2 - Ritual
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
THE NATURE OF RITUAL
Modern preconceptions
We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony — whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals — but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow … So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source … The result is rarely convincing.
(Peter Brook)Artaud expressed more passionately and forcefully than anyone else in the twentieth century the idea that psychological theatre is physically inert and spiritually sterile. He witnessed his ideal of ‘pure’ theatre when Balinese dancers visited a colonial exhibition in Paris in 1931, and he declared that their performance had ‘the solemnity of a holy ritual’. In a sense this decontextualized dance-drama moved Artaud precisely because he could not understand it. He discerned ‘a horde of ritualized gestures in it to which we have no key’, and because he had no key, he was free to see these gestures as ‘strange signs matching some dark prodigious reality we have repressed once and for all here in the West’. Perhaps Artaud would have reacted in the same way if, somehow, ancient Greek actors transported from the past had invaded the colonial exhibition. Perhaps he would have loaded on to the past the same romantic longing that he attached to the Orient, for a life that was spiritual rather than alienated.
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- Information
- Greek Theatre PerformanceAn Introduction, pp. 26 - 47Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000