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ENIKŐ SEPSI
forced — audience participation, it treated time teleologically," and "it ex¬
tended the spatial field of the performance from the church to the roadways
to the homes of the participants.”®
Another letter by Wilson dated August 23, 1970 states the following about the
connection between ritual and theater:
I’ve always believed that ritual is the heart of things. Somehow plays seem to revolve
furiously around ritualistic activity. The only hitch is, that artists usually stumble
on it without knowing it. Those like Peter Brook, in his version of Seneca’s Oedipus,
who go directly after a ritualistic interpretation often botch it up. If too much of a
scheme gets in the head of the participants the life can go out of the work. Genet is
very interesting ritualistically with his inverted Catholicism, with his fascination
with the Mass, with his need for good in order to spur on the evil he worships.
Religion and drama just have to get together again. Grotowski’s ideas about being a
secular saint. After all, the roots of drama were religious, some people think. [...] We
have to recover the tragic vision: that man is temporal, finite, doomed to death and
oblivion. Seems that people are more interested in the Eslin Institute and the varied
experiences of the Kama Sutra. Transcend the flesh. Burn out the flesh. Grotowski’s
idea. [...] Not in a pseudo-philosophical abstract way, but by really applying the hot
tongs of drama to the participants. A little Artaud. Scald them. [...] A true and deep
approach to and appreciation of life will, I’m sure, be ritualistic.’
This quotation highlights the main sources of inspiration for the creation of a
ritual-based piece of work in Deafman Glance and in the early performances
of productions by Wilson: Genet and the Mass and his inverted Catholicism,
Jerzy Grotowski’s ritualistic theater, the main goal of which is not to create
a performance but to focus on the way the actor lives and trains through the
preparation process (“being a secular saint”), and finally, Artaud’s original
“théatre de la Cruauté.” Peter Brook appears here as a counter-example, po¬
tentially influenced by the Russian-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff, though his
name is not mentioned in this text. (Gurdjieff, in turn, was strongly influenced
by the whirling dervishes he encountered in Istanbul and the sufis of Central
Asia at the turn of the century.) In the 1960s, Pilinszky also acquainted himself
with Grotowski’s laboratory theater, and he wrote articles about The Constant
Prince. Grotowski can be considered a prefiguration of what Pilinszky later
admired in Wilson’s theater, especially in Deafman Glance: this via negativa
making of theater, opposite in this sense to the intentionally ritualistic aspect
of Peter Brook’s Oedipus.
8 Richard Schechner: Performance Theory, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004, 136-137 (see the
chapter “Theater for Tourists”).
° See footnote 5.
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