Oldal 73 [73]
OCR
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 examples 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 instructions 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 singular 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 contributing 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 demonstrates 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 «71 ¢
