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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 wellknown authors, I am going to use the relevant points ofthe Bielefeld-based researcher 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 construction, 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 organizational 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 discovered 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 Dramatik 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. + 136
