during a girl’s initiation rite, Zambia 1985. Copyright Edith Turner, Victor and Edith Turner Collection, Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School Image Bank.

Worshippers at a Christian “mega church,” www.urbanchristiannews. com/ucn/2010/02/what-is-the-big-deal-with-mega-churches.html.

Worship of the Hindu goddess Durga during Durga Puja, Kolkata, 1980s. Photograph by Richard Schechner.

Schechner, Richard, and Richard Schechner. Performance Studies : An Introduction, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=1128311. Created from pensu on 2020-01-26 11:11:33.

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http://www.urbanchristiannews.com/ucn/2010/02/what-is-the-big-deal-with-mega-churches.html
http://www.urbanchristiannews.com/ucn/2010/02/what-is-the-big-deal-with-mega-churches.html
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fig 3.2. Uluru, sacred to Indigenous Australians, is the world’s largest monolith, with a height of 318 meters and a circumference of 8 kilometers. This same formation is called “Ayer’s Rock” by non-Native Australians. Photograph courtesy of Ernest Bial.

fig 3.3. Trinidad Carnival combines the secular and the sacred, the ecstatic and solemn, the celebratory and the erotic.

A line of young people “wining” – rotating the hips and rubbing up close to one another – during Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1990s. Photograph by Pablo Delano.

Maskers “bloody” and ecstatic celebrate Carnival in Trinidad, 1990s. Photograph by Jeffrey Chock.

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Many cultures do not enforce a rigid separation between the sacred and the secular. Sometimes there is no separation whatsoever.To those Native Australians who continue to live traditionally, every thing and every place has a sacred quality to it (see Gould box). This idea of the sacredness of the ordinary is a major theme of New Age religions and of some performance art. Dancer-choreographer-ritualizer Anna Halprin works with many different kinds of groups to locate and consciously perform the rituals of everyday life – eating, sleeping, greeting, touching, moving – and to invent new rituals that “honor” the body and the Earth. For example, Halprin’s 1987 Planetary Dance, a two-day “dance ritual,” consisted of groups of dancers in 25 countries moving in synchrony to make a “wave” of dance circling the Earth.The dance was repeated in 1994.

Structures, functions, processes, and experiences Rituals and ritualizing can be understood from at least four perspectives:

1 Structures – what rituals look and sound like, how they are performed, how they use space, and who performs them.

2 Functions – what rituals accomplish for individuals, groups, and cultures.

3 Processes – the underlying dynamic driving rituals; how rituals enact and bring about change.

4 Experiences – what it’s like to be “in” a ritual.

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fig 3.4. Mara Hoberman and Sam Schechner cutting their wedding cake, one of the secular rituals of an American wedding. Truro, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, September 2011. Photograph by Richard Schechner.

Richard A. Gould Ritual is an inseparable part of the whole

The daily life of the Aborigines is rewarding but routine.

There is a kind of low-key pace to the everyday round

of living. In their ritual lives, however, the Aborigines

attain a heightened sense of drama. Sharp images appear

and colors deepen. The Aborigines are masters of

stagecraft and achieve remarkable visual and musical

effects with the limited materials at hand. [. . .]

Gradually I experienced the central truth of Aboriginal

religion: that it is not a thing by itself but an inseparable

part of a whole that encompasses every aspect of

daily life, every individual and every time – past, present,

and future. It is nothing less than the theme of existence,

and as such constitutes one of the most sophisticated

and unique religious and philosophical systems known to

man.

1969, Yiwara, 103–04

Anna Halprin (1920– ): American dancer and choreographer. A pioneer in the use of expressive arts for healing and ritual-making. Her work in the 1960s had a profound influence on postmodern dance. Halprin continues to explore the uses of the arts in/as therapy – see her Returning to Health with Dance, Movement, and Imagery (2002, with Seigmar Gerken).

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These four aspects of ritual have been explored from many angles by ethologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. All of these approaches are relevant to performance studies. Throughout this book, I will be referring to them. In brief: Ethologists study the conti- nuities between animal and human rituals – particularly how rituals are used to control and redirect aggression, to establish and maintain hierarchy, to determine access to mates, and to mark and defend territory. Neurologists investigate what effects certain ritual practices have on the brain. Performing actions rhythmically and repetitively can put people into trance. While in trance, people are “possessed,” “swept away,” or have “out of body experiences.” I will discuss trance performing in Chapter 6.Anthropologists observe, describe, and theorize living ritual practices. Archaeologists are forensic anthropologists who reconstruct extinct societies by reasoning from surviving evidence ranging from bones, ruins, pottery shards, and midden heaps to artworks and implements, weapons, and tools.

How ancient are rituals? The evidence shows that human ritual practices go back many thousands of years. The paintings and sculptings found in caves such as Lascaux and Altamira in today’s France and Spain date from as recent as 9,000 BCE to as far back as 40,000 years ago. Archaeologists studying this cave “art” surmise that rituals were probably performed in association with the paintings and sculptings. (I put quotation marks around the word “art” because no one knows for sure what the makers of these works thought of them or meant them to be or do.) Some paintings are abstract patterns, others are stenciled handprints. Many are reasonably accurate representations of animals such as bison, horses, boar, and deer. A few depict dancing humans wearing masks. Taken both individually and as a whole, these works speak to modern humans across a great expanse of time. But what exactly are they saying to us today? Even more important, what were they saying to the people who made them? The “art” probably was a repository of group memory, desire, and imagination. At least some of the cave spaces were used for performances: there are footprints preserved in clay indicating dancing. Whatever the caves were, they were not art galleries in the modern sense – they are hard to access and even with torches the paintings and sculptings are difficult to illuminate clearly. Probably the caves were sites of hunting magic, initiations, and other kinds of per- formed rituals – behavior that concretely embodied the

“as if ” (see Montelle box). The paintings and sculptings were more likely to be “action works” – items executed to get some result – than visual art designed for viewing in a mood of appreciation or reflection as in a museum. Still, we today can appreciate the power and beauty of the “art” – and this argues for a continuity of human consciousness and aesthetic design from prehistoric times to the present.That is, not only were the “artists” who made the works in the caves fully human biologically, they were our contemporaries culturally as well. I will discuss the cave performances again in Chapter 7.

Eleven themes relating ritual to performance studies From the vast literature on ritual, I suggest eleven themes especially relevant to performance studies:

1 ritual as action, as performance 2 human and animal rituals 3 rituals as liminal performances 4 communitas and anti-structure 5 ritual time/space 6 transportations and transformations 7 social drama 8 the efficacy–entertainment dyad 9 origins of performance

10 changing or inventing rituals 11 using rituals in theatre, dance, and music

During the remainder of this chapter, I will explore these themes.

Rituals as action, as performance The relationship between “ritual action” and “thought” is complex (see Bell box). The idea that rituals are performances was proposed nearly a century ago. Émile Durkheim theorized that performing rituals created and sustained “social solidarity.” He insisted that although rituals may communicate or express religious ideas, rituals were not ideas or abstractions, but performances enacting known patterns of behavior and texts. Rituals don’t so much express ideas as embody them. Rituals are thought- in/as-action. This is one of the qualities that makes ritual so theatre-like, a similarity Durkheim recognized (see Durkheim box).

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Yann-Pierre Montelle Paleoperformance: theatricality in the caves

Upper Paleolithic cave users laid out the paradigmatic foundations for a social process which has remained characteristic of

our species to the present: the subjunctive world of the self-consciously constructed “as if.” [. . .] Theatricality, as practice,

finds its first tangible evidence in the deep caves of the Upper Paleolithic, at least 17,000 years ago. It is my belief that a direct

line of interrelated “landmarks” can be established between the cave and the theatron (or cavea). [. . .] Pleistocene use of caves

and iconography can be found in the Americas, Australia, China, India, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This global

phenomenon helps confirm the emergence and ubiquity of theatricality on a worldwide scale. [. . .] The undeniable sense of mise-

en-scène and the degree of planning indicate that the cave was a sophisticated place where “otherness” was explored, explained,

and contained. It was also a place where societal segregation took place in order to guarantee stability and survival. Knowledge

was variably disseminated during initiatory procedures that were carefully choreographed. [. . .] Exoteric visual displays were

a “visible” body of information positioned at specific locations, and standardized (in order to be “read” by all interested parties

of a band or group). Esoteric visual displays were an in/visible body of formulaic information (mnemonics) restricted to specific

“readers” of a band. The variations in the volume of exoteric and esoteric visual display per cave indicate an interesting shift

in the processual approach to information exchange and the mechanisms used to enforce adherence to arbitrary sets of

standardized rules. The degree of visibility and invisibility in these systems of information suggests that the “passing on” and

sharing of knowledge externally and internally was mediated by a rigid and ideological structure. It is in the junctions between

the components of this controlled repartition of cognition that [. . .] performativity and theatricality emerge(d).