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ENIKŐ SEPSI
ON POETIC RITUALITY
In order to describe the different connections between the poetic text and the
ritual executed on stage, in addition to the remarks and insights of the well¬
known authors, I am going to use the relevant points ofthe Bielefeld-based re¬
searcher Saskia Fischer’s PhD dissertation.? She introduces a simple but useful
concept, that of “poetic rituality,”* and she claims that the ritual does not have
to distance itself from art, as certain genres, like the oratorio, the tragedy, the
requiem, and the mystery play, have ritual contexts. Aesthetic and dramatic
theater becomes poetic (poiesis) due to their form and the manner of their con¬
struction, which broadens the possibilities of poetry. In reformulating Antonin
Artaud, I would add that poetry within the confines of a space, i.e., the theater,
uses the language of theater as we experience it in our dreams, substituting
for ordinary meanings others which form the basis of a metaphor. As theorist,
director, and playwright Richard Schechner emphasizes in his essay “From
ritual to theater and back: the efficacy-entertainment braid,” “So-called ‘real
events’ are revealed as metaphors.”° I would also reverse Fischer’s observation
by saying that poetry, i.e., the metaphorical construct, broadens the potentials
of rituals toward the theater. In other words, poetry may appear as an organi¬
zational logic in ritual on stage, and, on the other hand, poetic texts can have
ritualistic elements, such as repetition, performativity, etc.
Wilson’s theater is often called a theater of images, the early period even a
mute theater of images, but the secondary literature has touched very little on
its ritual aspects. What Pilinszky found very interesting in Deafman Glance
may very well have been the encounter of ritual and poetry in space.
In the Wilson Archives of Butler Library at Columbia University, I discov¬
ered that Wilson was also looking for a ritualistic theater in the process of the
de-creation of the Self, a kind of ceremony which was equally important to
Pilinszky and the author of his main reading, Simone Weil.
I wouldn’t know what my liturgy is until I wrote it, or saw one that was very close
to my own. Generally I think the modern liturgy, the one that comes closest to
expressing modern intellectual consciousness consists of a constant flaying out
of mind and body images from a receding and often disintegrating spiritual
consciousness. My biggest problem concerning liturgy consists of modern man’s
Saskia Fischer: Reflektierte Ritualität. Die Wiederaneignung ritueller Formen in der Drama¬
tik nach 1945, Bielefeld, 2016 (manuscript). See also Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama
nach 1945, Paderborn, Fink, 2019.
4 Ibid., 81.
Richard Schechner: From ritual to theater and back: the efficacy-entertainment braid, in
Performance Theory, London/New York, Routledge, 1988 [1977], 128.
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