Performing the Sacred (Engaging Culture)

Theology and Theatre in Dialogue

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441206060
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christian theatre has rich roots, from ancient Hebrew dramas to medieval plays, but where does it fit in today's media-saturated society? Performing the Sacred is a fascinating dialogue between a theologian and theatre artist, offering the first full-scale exploration of theatre and theology. The authors illuminate the importance of live performance in a virtual world, of preserving the ancient art form of storytelling by becoming the story. Theologically, theatre reflects Christianity's central doctrines--incarnation, community, and presence--enhancing the human creative experience and simultaneously engaging viewers on multiple levels. This Engaging Culture series title will be a key volume for those interested in theatre as well as drama practitioners, worship leaders, and culture makers.

1

a survey
of christianity
and theatre
in history

Dale Savidge

At no time in history was the relationship between theatre and Christianity warmer than during the medieval period in Europe. By the fourteenth century, nearly every European country had experienced some form of religious drama, such as the mystery cycles in England or the plays of Hrosvitha in Germany. The auto sacramentales in Spain, one-act religious plays dealing with the celebration of the Eucharist, came later, during the Spanish golden age, and were as popular in their time as musical theatre is today. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, an ordained Catholic priest and one of the greatest Spanish playwrights of all time, penned one of these autos in 1649, The Great Theater of the World. In this remarkable mix of biblical and allegorical drama, God, identified as the “Author,” begins by calling the World to perform “the Play of Life.”

Author: Now, therefore, World, order thy stage and the settings place, and gather together appropriate properties. I will then appoint rehearsals, and thou—from first to last—shall be the Great World’s Theater, and Man the cast.1

What follows is a drama about life and the drama of life. Various characters are called forth; they are assigned their roles and given their appropriate costumes and stage properties. Each one acts according to his role: the rich man, a king, a peasant, a beggar, and a child. Wisdom and Beauty also make an appearance. The comingling of allegory and realistic dialogue (as when the beggar and the peasant complain about their lot in life and in the play) causes us to see our own lives as part of a great cosmic drama, under the directorial control of the Creator.

Author: It matters not what part a man doth play in Life’s great Drama. What he must do is play the best he can the part that’s given him. And when the play is over, Beggar and King shall once again be equals, and shall be judged as equals.2

God, the Author, calls this play “Do Good, for God is Good,” and that moral is reinforced throughout the drama. The setting is two globes: God is seated on “the throne of glory” in one; the other, where the characters play their roles, has two doors: a cradle where they enter and a coffin where they exit. God authors and directs the play and also sits as the audience for its enactment. God says, “This play I have devised for my enjoyment.”3 At the end Beauty and the Peasant are invited to “the Table’s mystery ineffable,” and God calls all creation to “low kneel before this sacred Bread” and “praise God’s holy majesty, the Author of the World.”4 When we recall that the auto sacramentales were performed during the Feast of Corpus Christi (the annual celebration of the Eucharist as the body and blood of Christ), we see clearly the close relationship between theatre and theology in them. As we shall see, historically and theologically, the connections between sacraments and theatre run deep.

The Great Theater of the World is one of many historical examples of how the art of theatre, and the institution of theatre, have intersected with Christian faith. As we look back at this interaction, we should consider that our reflections will be conditioned by who we are and what we believe, by our worldview; it’s impossible to be totally objective in reading history. In this short study, we look through the lens of the Christian faith (in particular three theological categories: incarnation, community, and presence) to examine the interaction of theatre and Christianity.

Examining theatre history presents many challenges, not the least of which is the gathering of evidence. Theatre is an ephemeral art that is experienced in a specific and unrepeatable time and place. You may experience a second performance of Calderón de la Barca’s play, for example, but although the play text may be unchanged, the performance will be different by virtue of the change of cast, director, designers, and so on. Even if the second performance is by the same company, the actors will make alterations in their performance because the audience is different. Such is the dynamic nature of theatre; such also is the dynamic nature of life.

The artifacts of theatre history include play texts; remains of theatre buildings; eyewitness accounts of actors, scenery, costumes, and other visual elements; and firsthand descriptions of plays in performance. Theatre that intersects with the Christian faith does not often use the technical elements of theatre any differently than secular theatre does. It follows that many studies of theatre history and the church are rooted in the dramas, the texts, of representative periods.5

A chronological approach is the most popular method of arranging theatre history. Such an approach, based on Enlightenment historiography, assumes there are major historical divisions in the progression of the theatre. These divisions may be centuries, countries, reigns, art movements, genres, and so on.6 It presumes a forward movement, from unsophisticated to polished, from primitive to refined. For example, theatre history begins in primitive Egyptian and Greek ritual and matures into the literary masterworks of classical Greek civilization. After the dark period of the Middle Ages, theatre reaches a golden age in the Renaissance with the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As the world becomes more sophisticated, so too drama evolves in complexity. At the same time, theatrical production borrows from the Industrial Revolution to become the multifaceted creature it is today. Needless to say, this method has come in for vigorous, and deserved, critique in the last few decades. Is the highly complex and technological experience we associate with professional/commercial theatre better than the ancient rituals of preliterate Greece or the traditional theatre of Asian countries?

Alternative methodologies, including revisionist historiography (feminist, ethnic, political, etc.) and structural/semiotic approaches, offer other ways of reading theatre history. Richard Southern regards primitive and refined examples of theatre as chronologically simultaneous and critically on a par with each other.7 He views the ritual/theatre of remote tribes that continues well into this century as a “phase” of theatre distinct from technologically sophisticated theatre—Broadway, for example. One is not an improvement on the other; the primitive is not striving for the sophisticated. Rather they differ in kind. Southern then distills theatre in any of the seven phases into the two elements necessary for any theatrical event: the actor and the audience. The “essence” of theatre is thus a player and someone to experience the performance; a story for the player to tell is also assumed. Everything else (a formal script, scenery, costume, etc.) is a welcome but not essential accoutrement of the interaction of actor and audience.

It is important to recognize the reduction of theatre to these essentials, if for no other reason than to counter the tyranny of the text (to borrow a phrase from Antonin Artaud). The study of theatre history is not only the study of dramatic genres; limiting theatre (performance) to drama (text) blinds us to many lively and important examples of theatre, including some in the Old Testament and others during the Middle Ages. It also guides the exploration of the origins of theatre, a subject that has significance for our conversation. It has become commonplace in theatre history texts to locate the roots of theatre in ritual, and from that to extrapolate theories of theatre that focus on the two common elements of religion and theatre: narrative and ritual. In this historical survey we focus on ritual as a source of theatre and as a phenomenon sharing similarities with theatrical performance.

In our reading of theatre history, we need to consider both text-based theatre and those performances that may not have a text. That is, some theatre issues primarily from story and drama; other theatre foregrounds the performance and makes the text just one of many components in the theatrical experience (mime, dance, etc.). It’s tempting for Christians, as people of the Logos, to value text-based theatre over other types of performance, but we want to avoid that bias in our survey. We see some theatre emerging from the need to tell stories, and we see some emerging from what Aristotle called the mimetic instinct, the tendency for humans to imitate and role-play.

The Ritual Origins of Theatre in the Ancient World

The Birth of Theatre in Primitive Ritual

The relationship between theatre and ritual is complex; it differs according to cultural norms and periods. For example, when you attend a performance of a realistic play from the modern period, you may not sense any ritual in it. The characters are like people from the real world, acting and speaking realistically in the context of the conflict that the author has created. But if you were to attend a performance of Chinese theatre, such as the Peking Opera, you would grasp its connection to the traditions and religion of the Chinese, and you’d have a strong sense that what you were experiencing was not just a play but a ritual. The presence of singing and dancing, elevated beyond the conversational use of the voice and the body, together with the environment and the story, would mark the experience as something other than theatre, even though it would be using the resources of theatre.

In this chapter we explore the relationship between ritual and theatre from a historical perspective. There is widespread acceptance that the first great age of formal theatre, the fifth century BCE in Greece, derived from the ritual worship of Greek gods, especially the god Dionysus. Some scholars believe this connection is textual, that Greek drama developed from dithyrambs, choral odes to the gods. The English word “tragedy” comes from the Greek tragoida, which is literally translated “goat song.” (The Greeks sacrificed goats in their worship of Dionysus.) Others see a connection with shamanistic rituals performed by a person under the control of spiritual forces; this theory emphasizes the performance more than the texts being performed. The theatre buildings used by fifth-century Greek playwrights were descendents of temples dedicated to the gods. Yet other scholars view theatre and ritual as two manifestations of performance. Some performance tended toward “entertainment” (theatrical performance), and some tended toward “efficacy” (ritual with an intended outcome), but both ritual and theatre were performative activities.8

The Cambridge School of Anthropology (CSA) was articulated around 1912–14 by a group of English anthropologists, using archaeological and literary evidence. This school suggested that both the genre of tragedy (the literature of the stage) and the medium of theatre (the performance of that literature) had their roots in religious myth and ritual. (In 1927 A. W. Pickard-Cambridge called much of the CSA scholarship into question. He found no evidence of preexistent rituals that might have led to theatre or of extant Greek tragedies that manifested ritual roots.)9 The CSA theory posited that ritual developed into drama as the magical element of the ritual weakened in the face of declining belief, as the mimetic element grew and the participants were divided between performers and spectators, and as myths were replaced by heroic sagas. Historians of theatre have noticed a similar movement from sacred to secular in the medieval theatre.

The CSA theory suggested an ur-ritual (or primordial ritual) centered on the birth-death-rebirth of a god. This basic alternation of death and life is found in myths across cultures and centuries: death as a necessary prelude to life. This pattern is clearly an archetype for many religious ceremonies. Aristotle’s Poetics names two sources of tragedy: the aforementioned dithyramb and the satyrikon (a joyful paean to the rebirth of the god). This ritual structure also has a seasonal context: death in winter followed by rebirth in spring, growth in summer, and decay in fall leading to another death. It isn’t hard to see how our own use of theatre in church follows a similar pattern; Christmas (birth) and Easter (death and rebirth) are prime occasions for dramatic celebrations.

Other theorists drew attention to the performance medium rather than the texts. William Ridgeway cited examples of ritual performances from Burma, China, Japan, and Africa and recognized in them “the doctrine that the actor was originally a medium.”10 Ernest T. Kirby developed his shamanist theory of acting by focusing on the performative act. Underlying this approach to the origin and essence of theatre as a medium of performance is Aristotle’s observation that imitation is an activity intuitive to humans. People, even and especially as children, tend to imitate and role-play in life. This inherent tendency supposedly led to the use of the mimetic (i.e., theatrical) in religion and later in art. In her chapter titled “The Primitive Theater,” Margot Berthold traces “the roots of shamanism as a particular psychological ‘technique’ of early hunting cultures” through thousands of years in human history.11 According to Berthold, shamans are religious leaders who are believed capable of entering a trancelike state and channeling spirits from other worlds into the presence of the participants.

Shamans are, of course, not actors; what they purport to do is very real to them and to those gathered in their presence. Whether one can trace the origins of theatre to shamanistic ritual or not (and it is impossible to prove either with the available evidence), we do not treat theatre as an act of incarnating spiritual forces, be they holy or unholy, in the presence of communicants gathered for the express purpose of experiencing a magical/ spiritual event. Still, there is a transcendent quality in the act of mimesis that creates an encounter with something beyond simple human interaction.

Eli Rozik critiques ritual theory by asking why it continues to attract both scholars and practitioners of the theatre: “In my view, the only answer is that it is a matter of a metaphorical aura that, for romantic reasons, people wish to attribute to theatre. This metaphorical aura is supposed to lend theatre a numinous quality that not only does it not always radiate, but that perhaps less than anything else defines its nature.”12 He rightly cautions against a sentimental embrace of the ritual origins of theatre.

Christians legitimately look for traces of the spiritual in every human activity. But theatre and religion are not identical pursuits. Without doubt, some theatre touches on religious concerns, some theatre creates a ritualized environment, and for a believer in a religion the act of creating or experiencing theatre may be a religious experience. It is also true that religious ritual may be theatrical; however, it is always performative. But to equate the medium of theatre with the practice of a religion is reductive and confusing. Christians need not approach theatre as religion in order to value it as artists or audience members.

We will see later in this chapter that the shaman theory of theatrical origins has also evolved into a position on the essence of theatre in the work of Artaud and his successors. When we take up the twentieth century and the work of several avant-garde directors, we will see this theory in practice.

Theatre in the Bible: Old and New Testaments

It is a surprise and a mystery why books on the relationship of the Christian faith and the theatre fail to begin with or even touch on activities of the ancient Israelites that were either theatrical or actually theatre.13 Although there is no evidence that Old Testament Jews built theatres, one need not have a theatre building to have theatre. Evidence of dramatic structure can be found in at least three biblical books, and there are further examples of theatrical performances among the prophets. We will look at biblical evidence of theatre as an adjective as well as a noun: activities that are theatrical in nature as well as theatre per se.

In his Religious Drama: Ends and Means, Harold Ehrensperger makes only passing reference to the ancient Israelites, referring to them as one of the “nontheatrical races.”14 Other drama-ministry handbooks do not mention them at all.15 It is not surprising that theatre history written by secularists makes dismissive, if any, reference to the theatrical traditions of the Israelites. A recent article in the Quodlibet Journal notes the apparent absence of drama/theatre references in the Old Testament;16 the author reached this conclusion by perusing the Hodder Dictionary of Bible Th...