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POETIC RITUALITY IN THE THEATER AND LITERATURE
in spring 2017 in Orlando, the main thesis of the related symposium touched
upon transculturality of ritual forms. It declared that the revival of the ritual
and thus the adaptation of transcultural ritual theatrical forms are expressions
of modes of presentation which are cross-cultural and tackle fundamental
existential questions of our globalized world. The adaptation of transcultural
forms of ritual in theater addresses fundamental existential issues of glob¬
alized culture. The papers herein written by Saskia Fischer and Birte Giesler
develop the above thesis in much more detail. The relation between ritual, the
sacred, and the kenotic has been addressed by some of our team members also
in their lectures at the 2018 meeting of the American Comparative Literature
Association held at UCLA. The revised and expanded papers of Enik6 Sepsi
and Johanna Domokos are now included in this publication.
Funded and hosted by the Karoli Gaspar University of the Reformed Church
in Hungary, the two following two-day international workshops in Budapest
(fall 2017, summer 2019) examined how the use of ritual elements in literary
and theatrical works gains a special moment of subjective articulation. The
conceptual paper of Wolfgang Braungart was extensively discussed at our
roundtable in fall 2017. Because it is the most theoretical examination of po¬
etic rituality among all of the studies included here, Braungart’s contribution
now forms the opening study of the book. Indeed, the systematic relevance of
ritual to arts cannot be underlined strongly enough. And this has not changed
through and after modernity, as the paper of Jennifer A. Herdt in this publica¬
tion also demonstrates.
Both meetings in Budapest offered opportunities for PhD and MA stu¬
dents involved in related research to present their results. The works of Aniké
Lukács, Karina Koppány, Dániel Hegyi, and Anna Lenz demonstrate that po¬
etic rituality is a topic also fascinating young scholars.
Since our team included scholars active as dramatists, dramaturgs, and/or
directors of theater, our workshops offered frames for sharing insights into
artistic laboratories, especially in the barrack-dramaturgy of Andras Visky
and the work led by Jarostaw Fret at the Grotowski Theater. Despite the many
different approaches to poetic rituality, all of the workshop presentations and
studies published herein consistently demonstrate how fundamentally ritual¬
ity can contribute to the formal, semantic, pragmatic, and structural unfolding
of literary and theatrical art works. Besides continuous theoretical reflections,
a vast array of examples is given, ranging from Greek, Japanese, English, and
Hungarian to German, Russian, French, and Sami drama, performance art,
and theater productions, as the studies in the present volume also illustrate.
The final two-day workshop, planned for spring 2020 in the Center for
Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF), University of Bielefeld, had to be cancelled
due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, the closing presentations and discussions
— on the extent to which ritual is constitutive of twenty-first-century theater
“8e