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SASKIA FISCHER
1. RITUAL AND RITUALITY IN ‘SECULARIZED’ TIMES
Theater, as a cultural practice, which takes place in front of an occasional
public, can have an intense effect on its audience. It is the presentative and per¬
formative art form par excellence and therefore shows a great affinity to rituals.
This analogy is evident in complex ritual sequences such as the Christian lit¬
urgy, which is, like a drama, divided into different acts, is carefully staged, and
has its own dramaturgy. Performance theories in recent years, in particular,
have emphasized the comparability of ritual and theater. However, not only has
academic discourse shown a great interest in rituals, but the theater practice of
the twentieth century from around 1900 until now demonstrates an increasing
use of rituals, as can be witnessed in the theater of the European avant-gardes
(e.g. Antonin Artaud, Max Reinhardt, Vaslav Nijinsky and his company, the
“Ballets Russes,” Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold, etc.)! as well as in the theater
and drama after 1945 (Bertolt Brecht, Max Frisch, Nelly Sachs, etc.)? and in
the work of contemporary artists (such as Christoph Schlingensief, Robert
Wilson).* Theater and drama have always been embedded in ritual contexts,
and theater directors and playwrights have deliberately pushed this proxim¬
ity even in modernity. This is also true of the relationship between theater,
drama, and ritual in various cultures up to the present day. Particularly in the
European theater of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the adaption
of rituals from different cultures reveals the dynamic processes of a fruit¬
ful transcultural exchange that influenced the European theater in a decisive
way. Bertolt Brecht, for example, intensively studied Japanese Noh theater
and Chinese performing arts, from which he derived essential aspects for his
own idea of an “epic theater,” within which he, at the same time, referred to
religious genres and rituals from the Christian context. Likewise, the Sami
author Nils-Aslak Valkeapää recently created his play Ridn'oaivi ja nieguid
oaidni |The Frost-haired and the Dream-seer] in close engagement with Noh
theater, by which means he also tries to promote and foster Sami culture and
art in modern theater (see Johanna Domokos’ contribution in this volume).
These attempts highlight whether the interest of the performing arts in rituals
has opened up theater and drama to a transcultural perspective.
This fascination for ritualistic forms and genres is all the more surprising
in modern times as rituals seem to have lost their self-evidence in general.
1 Gabriele Brandstetter: Pina Bauschs ‘Das Frihlingsopfer.’ Signatur — Ubertragung — Kontext,
in G. Brandstetter — G. Klein (eds.): Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft: Modellanalysen zu
Pina Bauschs, Le Sacre du Printemps / Das Frithlingsopfer, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2015,
93-122.
? Saskia Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945: Brecht, Frisch, Dürrenmatt,
Sachs, Weiss, Hochhuth, Handke, Paderborn, Fink, 2019.
3 Lore Knapp: Formen des Kunstreligiösen: Peter Handke - Christoph Schlingensief, Paderborn,
Fink, 2015.
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