From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play

132 Pages·1982·20.605 MB·English

by  Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner

FROM
RITUAL
TO
J!SS^
THEATRE
J?S555
THE
HUMAN
SERIOUSNESS
OF PLAY
VICTOR TURNER
5?S55!$ 5^32:55
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Drmmi Books
511 G«mry
Smn Frmncisco, CA 94102
[phone]
FROM RITUAL TO THEATRE
©1982 Copyright by PAJ Publications
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
Library ofCongress Catalog Card No.: 81-83751
ISBN: 0-933826-16-8 cloth
ISBN: 0-933826-17-6 paper
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
From
Ritual
to
Theatre
The Human Seriousness of Play
Victor Turner
PAJ Publications
A Division ofPerforming ArtsJournal, Inc.
New York
This is the first volume ofthe Performance Studies Series edited by Brooks
McNamara and Richard Schechner. The Series is pubHshed by Performing
ArtsJournal PubHcations.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE PERFORMANCE STUDIES SERIES
What is a performance? A play? Dancers dancing? A concert? What you
sec on TV? Circus and Carnival? A press conference by whoever is Presi-
—
dent? The shooting of the Pope as portrayed by media or the instant
replays of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot? And do these events have
anything to do with ritual, a week with Grotowski in the woods outside of
Wroclaw, or a Topeng masked dance drama as performed in Peliatan,
Bali? Performance is no longer easy to define or locate: the concept and
structure has spread all over the place. It is ethnic and intercultural,
historical and ahistorical, aesthetic and rituail, sociological and political.
Performance is a mode ofbehavior, an approach to experience; it is play,
sport, aesthetics, popular entertainments, experimental theatre, and more.
But in order for this broad perspective to develop performance must be
written about with precision and in full detail. The editors of this series
have designed it as a forum for investigating what performance is, how it
works, and what its place in post-modern society may be. Performance
Studies is not properly theatrical, cinematic, anthropological, historical, or
—
artistic though any of the monographs in the Series incorporate one or
more of these disciplines. Because we are fostering a new approach to the
study of performance, we have kept the Series open-ended in order to in-
corporate new work. The Series, we hope, will measure the depth and
—
breadth ofthe field and its fertility: from circus to Mabou Mines, rodeo to
healing rites. Black performance in South Africa to the Union City Passion
Play. Performance Studies will be valuable for scholars in all areas ofper-
formance as well as for theatre workers who want to expand and deepen
their notions of performance.
Brooks McNamara
Richard Schechner
Contents
INTRODUCTION
/ 7
LIMINAL TO LIMINOID, IN PLAY, FLOW, RITUAL: / 20
An Essay in Comparative Symbology
SOCIAL DRAMAS AND STORIES ABOUT THEM
/ 61
DRAMATIC RITUAL/RITUAL DRAMA: / 89
Performative and Reflexive Anthropology
ACTING IN EVERYDAY LIFE AND / 102
EVERYDAY LIFE IN ACTING
INDEX/
124

Introduction
The essays in this book chart my personal voyage of discovery from
traditionail anthropological studies ofritual performance to a lively interest
in moderntheatre, particularlyexperimental theatre. In away, though, the
trip was also a "return of the repressed," for my mother, Violet Witter,
had been a founding member and actress in the Scottish National Theater,
located in Glasgow, which aimed, in the 1920s, at being the equivalent of,
if not the answer to, the great Dublin Abbey Theater. Alas, Scots Celts,
tainted by Norman and Calvinist forebears, could not emulate the heady
nationalist eloquence or stark political metacommentary of an Ireland
struggling to be free, an Ireland rich in bards and playwrights. The Na-
tional Theater soon folded. But my mother remained a woman of the
theatre to the end, and, Ruth Draper-like, would give solo performances,
drawing her repertoire from such (then) rebel voices as Ibsen, Shaw,
Strindberg, O'Casey, Olive Schreiner, and Robert Burns ("A Man's a
Man for a' That"). She was also something ofa feminist and included in
her stock of roles a selection entitled "Great Women from Great Plays,"
which ranged from Euripides, through Shakespeare and Webster, Con-
greve andWycherly, to such an odd bunch of"moderns" asJames Barrie,
Fiona McLeod (actually the critic William Sharp in literary Celtic
From Ritual to Theatre/8
"drag"), Clemence Dane (Queen Elizabeth in "Will Shakespeare"), and
Shaw once again ("Great Catherine" and "Candida"). The recurrent
theme was female charisma, the sort of willed or innate queenliness that
My
cowed would-be dominant mziles. father, though, was an electrical (in
American terms, "electronic") engineer, an inventive businessman who
had worked intensively withJohn Logan Baird, a pioneer in the develop-
ment oftelevision. He had little interest or insight into theatre, though he
adored the novels ofH. G. Wells (particularly his science fiction), whom he
had once met. Inevitably, in those C. P. Snow days ofthe "two cultures,"
that even more than Kipling's "East and West," could "never meet,"
they divorced, and stranded me, a fervent Scots nationalist, though only
eleven years old, with retired maternal grandparents in the deep south of
England, Bournemouth. Although this seaside haunt had been graced in-
termittently by Verlaine and Rimbaud, Walter Scott, Tolstoy, Robert
Louis Stevenson, James Elroy Flecker, and other authors of less note, its
nature, not itsculture, moved me, its seascapes and headlands, its proximi-
ty to the New Forest, its aromatic pine trees. Separated effectively from
both my parents (my mother moved around Southern England, teaching
Delsarte principles and elocution to young ladies in sundry "Free
Schools," while my father, still in Scotland, "went broke" in the "Thir-
ties" slump), I slithered between arts and sciences, sports and classics. I
won a prize for a poem on "Salamis" at age twelve, which excited the deri-
sion ofmy schoolmates for many years and forced me to win attention as a
—
soccer player and cricketer of some violence I shamefully acquired the
—
proud title of "Tank" to erase the stigma of sensibility.
No wonder, then, that in time I became an anthropologist, a member of
a discipline poised uneasily between those who promote the "science of
culture," on the model of the nineteenth century natural sciences, and
those who show how "we" (Westerners) may share in the humanity of
others (non-Westerners). The former speak in terms of monointentional
materialism, the latterofmutual communication. Both approaches are pro-
bably necessary. We should try to find out how and why different sets of
human beings in time and space are similar and different in their cultural
manifestations; we should also explore why and how all men and women, if
they work at it, can understand one another. At first I was taught by British
"structural-functionalists," descendants not only of the British empiricist
philosophers, Locke and Hume, but of the French positivists, Comte and
Durkhcim. Armchair Marxists have accused those ofus who lived close to
the "people" in the 1950s in African, Malaysian, and Oceanian villages,
often for several years, of "using" structural functionalism to provide the
"scientific" objectification of an unquestioned ideology (colonialism in
prewar anthropology, neoimperialism now). These dour modern "Round-
—
heads" an infra-red band on the world's spectrum of Moral Ma-