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aesthetic and a social function, its integration into theatrical performance
should increase theaters ability to achieve extra-theatrical effects, such as
solutions in the social realm.°
Another side-glance into ritual theory may support this view. Turner labeled
structured social conflict as “social drama,” and he recognized a pattern of
events, a recurring course of action: “breach, crisis, redress, restoration of
peace through reconciliation or mutual acceptance of schism,” i.e., violation
ofa social rule, conflict, attempts at solution, and finally either acceptance of
division or, preferably, reintegration; in the crucial phase of this process, the
action of redress, ritual plays a major role.” Note how Turner’s view of ritual
is decidedly different from the view that is now prevalent in performance
studies and on the contemporary stage, which is dominated by conflict and
destruction and which stops short of considering reintegration. Note also that
in Turner’s view ofritual, negativity and obliteration are important phases, but
are mostly to be considered as integrated parts of a comprehensive process.
Altogether, Turner’s sequential template for social drama, especially through
its telos of reintegration, suggests that ritual may be able to support the project
of conflict resolution in artistic drama as well.
Braungart emphasizes that ritual and literature are not fundamentally
different: he insists that, on the one hand, “ritual is not simply a forced so¬
cial event,” and on the other hand, “literature is not autonomous and self¬
determined." Or, to formulate the relation in Victor Turner’s terms: social
drama and artistic drama imply each other, because artistic drama unfolds
according to the basic pattern of social drama, but we best understand such
social drama by applying the interpretive categories of artistic drama: “The
processual form of social dramas is implicit in aesthetic dramas (even if only
by reversal or negation), while the rhetoric of social dramas — and hence the
shape of argument — is drawn from cultural performances.”® This mutual
implication does not mean that social drama and artistic drama are identi¬
cal — quite the contrary: Turner even branded ritual, in contrast to drama, as
regressive and totalitarian. One way to describe the development of Western
theater over the course of the past century would be as an attempt to connect
or re-connect with ritual, and Turner was quite adversarial toward such at¬
tempts. For him, the ritual theater, as for instance represented in a director
such as Grotowski, “wishes to ‘reliminalize’ or ‘retribalize’ if not all modern
Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual, in D. Weidner (ed.), Handbuch Literatur und Religion, Stuttgart,
Metzler, 2016, 431.
Turner, Victor: Acting in Everyday Life and Everyday Life in Acting, in Play, Flow, and Ritual:
An Essay in Comparative Symbology, in From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of
Play, New York, Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, 102-123, 111.
8 Braungart: Ritual, 429.
Victor Turner: Dramatic Ritual / Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology,
Kenyon Review 1.3 (1979), 81.
* 60 °