Oldal 98 [98]
ENIKŐ SEPSI
survive for a long time.** The attention given to the nature of making theater
is already an attempt to ritualize performance “in order that we discover the
forms of valid action in the theater itself.” “In an age when authenticity is
ever less observable in life,” explains Schechner, “it is the performer who is
obligated to cast off his traditional masks and become himself — or at least
let him show how he dons and removes the mask. Instead of mirroring his times,
they expect him to improve them. Healing and the Church serve as models for
the theater.”*° He uses the twelfth-century Mass as an example to demonstrate
that the liturgy used “avant-garde” techniques: “It was allegorical, it drew in
the audience, it handled time teleologically, and it extended the performance’s
sphere of influence beyond the church onto the road home.”** Novarina’s de¬
structive and constructive theater, interrogating anthropoglyphs in real time,
also relies on the result-orientation of ritual; indeed, in the above sense it also
has a liturgical objective. Furthermore, it not only reflects upon the method
of creating theater but also on the existence of Man as a speaking animal.
In building his experimental theater, that alloys the results-orientation of
ritual with theatrical entertainment, Schechner made use of rituals in the
anthropological sense. In producing his work Dionysus 69 he took its birth
ritual from the Western Iranian Asmat, while in his Mysteries and Paradise
at the Living Theatre, he used yoga and elements of Indian theater as build¬
ing blocks; and in several productions in collaboration with Robert Wilson,
Philip Glass incorporated Indonesian gamelan, Indian raga, etc. The Asian
influence is clear and undeniable in the Poor Theater phase of Grotowski’s ex¬
perimental theater*’ but also in Barba’s work; indeed it occasionally happened
that Barba shared his experiences with Grotowski, who then made use of the
borrowed material: this may be how elements of the Kathakali south Indian
dance theater were incorporated into his training exercises.**
To this day it also happens that such rituals set out on European tour, which
evidently results in their acceptance into theater (e.g., the whirling dervishes).
Schechner arrives at the conclusion that every rite, indeed, any everyday event,
can be extracted from its original environment and produced as theater, and he
explains the phenomenon by observing that it is not the underlying structures
but merely the context that differentiates ritual from theater.* As a matter of
fact, it is also possible — and we can agree fundamentally about this — that
ritual can arise from theater.
34 Tbid., 107, 108, 109.
35 Emphases added. Ibid., 108.
36 Ibid., 111.
From 1960 to 1968: it was in this period that his Steadfast Prince, Acropolis, and Apocalypsis
cum figuris were created. See Ibid., 117.
38 See Schechner’s discovery: Ibid., 118.
39 Ibid., 122.
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