Ritual Theatre Research Articles

The Camera as Catalyst: Photography as a Form of Ritual Theatre

The Camera as Catalyst: Photography as a Form of Ritual Theatre

Building the Ark: Strategies for Sailing the Seas of Ritual Theatre

“…the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth”. Genesis 7:17

Studies in Chinese Ritual and Ritual Theatre: A Bibliographical Report

Studies in Chinese Ritual and Ritual Theatre: A Bibliographical Report

Women and the Women's Movement in Contemporary Spanish Theatre

The problems confronted by most women's theatre in reaching its own constituency and, when desired, gaining a wider hearing have been exacerbated in Spain by the long period of emergence from the Franco dictatorship, with its legacy of oppression. In this article, Maria–José Ragué offers an overview of the subject, outlining the historical context and exploring the work of women playwrights, then looking in particular at women's theatre groups based in Barcelona, at whose university she teaches theatre history. Maria–José Ragué is also a theatre critic and a playwright, having published Clytemnestra and Crits de gavina in Catalan and Gaviotas, lagartijas y mariposa in Spanish. Among her research she has published, in Catalan, The Feminine Characters of Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Catalan Theatre (1990), and, in Spanish, The Feminine Characters of Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Galician Theatre (1991). Her Themes of Greek Tragedy in Spanish Contemporary Theatre is also in print. She is currently completing a book about women and theatre in contemporary Spain, and beginning work on a study of African ritual theatre. Marias-José Ragué was born in Barcelona in 1941, and has always lived in her home town except between 1968 and 1970, when she lived and studied in Berkeley.

New Age Spiritualities: How are we to Talk of God?

Two autobiographical accounts by American Jesuit priests of their New Age involvement have gained considerable attention recently—David Toolan’s Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness published in 1987, and Fr. Mitch Pacwa’s Catholics and the New Age, published last year and already reprinted.David Toolan does not, so far as I am aware, attempt to define the New Age movement. But his encounters reveal this ‘epistemological revolution’ to be an amalgam of Asian mysticism, modem physics, and transpersonal psychologies. Its major proponents are the Esalen Institute, Jean Houston’s ‘Ritual Theater,’ and a host of physicists, psychologists, and naturalists, including Ernest Becker, Stanislaus Grof, Loren Eisley, David Bohm, and Ilya Prigogine, among others.According to Pacwa’s descriptive (and to my way of thinking very limited) definition, the New Age Movement ‘is a loosely structured, eclectic movement based on experiences of monism that lead people to believe in pantheism, with a tendency to hold millennarian views of history’ (p. 13). (No one, of course, with the possible exception of some professional philosophers, experiences monism or believes in pantheism or even holds millennarian views of history. What Pacwa means is that some people have experiences that he considers monistic rather than dualistic, or entertain ideas about God that he considers insufficiently distinct from ideas about the world, and who tend to think the world might end soon.)

South India: Ritual Music and Theatre of Kerala

South India: Ritual Music and Theatre of Kerala

Orientalizing the Self: Theatre in China after Tiananmen Square

GUIZHOU, YUNNAN, INNER MONGOLIA, SHANXI, MayJuly 1990 From 23 May to 9 July 1990 I traveled in China researching the state of theatre.1 My official research concerned nuoxi (ritual theatre by ethnic minorities) in southwest China; my unofficial research concerned repression by the government since the brutal crushing of the democracy movement of 1989. I went to China with the naive assumption that, like Eastern Europe in recent years, I would find a thriving underground. My own Eurocentrism (despite years of training in Asian theatre and culture) prevented me from viewing the events in China from a Chinese perspective. The repression, fear, and sadness in China was far greater than I had expected. The year prior to the 4 June 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square had been a year of artistic advances. A breath of freedom was in the air, perhaps most visible in the first public, government-sanctioned exhibit of Chinese paintings of nudes. Displayed in Beijing during the early months of 1989, the exhibition coincided with attempts by China's avant-garde visual artists to imitate what were perceived to be Western styles. For example, one artist blasted her painting with bullets during an exhibit. Neither the nude paintings nor the bullet-spewing performance would have been tolerated-or even attempted-prior to that extraordinary spring thaw. Such events encouraged the optimism of the prodemocracy movement. Thus the brutality of the military reprisals was all the more shocking to Chinese artists. I naturally assumed that arriving in China one year after the massacres, traveling under the auspices and at the invitation of the Chinese Theatre Artists' Association (Zhongguo Xijujia Xiehui), I would be able to meet and discuss theatre with playwrights and directors all over the country. Indeed, I discovered that they were more than eager to share their experiences with me. A priority for theatre artists in China today is to be heard; and since the silencing of protest is extremely efficient, foreign visitors are viewed as emissaries, letter carriers from behind the lines. The fact that I was accompanied by Kuang-Sheng Shih, a doctoral student at UCLA who is a native of Taiwan (and thus was freed from a translator provided by the Chinese government) meant that I was a safe person with whom to speak. The knowledge that comments spoken to me would neither be censored nor reported to Chinese authorities gave me a peculiar power, seeming to draw artists to me. Much of what I will

Archaic Ritual Theater From the Ceremonial Glade to Theater Square

When we do not wish one of our actions to dissolve into the ocean of doings and activities that constitutes our existence, we shape it in a special manner, endowing it with special meaning. Thus is created ritual, which allows people to control their behavior, to lift themselves out of the natural world, the world of nature, into the world or art and culture. Or, already within the bounds of culture, people try to break free of these bounds, ritually returning to the world of nature. Having learned this language and behavior, they enter into a special dialogue with nature, responding to each of its manifestations with an appropriate ritual phrase, or instead, evoking an appropriate response in nature with their own ritual deeds. Occasionally, to safeguard their way through life, people almost entirely enclose themselves in the protective armor of ritual—thus the neurotic who accompanies each step with a guarantor-ritual known only to himself. But ordinarily it is the special moments in the life of the col...

Jean Genet by Jeanette L. Savona (review)

Book Reviews be a problem for the general reader. She also uses many specific productions as examples, and while her emphasis remains on the conceptual and theoretical, her discussions often approach theatrical rather than dramatic history. In this, she points out the problem of translating text into performance, if frequently slighting an explication of the nature of the problem. As with much dramatic criticism, the focus seems dual and unreconciled, both theatrical and literary. Despite generalizations in her discussions of types, her observations about the individual plays are always insightful. In her discussion of EquIls. for example, she argues persuasively that the play may suggest a new mode of ritual theater. The nature of the masks in this work. she argues, translates "an inner conflict into a visual emblem, a ritual," literalizing the anthropomorphic nature of the horses and their representation ofa moralistic and repressive human, not animal, element. The masking projects a psychological state and elevates it to the stature of individual tragedy (85-88). Usefully illustrated, Masks in Modern Drama also provides an appendix of production stills. This, along with a production chronology and an exhaustive bibliography, gives (unher evidence of the admirable scholarship of the study. This is a valuable work for anyone with an interest in modernist theory and practice, particularly as manifested in drama and theatre. RODNEY SIMARD, CALIFORNIA STATE COLLEGE, BAKERSFIELD JEANETTE L. SAVONA. Jean Gellet. New York: Grove Press 1984. pp. 180, illustrated. $12·50. The plays of Jean Genet are remarkable in many ways, not least in the extremism of the responses they tend to elicit. Both in the reviews that follow their perfonnances, which routinely register protests against Genet's "ugly obsessions", and in the critical treatment they receive years or even decades later, in which Genet is charged not so much with blatant prurience as with its literary equivalent, lack of clarity - the note of hysteria is unmistakable. The refreshing absence of this note in Jeanette Savona's new book on Genet is the first sign of its excellence. This is not merely a fine introductory volume (the definition its context imparts - it is another in the massive series on Modem Dramatists currently being brought out by Grove Press), but one of the finest critical studies ofGenet's drama to dafe. Savona has managed to use the form imposed by the editors ofthe series not only to assess the criticaJ tradition on Genet (and she has done this with great tact and clarity, finding and highlighting the best in all previous studies), but also to suggest several extremely promising new approaches to this body of work. Savona's special strengths as a reader of Genet are reflected even in the title of the opening chapter. The obligatory "Biography and other background" is prefaced by the words "Genet's Theatre." ]t is primarily as a maker of theatrical images and a constructor of dramatic messages that Genet appears in these pages, not (as in so many Book Reviews previous studies), as a nihilistic philosopher, a perverted prophet, a social outcast, an existential puzzle, or a saint. Savona's short discussion of these previous characterizations , especially Sartre's, in a section entitled "Problems of a legendary life," is an examplary exercise in reasonableness and demystification, in which she exposes critical problematizing of such issues as homosexuality, for instance, as products of literalism, of a failure to attend to their poetic manifestations and theatrical effects. Savona's handling of the production history of Genet's plays is another example of how she both fulfills and goes beyond the requirements ofa typical introduction. Besides . providing updated and (to most English spealdng readers) new infonnation about European productions of the plays, she makes the relevance ofsuch infonnation clear in her actual analyses ofthe plays. These analyses, while incorporating lucid summaries of traditional thematic readings of the plays (I know of no better discussion of the much-treated illusion and reality theme in The Balcony) relate these themes to Genet's theatrical practice (or, more precisely, to the theatrical practice his texts enjoin on producers). That is, Savona explores the ·special sort of theatrical semlosis implicit in Genet's play-texts, which she fonnulates as follows...

Ritual and Pathos-the Theater of O'Neill

Ritual and Pathos-the Theater of O'Neill

Ritual Theatre: Fernando Arrabal and the Latin-Americans

Ritual Theatre: Fernando Arrabal and the Latin-Americans

The Kathakali Theatre

On the southern coast of India, the three-hundred-year-old Kathakali ritual theatre still flourishes, a mixture of dance and pantomime, religious inspiration and mythological tradition. This essay is neither an aesthetic analysis of Kathakali nor a study of its origins or its relationship to other forms of Indian theatre, for my main purpose in studying Kathakali was to acquaint myself with a specific technique and assess the possibilities of adapting it for the training of European actors.According to the Kali chronogram Grahya Stutirgathaih, the gods made important contributions to the Indian theatre. Krishna appeared in Kalikut in 1657. He met a high priest and gave him a peacock feather; to celebrate this extraordinary event, the Krishnattam was created. It was a religious dance drama which glorified Krishna's exploits and the prowess of his Gopies. The spectacle soon became famous all through the state of Malabar.