The Future of Ritual

Writings on Culture and Performance

Richard Schechner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134946921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

In The Future of Ritual, Richard Schechner explores the nature of ritualised behaviour and its relationship to performance and politics. A brilliant and uncontainable examination of cultural expression and communal action, The Future of Ritual asks pertinent questions about art, theatre and the changing meaning of 'culture' in today's intercultural world. An exciting new work by the author of Performance Theory.

1
Introduction
Jayaganesh and the avant-garde

The best way to…understand, enliven, investigate, get in touch with, outwit, contend with, defend oneself against, love…others, other cultures, the elusive and intimate “I-thou,” the other in oneself, the other opposed to oneself, the feared, hated, envied, different other…is to perform and to study performances and performative behaviours in all their various genres, contexts, expressions, and historical processes. What the book was, the performance has become: index and symbol, multiple truths and lies, arena of struggle. And what is performance? Behavior heightened, if ever so slightly, and publicly displayed; twice-behaved behavior. Even in con games, spies, and stings where performances are cunningly masked and folded into the expected, these are enjoyed by a secret audience, the producers of the deceptions. And no matter how sinister and destructive the deception, when it’s made public people get a special kick out of learning all about it. Gordon Liddy of Watergate harvested fat fees lecturing at colleges about his crimes. Performances can be celebratory; performances can terrorize. Many trials and public executions are both. The night the Rosenbergs were electrocuted some people wept, others were enraged, and still others danced in the streets. Performance is amoral, as useful to tyrants as to those who practice guerrilla theatre. This amorality comes from performance’s subject, transformation: the startling ability of human beings to create themselves, to change, to become—for worse or better—what they ordinarily are not.

A Jewish Hindu named Jayaganesh

In the summer of 1976 I was living in Churuthuruthy, a small town in Kerala, southwest India. I’d come to India in January of that year with The Performance Group (TPG)—a New York-based experimental theatre company which I founded in 1967 and directed until 1980. After I left, TPG completed its metamorphosis into the Wooster Group. For three months TPG toured across north India from New Delhi to Lucknow, Calcutta, Bhopal, and Bombay performing Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (see Schechner 1983:31–54). When the tour was over, several people struck out on their own.

I’d been to India before in 1971–2 so I knew some of what I wanted to see. During the spring Chaitra Parva celebrations, I went to Purulia, Seraikella, and Mayurbhanj in eastern India to observe the three forms of chhau dance theatre. Then I spent time in Calcutta viewing traditional and new jatra, modern theatre, and experimental theatre, especially Badal Sircar’s Satabdi group. While in Calcutta I made plans to travel to Vrindaban and then Ramnagar (near Banaras) to study Raslila and Ramlila. The mid-summer was reserved for an extensive trip to the south. I was especially looking forward to my weeks in Kerala, where I would take some classes in kathakali and observe the training and performance practice at the Kalamandalam in Churuthuruthy.

Kerala was very attractive to me as a performance theorist and theatre director. Kathakali, teyyam, and kutiyattam—closely related genres of theatre and ritual—were thriving in proximity to each other. Kutiyattam continued an ancient practice of Sanskrit theatre in association with the Hindu temples. Teyyam was an exorcistic, extremely robust folk ritual theatre. It was performed near simple shrines often incorporating old and numinous trees and rocks. Kathakali, especially as practiced at the Kalamandalam, was rapidly modernizing its ways of training and performing. Professional troupes performed in venues ranging from tourist hotels to village squares. Performances were taking place not only in Kerala but also in the metropolitan cities of India and overseas. The great form itself, originating in the seventeenth century, renewed in the 1930s, was undergoing further changes as every living art does.

I wanted to understand through observation and experience as much of the village-temple performance complex as I could. But I found myself shut out from the interiors of many temples because I was not a Hindu. This exclusion was one more reminder that I was, and would always be, an outsider. I saw performances in theatres and village squares, rode careening intercity buses and chicken-choked local ones, walked the ridges of the steamy rice paddies where farmers worked their patient, hulking, black water buffaloes, and sat at many a roadside stall slurping hot, sweet, milky Indian tea trying to make myself understood to Malayalam speakers. I was welcomed in academic and artistic institutions where English was the lingua franca. But I wanted more. I was hungry for what was happening inside such Kerala temple complexes as Guruvayur, Vadakkumnatha, and Sri Padmanabha. Inside the temples, I wanted to inspect and study the kuttampalams—theatres constructed according to the Natyasastra, the ancient Sanskrit text on performance. I wanted to experience kutiyattam, a vestige of Sanskrit theatre, performed in a kuttampalam. I might even live in a temple for some days, as I had done in the spring of that year at Sankat Mochan, Banaras’s Hanuman temple.

I decided to convert.

Well, not exactly.

In the matter of conversion, I was uneasy about what I was taking on, what I was giving up. Before entering the Ramakrishna ashram near Trichur, Swami Sakrananda, the President of the ashram, interviewed me concerning my intentions. I told him my purpose was to see temple dances and ceremonies close up, to study architecture, especially as it pertained to performance, and to participate in temple rituals. “Are your motives religious or aesthetic?” the Swami inquired. I hemmed and hawed, finally slipping the knot by asking him, “How can you separate the two, especially here in India?”

On 6 July 1976, the eve of my Upanayana ceremony—the tying of the sacred thread that would signify I was “twice-born,” a high-caste Hindu— I wrote in my notebook:

I think about my initiation into Hinduism. I am not cynical about it. And this lack of cynicism stirs contradictions. Am I “betraying” my Jewishness? I am attracted to Hindu philosophy, especially the Bhagavad Gita, and what I know about the Upanishads, and Hindu art, of course. And I want to go deeper—is this the way?

That night I rehearsed my initiation by copying into my notebook the ten pages of ritual text, written partly in Sanskrit and partly in English, whose recitation constituted the main portion of the ceremony. In the name of Sri Ramakrishna (an Indian ecstatic saint of the nineteenth century, teacher of Vivekananda), “I pray[ed] to be blessed with Upanayana initiation with due solemnity for the attainment of the four aims, Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha…. I embrace[ed] with deep sraddha [faith] the Sanatana Vaidika Dharam…. I accept[ed] all the Vedic Rishis and incarnations and acharyas as guiding saviours in my life,” and so on.

What was I doing? Why was I writing all this out?

Was I attempting to tame the ceremony, own it, reduce it to a discourse I could master?

The next morning the initiation was performed. I repeated the many mantras I was instructed to enunciate. The sacred thread was laid over my left shoulder. Sandal paste was applied to my forehead. I was given my Hindu name. At the end of it all, I received a small “Conversion Certificate,” featuring a passport photo and text, in full:

This is to certify that Mr Richard Schechner, New York City, a Jew by faith, has been converted into a Hindu and named Jayaganesh as per his request after performing purificatory rites at this Ashrama on 7–7–1976.

SIGNED
Swami Sakrananda,
President,
Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama
P.O.Puranattukara,
Dt. Trichur, Kerala

The ceremony itself, far from erasing my doubts, magnified them.
Immediately before accepting initiation, I wrote:

Actually, now that the time for my initiation grows close, I ought to set down the motives for this act. Were I not denied entry into temples because temples are reserved for Hindus, I would not have chosen this path. I do not use the word “conversion” because it is repugnant to me. I am frightened because I want my Jewishness to remain “intact.” Thus I go into this with my fingers crossed, winking at my Jewish self. It would be easier and smoother if it were sheer cynicism, if I could just say to myself, “Well, you want to see/ study these things; this is the only way.”

After my initiation, I felt easier in the temples, though wicked in my heart. Threaded in my new Hindu identity, I was “authentic,” almost.

As I entered Sri Padmanabha’s inner sanctum, deep in my pocket I held tight to my Conversion Certificate. I learned also of the objective power of ritual—the efficacy of ritual acts despite the duplicity, or worse, of those undertaking them. To this day I keep my sacred thread, as I have preserved the teffilin given to me at my bar mitzvah. As I, a 58-year-old man, write these words, I wonder at the secret spectacle of my Keralan incarnation: a New York man of 42, dressed Indian-style, fretting as only an atheist Jew can over his hypocritical conversion, moving through a crowded temple courtyard—what was this Jayaganesh doing if not performing himself performing his Hinduism?

The five avant-gardes or…

What the avant-garde has become during the past 100 years or so is much too complicated to be organized under one heading. There is an historical avant-garde, a current avant-garde (always changing), a forward-looking avant-garde, a tradition-seeking avant-garde, and an intercultural avant-garde. A single work can belong to more than one of these categories. The five avant-gardes have emerged as separable tendencies because “avant-garde” meaning “what’s in advance of”—a harbinger, an experimental prototype, the cutting edge— no longer describes the multifid activities undertaken by performance artists, auteurs, directors, designers, actors, and scholars operating in one or more of the various “worlds” the planet has been partitioned into. At this point, even as I use them, I voice my objection to these outdated categories. The end of the cold war dissolved the opposition between the first world and the second. The collapse of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and even the territories of the USSR itself was not a spasm temporally limited to 1989–91 or spatially localized in Europe. A steady and long-term infiltration of possibilities and alternatives accompanied, forced, and highlighted the failure of Soviet communism to deliver the goods or permit an open play of ideas. Similar historical processes are at work eliding and topsy-turvying other apparently stable systems, including Europe, China, and that most stable of them all, the USA. If by “new world order” George Bush means American hegemony (as he surely does), he is mistaken. The third and fourth worlds are everywhere. The pressures on America from the south are steadily increasing. There is a large and growing south in the USA, the UK, France, and other northern European countries. Change is coming both to China and the USA, forced on them by circumstances working themselves through in historical rather than journalistic time. As for the third world, it is characterized by tumult and often uncontrollable transformations. The task for cultural workers is to express as clearly as we can both the emotional and the logical sense of the changes taking place. We need to find ways to celebrate individual and cultural differences, even as people work towards economic and political parity. Is such a differential egalitarianism possible?

The historical avant-garde took shape in Europe during the last decades of the nineteenth century. It soon spread to many places around the world. The plays of Ibsen, and the naturalistic style of presenting them, for example, affected the modernization of Japan and the liberation of China from the Qing Dynasty. But the first great modern avant-garde, naturalism, soon evoked its opposites in an explosion of heterodoxies: symbolism, futurism, cubism, expressionism, dada, surrealism, constructivism…and many more with names, manifestos, and actions that came and went with such speed as to suggest their true aim: the propagation of artistic difference. Along with this was a political agenda, one of sharp opposition. Poggioli is near right when he detects in the historical avant-garde a “prevalence of the anarchistic mentality…an eschatological state of mind, simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic” (1968:99–100). Avant-gardists were on the left because the right was in power. When the left came to power, in the USSR for example, experimentalists were treated like kulaks, ripe for repression and extermination. Look what happened to Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, who, among a host of others, were reclassified from “revolutionary comrades” to “enemies of the people.” Stalin protected remnants of bourgeois culture, Stanislavski among them, and fostered the dullest kind of “socialist realism.” Decades later, marching under the authority of Mao Zedong’s “little red book,” China’s cultural revolution, orchestrated by Jiang Qing, actress and Mao’s second wife, razed Chinese culture, both traditional and avant-garde. What Jiang produced were “model operas,” brilliant but wooden performances expressing her own political and aesthetic values.¹ At present, categories like “left” and “right” have lost much of their meaning; they are useful only in very particular historical circumstances, not as general principles.

Regarding the historical avant-garde, Michael Kirby is on the mark when he says that

“avant-garde” refers specifically to a concern with the historical directionality of art. An advanced guard implies a rear guard or at least the main body of troops following behind…. Some artists may accept the limits of art as defined, as known, as given; others may attempt to alter, expand, or escape from the stylistic aesthetic rules passed on to them by the culture.

(1969:18–19)

What Kirby identifies as the avant-garde’s “impulse to redefine, to contradict, to continue the sensed directionality of art” (1969:18–19) is the energy source and connecting link holding together the disparate movements of the historical avant-garde.

The historical avant-garde was characterized by the twin tendency to make something new that was also in opposition to prevailing values. Since Romanticism, these values have been seen as social and political as well as aesthetic. The Romantics introduced the idea that artists lived their lives in terms of their art—that experience, display, and expression were inextricably linked, each one functioning in terms of the others. “Action,” whether poetic, personal, or political (trying to affect the way society was organized) became key. Wordsworth’s description of poetry (in the 1800 “Preface” to his Lyrical Ballads) as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… “emotion recollected in tranquillity” was soon replaced by Shelley’s call for direct radical action. This affection for radical thought, rhetoric, and action in opposition to accepted values was at the heart not only of the historical avant-garde’s politics, but also of its bohemian lifestyle.

Even the ancien régime was not hated as much as the new dominant class, the bourgeoisie. Not only was the middle class in power, and to avant-gardists therefore the cause of what was wrong with society, it was also uncultured, grossly materialistic and greedy. Ironically, some of Shelley’s heirs, in their hatred of bourgeois values and manners, adopted aristocratic airs. Paris’s Left Bank and New York’s Greenwich Village were famous as places where artists, dandies, and radicals (not mutually exclusive categories) lived their eccentric and libidinous lives, making art, mocking the bourgeoisie, and plotting revolution. Middle-class people considered the artists to be neurotic, childlike, and savage—a trinity formulated by Freud (in many ways an apologist for the Victorianism to whose practices his “talking cure” adjusted errants). From the bourgeois perspective, artists were thought “naturally” to be impetuous and irresponsible when it came to money, sex, and politics.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the conjunction of revolutionary thought and art grew stronger. Meyerhold was the most visible of a large cohort who wanted to find a place for experimental performance in what he believed was a new and progressive social order. For a time, until the paranoid “man of steel” Josef Stalin turned it off, light came from the East in the form of biomechanics, constructivism, Russian futurism, montage, multimedia, and vibrant performance styles combining the most recent technological innovations with traditional popular entertainments, such as commedia dell’arte, circus, and the cabaret. And just as Germans fleeing Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s fertilized the artistic and intellectual life of Great Britain and the Americas, so Russians (Czarists as well as progressives) vitalized Western European and American theatre, film, and visual arts.

The “current avant-garde” (second of the five types of avant-garde) is by definition what’s happening now. Of course, “now” is always changing— it will be different when this writing is published from what it is as I write in New York in November 1991. Today’s current theatre avant-garde includes reruns of the historical avant-garde as well as the practices of formerly experimental artists whose work is by now “classical” in terms of its predictability, solidity, and acceptance. You know what to expect from Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Elizabeth LeCompte, Meredith Monk, Lee Breuer, Richard Foreman, Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Rachel Rosenthal—and a bunch of younger people working in roughly the same ways as their predecessors and mentors; people like Anne Bogart, Julie Taymor, Bill T.Jones, and Martha Clarke.

The work of the current avant-garde is often excellent, virtuosic in its mastery of formerly experimental and risky materials and techniques. This mastery, coupled with a second and third generation of artists working in the same way, is what makes the current avant-garde classical. Over time, the historical avant-garde modulated into the current avant-garde: what were once radical activities in terms of artistic experimentation, politics, and lifestyles have become a cluster of alternatives open to people who wish to practice or see various kinds of theatrical art. The current avant-garde offers no surprises in terms of theatrical techniques, themes, audience interactions, or anything else. Like naturalism before it, “avan...