Ritual, Performance, Media

Felicia Hughes-Freeland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415163378
• eBook ISBN: 9781134713820
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ritual, Performance and Media are significant areas of study which are essential to anthropology and are often surprisingly overlooked. This book brings a more anthropological perspective to debates about media consumption, performativity and the characteristics of spectacle which have transformed cultural studies over the past decade.

Chapter 1

Theatre as a site of passage

Some reflections on the magic of acting

Kirsten Hastrup

We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being.

(Artaud 1958: 13)

In 1968, that year of revolt and of imagination, Peter Brook launched an attack on the ‘deadly theatre’ (Brook 1968). Deadliness had settled most comfortably within the European textual tradition, notably the Shakespearean, which made the audience smile out of recognition and confirmation rather than from the experience of surprise. Deadliness, however, is not attached to a particular genre; it may occur anywhere, according to Brook. This chapter seeks to explore its opposite, the living theatre, theatre that moves.¹ My concern is related to a more general interest in retracing the process by which ‘newness’ enters the world, and thus in identifying a point of agency that truly matters (cf. Hastrup forthcoming). Thus my emphasis is more on the historical potential of theatre than on its ‘meaning’. Although my argument is quite literally ‘staged’, it is still squarely within recent epistemological concerns in general anthropology (cf. Hastrup 1995a).

In anthropology, we have talked at length about social dramas or cultural performances, and many studies have been carried out with the explicit aim of studying the spectacular qualities of social life (e.g. Cohen 1981, Geertz 1980, Turner 1974). Far fewer studies have been devoted to theatre and spectacle per se (cf. Beeman 1993: 370), which is all the more strange since theatricality seems to have been at the roots of the overwhelming interest in ritual, for instance. If there is any tradition of ‘theatre anthropology’, then this originates in the world of theatre studies (e.g. Barba and Savarese 1991, Hastrup 1996a, Watson 1993). In many ways this field is (deliberately) at odds with social or cultural anthropology, seeking to decontextualize the art of acting, historically and culturally, and aiming at an understanding of the universal, ‘natural’ dimensions of performers’ work. However, with its clear focus on the secret art of the performer, transculturally, theatre anthropology in Barba's sense provides a singularly apt comparative perspective for the renewed attempt within social anthropology to come to grips with theatre as a moving force in the world.

This chapter should be seen as an attempt to reintroduce theatre into general anthropology, and to investigate the power of acting. My perspective is not that of the audience, or that of the passing anthropological observer, but that of the players. The ‘native point of view’ in this context is embedded in the world of European theatre, from where we get a new perspective on the world beyond the stage. The implicit point is that ‘the playful’ is an integral part of social experience and cultural reproduction, not something existing outside it (cf. Turner 1982, Bruner 1984), much like ‘the painful’ on the less pleasant side of life (Hastrup 1993). Cultural reproduction in this sense points not to stability but to a domain of implicit motivation.

Theatre belongs to the domain of art. This domain is notoriously difficult to talk about without either subscribing to the cult of self-perpetuating admiration or reducing it to craft (cf. Geertz 1983: 94–5, Bourdieu 1996). Craft or technique is, of course, an integral part of art's peculiar power of enchantment (Gell 1992), yet there is something more than that, which defies our words and locks our tongues. To talk in a scholarly way about art we need a kind of ‘methodological philistinism’, akin to the methodological atheism needed when studying religious forms elsewhere: ‘Methodological philistinism consists of taking an attitude of resolute indifference towards the aesthetic value of works of art – the aesthetic value that they have, either indigenously or from the standpoint of universal aestheticism’ (Gell 1992: 42). Theatre being one art form among others, this point should be kept in mind during my argument on the power inherent in the players’ investment of themselves in a process of becoming what they are not.

The main point of departure, however, is not theatre as art as much as theatre as life. As Peter Brook has it: ‘theatre has no categories, it is about life. This is the only starting point and there is nothing else truly fundamental. Theatre is life’ (Brook 1993: 8). Evidently, it differs from everyday life, or there would be no point in making theatre; but the difference is one of condensation. Theatre is a concentrate of action, which is what makes it so (potentially) powerful. This view of theatre goes back to Aristotle, who defines tragedy as an imitation of action, or literally as a mimesis of praxis, and claims that it represents ‘an action which is complete, and of a certain magnitude’ (Halliwell 1987: 39). This ‘magnitude’ is what makes theatre:

indeed tragedy would be irrelevant otherwise. It is true, actions in tragedy are usually larger than actions in life: they have more complications and weightier consequences, and involve individuals of higher rank. But that they are large is what makes them worth putting on the stage. It does not make them different in kind.

(Bittner 1992: 98)

The magnitude of action must be transformed to life by the actor. In a general depiction of the actor's craft, Colley Cibber (1671–1757) compares the actor Thomas Betterton to the painter Vandyke and the playwright Shakespeare himself:

The most that a Vandyke can arrive at, is to make his portraits of great persons seem to think; a Shakespeare goes farther yet, and tells you what his pictures thought; a Betterton steps beyond them both, and calls them from the grave, to breathe, and be themselves again, in feature, speech, and motion.

(Cibber, in Actors: 105)²

It is Betterton and his like that are at the centre of my attention here. Betterton (1635–1710) was a player of Shakespeare, and among his most famous roles was that of Hamlet. In what follows, Hamlet will be a more or less constant companion on my tour towards a greater understanding of the art of acting. Deadliness is not necessarily his attribute, even if mortality is. Other companions will join the tour at various points in the interest of bringing us closer to the power of acting which seems to cut across time and space – – if still based within the European tradition. It is the source of that power which we are setting out to ensnare, in the general interest of investigating social agency.

PLACE: THE LIMINALITY OF THE STAGE

In anthropology it has often been stressed that theatre has developed from ritual, and that both are in some sense an answer to people's need for ‘communitas’ and spectacle (e.g. Turner 1982, Schechner 1988). In this section I shall circle around the possible relationship between theatre and ritual, with a view not to origins but to history and structural parallels. First a brief note on history.

It seems well established that Greek theatre developed in connection with Dionysian festivals as part of the performance culture of Athens, and evolved into a highly specialized entertainment, involving dancers, a chorus, and a composer who played the lead, and who eventually evolved into one among the other actors, while the playwright withdrew from the stage (Green 1994, Ley 1991, Rehm 1992). Dramas were produced and masks were constructed to suit the cities’ desire for play at times of almost carnivalesque ‘communitas’. Whether actually evolved from ritual or not, theatre in ancient Greece was not an everyday performance. It was a regular feature of the Hellenistic world, however, and as such it probably spilled over into the Roman realm via plays enacted on wooden stages in Greek outposts in southern Italy (Beacham 1995: 7ff). In classical Rome, the first stages were temporary wooden constructs, much like the ones depicted on Greek vases. It was not until 55 BC that the first of those monumental stone theatres that have been left for posterity was constructed in Pompey, seating some 17,500 spectators (Beacham 1995: 56). This theatre staged power and prestige, but it also featured a ritual component in that a small temple was built at the top.

Roman theatre dwindled with the fall of the Roman Empire, and what was left was wandering groups of players of a motley breed. Theatricality was transferred to the church. It has been suggested that (early) modern European theatre grew out of the Christian rite celebrating the Lord's supper, and with it the entire passion (Harris 1992: 3–4). The staging of Christianity and the implied moral dimension were to influence later Elizabethan drama heavily, if again by way of small troupes of itinerant players (Harris 1992: 166). Greek, Roman or medieval, it appears that the stages set for public drama were always set apart from the space of everyday life, and heavily laden with religious or ritual connotation. In between, itinerant players made imagination reign in the streets.

The paradigmatic form of modern western theatre, deriving from the Renaissance, also took place on a well-bounded stage. If we concentrate briefly on Elizabethan England, we notice how, in the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, a new sense of theatre was created, along with a manifest orchestration of the city as inherently theatrical (Smith et al. 1995). A new sense of rites and sites was promoted, and among the innovations were proper theatres, where none had been before. They were erected in the London Liberties, side by side with leper hospitals, in ‘a site of passage’ (Mullaney 1991: 17; see also Mullaney 1988). The Liberties were social margins, a space of freedom and restraint. Inside the city walls, ritual and spectacle were organized around the figures of central authority and were emblems of cultural coherence, not unlike the spectacles of the Balinese ‘theatre state’ analysed by Geertz (1980), and of ancient Rome. By contrast, the ‘figures we encounter outside the city walls are liminal ones, and the dramaturgy of the margins was a liminal breed of cultural performance, a performance of the threshold, by which the horizon of community was made visible, the limits of definition, containment, and control made manifest’ (Mullaney 1991: 22). Thus an ambivalent space between inside and outside turned the dualism into a tertiary construct. And this was the place where the stage was set for Elizabethan drama, when it was not played at court. Among the theatres raised in this space was Shakespeare's theatre, the Globe.

What is happening here is part of a larger development, gradually setting artists free from their patrons and benefactors; it is a process of autonomization of artistic and intellectual work, eventually placing these in a rather restricted field of cultural production (Bourdieu 1993:113–14). The restrictedness of the field is what eventually was to produce the cult of Art. At the time of the Globe, around 1600, the artists were still partly at the mercy of royal or other interest, yet they also had their own space. In this autonomous space, ‘freedom’ of course was dependent upon market and other factors, and certainly Shakespeare's theatre was also about balancing the books, and making profits (Thomson 1992). With the putting up of regular stages in theatres of the threshold, the artistry of acting became a different kind of profession. The process of canonizing the play could take off, just as Bourdieu has described it for art in general, leading to an increasing degree of consecration (Bourdieu 1993: 123). This process presupposes a distinctive field, a theatre firmly bounded off from the everyday.

Before Shakespeare, England had itinerant comedians and troupes of players, and elsewhere in Europe there were other, related forms of performance in market places, on streets and in churches. But theatre now emerged at the verge of modernity, witnessing a transformation of ‘spectacular society’ to a ‘society of spectacle’ (Chaney 1993). Ritualized dramatization of social life was gradually replaced by institutionalized reflexivity on stage. Whether or not this is an absolute before and after modernity as Chaney implies, with Elizabethan theatre professional acting was disrupted from social drama in general. Today, in the postmodernist era, this process may be reversing yet again, making of the street a new and powerful stage (cf. Schechner 1993).

The means to do this was to allot to it a liminal space. And it is this liminality which provides us with the first clue to theatre in general as a site of passage, structurally related to ritual, and in its own way englobing the world. This last point has received notable attention by Frances Yates, whose work points to a possible link between classical philosophy and Shakespearean cosmology in which the idea of the globe was all-pervasive:

The Globe Theatre was a magical theatre, a cosmic theatre, a religious theatre, an actors’ theatre, designed to give fullest support to the voices and gestures of the players as they enacted the drama of the life of man within the Theatre of the World. These meanings might not have been apparent to all, but they would have been known to the initiated. His theatre would have been for Shakespeare the pattern of the universe, the idea of the Macrocosm, the world stage on which the Microcosm acted his parts. All the world's a stage.

(Yates 1987 [1969]: 189)

This is a not too distant echo of the classical view in anthropology of ritual as a condensed symbol of the social. If Yates's words are the real clue to the (now recreated) Globe theatre in the (long-lost) London Liberties, being at one and the same time liminal and inclusive, then they may also provide our cue for the next section.

SPACE: THE ALCHEMY OF ACTING

Space is a practised place (Certeau 1984: 117); if the stage makes up the place of theatre, it is for the players to create a proper social space through their practising of the place. What kind of space results from the actors’ practising of the liminal space, and what is the power inherent in this space? Artaud points to a mysterious identity between the principle of alchemy and...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Ritual, Performance, Media
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theatre as a site of passage: some reflections on the magic of acting
• 2 Performing pilgrimage: Walsingham and the ritual construction of irony
• 3 Ritual, performance and media in urban contemporary shrine configurations in Benin City, Nigeria
• 4 From ritualization to performativity: the Concheros of Mexico
• 5 Perspectives towards ballet performance: exploring, repairing and maintaining frames
• 6 From ritual sacrifice to media commodity: anthropological and media constructions of the Spanish bullfight and the rise of women performers
• 7 ‘A oes heddwch?’ Contesting meanings and identities in the Welsh National Eisteddfod
• 8 Macedonian culture and its audiences: an analysis of Before the Rain
• 9 Hard sell: commercial performance and the narration of the self
• 10 Problematizing performance
• 11 Bound and unbound entities: reflections on the ethnographic perspectives of anthropology vis-à-vis media and cultural studies
• Index