Oldal 73 [73]
SCRIPTED AND EMBODIED RITUALITY IN A YOIK-NOH PERFORMANCE
reader, the actor, or the audience). Its counterpart, embodied rituality, relates
to the role and function of ritual elements and patterns as they manifest, as
well as carrying out the interpretative and performative processes while the
text or performance "happen."
The first concept, scripted rituality, maps the ritual elements and patterns
used as “scripts” for creating the art form and thus becomes constitutive in the
mediality of the work. Thus the following elements of a work are all good ex¬
amples of scripted rituality: (1) cited ritual texts, (2) socio-cultural and artistic
ritual forms used as sources of inspiration in creating a literary or theatrical
work, (3) the rhythm, repetition, broken lines, and symbolic language found in
a poetic text, (4) the dialogic characteristic of a play, (5) the performance in¬
structions in a staged version of a dramatic text, (6) the designated positioning
of the characters (like the waki or shite or the chorus and musicians in a Noh
performance), (7) or the static visual elements of the scenery (like the painted
green pine tree on the back wall of Noh performances, or its static lighting).
The concept of embodied rituality underlines the performative and singu¬
lar aspects of such processes. These are the elements that carry the liveliness,
the hic et nunc quality of the event. Embodied rituality contributes to the
emergence of new characteristics and aspects. Examples of such transitory
processes include: (1) the mental images created in the mind of the reader
while reading a play, (2) imagining how certain ritual elements could look in
a real performance, (3) the audience watching the ritual gestures of the actors
and endowing them with personal meanings or feelings; or (4) perceiving the
ritual music and several other common interactions during the reception of
an artistic work or event.
In the following sections, I will give a brief overview of the conditions con¬
tributing to the birth of Sami theater and drama, as well as looking at the most
successful trademark of contemporary Sami culture: the modern yoik. The
relatively recent establishment of these artistic forms in SAmi society dem¬
onstrates the importance of social training in the development of ritualistic
artistic patterns, which then enable the birth of artistic fields of literature,
music, and theater as communicative media.
SAMI THEATER
Although modern Sami drama and theater are very young artistic forms, they
have consistently produced mature works since their inception. About fifty
years ago, at the end of the 1960s, the multimedia Sami artist Nils-Aslak
Valkeapää could still say that the Sami did not have separate art forms in
the modern sense, though the aesthetic nature of spoken word, musical, and
handicraft culture were highly valued in Sami society. However, these artforms
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