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JAN L. HAGENS
contradiction between content and form, between what it says and how it
relays that message, were it not for its realization on stage, in live theater.?
Once dramas inherent tendency toward becoming theater has been realized
in performance, the affinity between dramatic texts, theater, and ritual can be
made explicit and become experiential.
As Saskia Fischer has laid out convincingly in her recent Ritual und Ritual¬
itat im Drama nach 1945, theater can reflect on and instantiate this close rela¬
tion between drama, performance, and ritual.’ In fact, in post-1945 Germany,
Austria, and even Switzerland — after Nazi culture had annexed ritual for
its own reactionary purposes between 1933 and 1945 — politically conscious
theater had no choice but to reflect on its own relation to ritual. Ritual could
only be reappropriated for progressive purposes through a highly reflexive ap¬
proach that would interweave the practices of ritual and its critique. In order
not to remain tentative, partial, and arbitrary, German-language post-war
theater would eventually have to turn ritual into a self-aware practice, elevat¬
ing ritual to become theater’s own core around which to dynamically construct
the aesthetics of its entire performance.
Within the dramatic genre, when we think of how various sub-genres em¬
ploy ritual, the strategies that first come to mind are tragic, as in the com¬
munal rite of sacrificing, or of expelling the scapegoat, or of killing the aged
king. The connection between ritual sacrifice and tragedy has of course been
extensively researched, by scholars such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Mur¬
ray, Karl Meuli, Walter Burkert, René Girard, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Anton Bierl,
and Wolfgang Braungart. In this respect, research sometimes neglects to make
a distinction that is important and should be stressed. On the one hand, there
is a historical and genealogical thesis regarding the origins of drama: that, to
use Northrop Frye’s terms from his Anatomy of Criticism, ritual fused with
myth and thus became drama (and that thus drama saved ritual from going
extinct); or that, to use Victor Turner’s famous but not clearly distinguishing
terms, “liminal” ritual developed into “liminoid” tragic drama (and in fact,
did this twice, in ancient Greece and in late medieval Europe).* On the other
2 Fora more detailed analysis of the pragmatic contradiction between drama and performance,
see Jan L. Hagens: Text and Presentation: How Do They Relate?, in Text and Presentation XIX
(1998), 52-62. For a more complex analysis of the relation between text and performance,
see Richard Schechner: Drama, Script, Theatre and Performance, in Essays in Performance
Theory 1970-1976, New York, Drama Book Specialists, 1977, 36-62.
Saskia Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945: Brecht, Frisch, Dürrenmatt,
Sachs, Weiss, Hochhuth, Handke, Paderborn, Fink, 2019. Saskia Fischer and Birgit Mayer
insist that works of art can at the same time engage in ritual and critically reflect upon ritual;
see Saskia Fischer — Birgit Mayer (eds.): Einführung, in Kunst-Rituale — Ritual-Kunst. Zur
Ritualität von Theater, Literatur und Musik in der Moderne, Würzburg, Kônigshausen &
Neumann, 2019, 7-16, 12.
For a more detailed description of “liminal” and “liminoid,” as well as many illustrations
(from Italian, French, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Medieval European, and Roman drama) of
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