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DRAMATIC GENRE, RITUAL, CONELICT RESOLUTION men, at least that handful which could constitute a cult group of shamans."" Turner contested: “The concept of individuality has been hard-won, and to surrender it to a new totalizing process of reliminalization is a dejecting thought. (...) Liminoid theater should present alternatives; it should not be a brainwashing technique.”"' He insisted that modern man needs the freedom that drama, not ritual, provides. Turner is probably correct in that there is much ritual in late medieval and early modern drama and less in Elizabethan drama and French and German Classicism, where freedom and individual agency are foregrounded. The modern subject is a sixteenth to eighteenth-century achievement we cannot ignore; the central status of the rational, moral, and decisive protagonist should not be superseded but sublated and integrated. For a modern spectator, for a contemporary audience, a conflict resolution is more convincing and satisfactory if it comes about through both communal participation in ritual and the individual’s responsive reflection. As inhabitants of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most of us want to witness singular characters, with decisions and actions that originate in a unique instant, and that do not wholly depend on the repetition of traditional patterns of ritual and ceremony. Clearly, Turner felt that going back to medieval or pre-historic times was not an option. Instead of adopting Turner’s radical and antagonistic stance, we could align ourselves with Richard Schechner, who does not differentiate so sharply between ritual and theater because, to him, both are forms of performance which can be distinguished according to their effect: ritual has more of a visceral, transporting, and transforming function; drama more of an intellectual and entertaining function.” The difference is a matter of degree and proportion. However, even if the affinity between ritual and drama is made evident by subsuming both under the category of performance, it remains a legitimate question whether there might not exist an unproductive tension in the historical and systematic relation between, on the one hand, primitive social ritual — a communal reality, pre-rational and pre-literary, immediately participatory, prescribed and codified, obligatory, unquestionable, repetitive, and even religious, without much individual agency in regard to right and wrong — and, on the other hand, individually shaped drama — an aesthetically complex and nuanced object that displays often psychological stories and self-conscious personal decisions for a more distant, spectating audience, in original and creative “as if” ways. Turner: Frame, 496. 1 Ibid., 497. 12 Richard Schechner: From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure / Process of the EfficacyEntertainment Dyad (1974-1976), in Essays on Performance Theory 1970-1976, New York, Drama Book Specialists, 1977, 63-98, 75, 77. +61 +
