Oldal 98 [98]
OCR
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 destructive 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 building 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 experimental 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. + % +
