Oldal 139 [139]
ON BEARING WITNESS TO A POETIC RITUAL
divorcement and dislocation from his once central focal areas: birth, death, god,
initiation, brotherhood. Modern man seems to be lost inside his own insanely
personal hieroglyphics. How to relate these to a central focus? Of course, the power
of art is now of great importance. To crystallize, to bring us back to our living cen¬
ter. But does it still exist? Have we already lost it? Are we in the process of trying
to evolve a new one? Can liturgy help us in this process? Is art our enemy leading
us further and further away, making it more and more difficult for us? The mind is
too active, the spirit too still."
Until I discovered this letter, there were no known traces of Wilsons interest
in liturgy. Sheryl Sutton, who was the main and only professional actress in
Wilson’s early 1970s period, also observes that in the “Overture” to Deafman
Glance, Byrdwoman is a mythological figure taking part in a ritual, more pre¬
cisely, a mass; she may be the embodiment of a mother, Death’s Angel, or even
Medea: “I never thought of it as evil. No emotion was implied. No anguish. No
suffering. It was more subliminal. I thought of it as a ritual, like a mass. Raising
and lowering the knife was like raising and lowering a chalice.”’ In From Ritual
to Theatre, Victor Turner mentions Schechner, who applies Winnicott’s stages
of child development (me, not-me, not not-me) to the actor’s work (Turner
quotes this border-crossing in his book). Ihe role, the character to be played,
means the not-me for the actor, and after he integrates a part of the role into
himself, the not-me becomes the not not-me in him. In the process, described
as “alchemy” and “mystic,” Turner assigns only the catalyst’s role to the di¬
rector, and he considers this third self-state richer and deeper. Sheryl Sutton
speaks about this altered state of consciousness as resulting from the inner
timing required by the “overture.” In his work Performance Theory, Schechner
highlights performances which lead not only from one state to the other but
also from one self-identity to the other. In addition, he emphasizes that the
attention paid to the manner of theater-making is already an experiment in
the ritualization of performance, to find the valid forms of action in the theater
itself. He demonstrates that liturgy applied many “avant-garde” techniques by
referring to a twelfth-century mass: “it was allegorical, it encouraged — no,
® Box 81: “Performing jobs” label. Letters of Robert Wilson to Antony Scully in September
1970 about Woodstock College program, Center for Religion and Worship, New York. These
letters were first published in my book Le “théâtre” immobile de Janos Pilinszky — lu dans
Voptique de Mallarmé, Simone Weil et Robert Wilson, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2014, 146-147.
(Pilinszky János mozdulatlan színháza Mallarmé, Simone Weil és Robert Wilson műveinek
tükrében, Budapest, L'Harmattan, Käroli Kônyvek, 2015, 109-110.)
Arthur Holmberg: The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1996, 7.
7
e 137 "