"Ritual" in Contemporary Theatre and Criticism

Author(s): Anthony Graham-White

Source: Educational Theatre Journal , Oct., 1976, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Oct., 1976), pp. 318-324
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206421

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 ANTHONY GRAHAM-WHITE

"Ritual" in Contemporary Theatre

and Criticism

"Ritual" continues to be a fashionable term among experimental theatre groups.

Creative artists are free to find inspiration where they may; my purpose is not to
cast doubt upon the effectiveness of particular productions. Indeed, I have (for ex-
ample) seen the Living Theatre only once, the Performance Group not at all. Most of
those who read this article will probably have seen as little of such major companies;
but many of them, like myself, will have attended "rituals" by those who are in-
fluenced by the example of the Becks and Schechner or Artaud and Grotowski. The
influence of such artists rests less upon their performances, which a limited number
see, than upon their writings and the writings of critics about them. It is not to de-
tract from the achievement of particular artists to suggest that those who follow their
work, from the desk or from the rehearsal room, may mislead themselves if they
take the avant-garde use of the term "ritual" too literally-and will not, incidentally,
be taking the concept of ritual itself seriously enough. The Living Theatre's Para-
dise Now and The Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 are rituals only to the degree
that Strindberg's Ghost Sonata is a sonata or Anouilh's Waltz of the Toreadors a
waltz: by analogy. By using a term that belongs to a different cultural form the
artist alerts his audience that he is borrowing formal elements and at the same time
implicitly invites his audience to feel in the presence of his work as they might in
the presence of the analogous cultural form.

For the audience member to accept the artist's terms is an appropriate response.
But the critic should be more skeptical. That is, while seeking to understand the
artist's motives and their relevance to the appreciation of his achievement, he should
evaluate the appropriateness of the artistic choice of terms and the extent to which
he uses them in an uncommon and individual way. Critics have, for example, de-
bated the appropriateness and significance of Chekhov's designating The Seagull and
The Cherry Orchard as comedies, Uncle Vanya as "Scenes from Country Life," and
Three Sisters as a drama. Such evaluation is particularly the critic's duty in the face
of a term such as ritual, which has several connotations that should be distinguished,
and which also needs to be defined since-as it is appealed to in the theatre of the
avant-garde-it stands for a richness of experience lacking or greatly attenuated
in our society. (Indeed, the emphasis upon "ritual" in the avant-garde is a criticism
of our society's values.)

Anthony Graham-White, a past editor of ETJ, is Head of the Department of Speech and Theatre
at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. He is author of The Drama of Black Africa.

318

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 319 / "RITUAL" IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE AND CRITICISM

Yet, to take as an example a recent survey of experimental theatre, Margaret

Croyden scatters "ritual" blithely and approvingly through two hundred pages be-
fore she comments on the validity of the term. Her entire discussion reads:

Attempts at ritual seem less successful when actors and audience share no common
ground. In actual fact, ritual has always had a moral, religious, practical, or psycho-
logical significance, and has never existed for its own sake. Rites were a need. Spring
meant a rebirth of the crops and food, a relief from the darkness of the winter; thus
rites often accompanied the change of season. Rites helped primitive people to over-
come the mysteries of the universe; their dances and ceremonies were offerings to
the mysterious elements, in exchange for survival.1

She does not conclude from her perception of the need for shared beliefs (as others
have) that one cannot create rituals in today's America, nor does she speculate on
why the avant-garde should have turned to ritual in spite of the absence of what she
considers a precondition for its success. Are we "primitive people," too, who turn to
ritual because we feel that we lack control over our socio-political and technological
world? Or do we turn to it simply to try to create, temporarily, a sense of shared
belief and communion?

II

A glance at the tables of contents in the journal Modern Drama over the past
twelve years will show that the term ritual has had an increasing appeal not only
for the experimental theatre and those who write about it but for a broad range of
literary critics. But a glance at the articles themselves will show how rarely it is de-
fined. Even in a book with "ritual" in its title, Lewis T. Cetta's Profane Play, Ritual,
and Jean Genet, the author thinks we only have to "look at ritual for a moment" to
know what it is; one brief paragraph will convince us that, "in short, it is wish-
fulfillment."2 This judgment is supported by a single reference to Johan Huizinga's
Homo Ludens, a work which was written thirty years ago and prompted rather than
concluded the investigation and discussion of the relationship of play and ritual to
other cultural forms.

Now that anthropology has inspired theatre practitioners and literary critics to use
the term, perhaps critics could learn from anthropologists something about how to
define ritual. While the creative artist may cherish the ambiguity of the term, the
scholar and critic should "try to use words in the most fruitful way," which is, the
eminent anthropologist Max Gluckman tells us, to define terms in order to ensure
that discourse is based on assumptions held in common, and to enable distinctions
to be made.3

"Ritual" is commonly used in three different senses. At one pole it stands for rou-
tine, as in the phrase "empty ritual" or "meaningless ritual." These adjectives are
absolutely inapplicable to "ritual" at the other pole of meaning, "ritual" in the sense

1 Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: The Contemporary Experimental Theatre (New York, 1974), p. 203.
2 (Alabama, 1974), PP- 4-5.
3 Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations (Manchester, 1962), p. 22. The comment is made as an
introduction to his own suggested definitions of ritual and related terms.

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320 / ETJ, October 1976

of a performance on behalf of, but not necessarily by, the whole group or commun-
ity that expresses and enforces some of its deepest values at a time (usually) of
change in the seasonal cycle or in the longer cycle of a man's life. (If rituals of this
type can be described as "empty" or "meaningless," they have lost their function
and, indeed, ceased to be ritual.)

Both these senses, of course, are available to the critic. They are, for example, the
basis for Katharine Burkman's approach to Pinter: "The plays abound in those daily
habitual activities which have become formalized as ritual and have tended to become
empty of meaning, an automatic way of coping with life. These automatic and mean-
ingless activities contrast in the plays with echoes of sacrificial rites which . .. force
the characters into an awareness of life from which their daily activities have helped
protect them."4 She argues that Pinter sets the two kinds of ritual "in counterpoint
with each other."

Between these polar senses, one of emptiness, one of fullness, is that which most
anthropologists agree to call "ceremony." Literary critics have long been familiar
with such a usage in Francis Fergusson's description of how Chekhov's plays are
built around such ceremonies as arrivals, departures, anniversaries, and parties.
Whether ritual in this intermediate sense is seen as a full expression of the group's
beliefs or as empty form depends upon the individual viewpoint. Some of the bit-
tersweetness of Chekhov comes from our sense that such ceremonies should be full of
meaning but in fact are not.

If critics would speak of routine and ceremony and reserve ritual for the fullest
sense of the term, they would deny themselves an occasional fine paradox but would
be infinitely clearer. It is, of course, ritual in the fullest sense that is attractive to
the avant-garde.

Anthropologists distinguish ritual from ceremony in terms of efficacy. Monica

Wilson, with experience in Africa, writes that "a ceremony is an appropriate and
elaborate form for the expression of feeling, but a ritual is action believed to be ef-
ficacious."5 Raymond Firth uses the same word to distinguish ritual from ceremony
in Oceania6 and, in a discussion of ritual and drama in Malaya, defines ritual as "a
formal set of procedures of a symbolic kind, involving social communication, and
believed to possess an efficacy of themselves in changing the technical or social con-
ditions of the performers or other participants."' G. S. Kirk, with classical Greece in
mind, states that "ritual . . . implies a closely controlled set of actions performed in
an established sequence for a specific supernatural end."8 Anthropologists are not
unanimous in their definitions of ritual,9 but there is general agreement that, in the

4 This and the quotation that follows are from The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter (Columbus,
1971), p. 10.
5 "Nyakyusa Ritual and Symbolism," American Anthropologist, 56 (1954), 240.
6 "Ceremonies for Children and Social Frequency in Tikopia," Oceania, 27 (1956), 46.
7 "Ritual and Drama in Malay Spirit Mediumship," Comparative Studies in Society and History,
9 (1967), 202-3.
8 Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley, 1970), p. 29.
9 The commonest points of disagreement are over how much to include under the term ritual and
how to characterize the relationship between the ritual action and its supposed results. These dis-
agreements hardly affect the central point, that of ritual as efficacious action.

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321 / "RITUAL" IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE AND CRITICISM

view of those who enact and watch it, ritual produces results that lie beyond the
termination of the performance. It is this that distinguishes it from the perform-
ance of a drama.10

I am not suggesting that literary critics should accept the anthropologists' defini-
tion of ritual simply in awe of social science, but rather because anthropologists have
paid a great deal more attention than have literary critics to working out a definition
that, for example, distinguishes ritual from other patterned forms of social expres-
sion, such as parties, and of artistic expression, such as drama.

Current literary usage lacks an agreed-upon definition of ritual; the term tends
to be defined in the broadest terms as "a recurrent act of symbolic communication"11
or as "acted-out images of human patterns, necessary to man if he is to perceive of
life beyond its momentary significance."'12 Such would-be definitions do not dis-
tinguish ritual from art-certainly not from drama-and so the term is in danger
of becoming an honorific.

The term ritual can, for example, be used to raise the intellectual status of the neg-
lected work or popular artform. The author of a book on vaudeville finds vaudeville's
significance enhanced because as ritual it offers "directly sensory experiences which
are imparted by rhythmic patterns of gesture, color, and sound," and, "as ritual,
vaudeville could delve beneath conscious prejudices." He uses the term ritual to
mean "a developmental stage in the process of myth creation" (ignoring the prob-
lematic relation of myth and ritual) and finds that vaudeville gave its audience a
"ritual articulation of the American Myth of Success." In short, "As ritual, vaude-
ville arose in an era of crisis to offer the American people a definitive rhythm, a series
of gestures which put man back into the center of his world, a sense of the human
community, and an effective emotional release."'3 Is this, however, any more than
drama has traditionally offered-"a series of gestures which put man back into the
center of his world, a sense of the human community, and an effective emotional
release"? If the author had said simply that vaudeville's function is the same as that
of tragedy we might have been skeptical but also, perhaps, more sure of what he was
saying.

All too often, moreover, the connotations of "ritual" shift as the argument pro-
gresses. Such shifts can be aided by modifying the term "ritual" to "ritualistic"
and by coupling nouns to speak of "theatre ritual," "ritual drama," or "game-

10 Efficacy does not distinguish theatrical from ritual performance absolutely. In fifteenth-
century Japan, for example, N5 dramas were presented before a sick person for curative effect. Then,
too, there is a tendency for rituals to lose their efficacy and become prized for their theatricality;
indeed, the name of ritual may remain attached to a performance that is more or less openly ac-
knowledged to be for entertainment's sake (see my The Drama of Black Africa [New York, 1974],
pp. 17-28). Richard Schechner has emphasized that there is a continuum between ritual and thea-
trical performance ("From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-
Entertainment Dyad," ETJ, 26 [December, 1974], 455-81).
11 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), P. 105.
12 George H. Szanto, "The Dramatic Process," Bucknell Review, 19 (Winter 1971), 8.
13 Albert F. McLean, Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington, Kentucky, 1965), pp. x, 4,
ix, 36, 6.

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322 / ET], October 1976

ritual."14 Such usages raise the suspicion that the writer wishes to avoid com-
mitting himself to the implications of his own argument, or that there is an un-
conscious evasiveness in the writer's mind.

The anthropological definition of ritual points to a crucial problem in theatrical

works which borrow from ritual. Indeed, theatre practitioners are at least partly
conscious of the problem, and their awareness would seem to show the aptness of the
anthropological definition to discussions of theatrical works. The problem is that if
ritual has results that lie beyond the termination of the performance, theatrical per-
formance does not. Whatever effects a theatrical production may have are subjective:
its enactors may hope to prepare the hearts of the spectators for future revolution,
or to encourage prison reform, but these hoped-for results are not produced by the
performance itself-a chain of further activities must bring them about. Such play-
wrights as Jean Genet and Wole Soyinka, who have let their imaginations play
around the patterns of event and meaning expressed in rituals, have not assumed that
those rituals guaranteed reality or authenticity to their scripts. The Blacks seems to
be based upon an actual ritual,'5 but Genet is careful to introduce a character out-
side the structure of the ritualistic action, Newport News, who stands for the con-
nection with reality and futurity that Genet's play cannot in fact include. At the
climax of most of Soyinka's plays is a traditional ritual, yet the plays make us aware
of the disparity between the traditional pattern and the events of the play.'6 While
ritual implies control over some future event, Soyinka's plays point to the lack of
any such control in contemporary Africa. After some performances of the Living
Theatre's Paradise Now, a work composed of eight "rites," the founders of the troupe
led the audience into the streets to start a revolution. This action is not in the script
and is a tacit acknowledgment of the inefficacy of the "rites" performed.'7

It was not, however, in search of efficacy that theatre practitioners took ritual as
the model for their own performances. Richard Schechner states that "the move from
theatre to ritual happens when the audience as a separate entity is dissolved into
the performance as 'participants.' "is And Richard Kostelanetz believes that "en-
ticing the audience to become participants in a theatrical process is . . . precisely the

14 See, for example, Jules L. Aaron, "The Audience in the Mirror: The Role of Game-Ritual in
Contemporary Theatre," Dissertation Abstracts International, 31 (1971), 5563-A.
15 See my "Jean Genet and the Psychology of Colonialism," Comparative Drama, 4 (September,
1970), 208-216.
16 Cf. Jerzy Grotowski's comment that though the theatre had its origins in ritual, today the
theatre worker must seek "confrontation with ritual rather than identification." Toward a Poor
Theatre (New York, 1968), p. 23. See also p. 121.
17 One might question how the "rites" earn that title. For example, here is the Rite of Study:
"Each actor speaks when he feels moved to do so. There is no pre-designed order. The actor listens,
meditates, studies the Mantras as they are spoken, and answers. He may use one of the Mantras in
the text, or invent one. Because of this interchange it is called the Rite of Study" (Paradise Now:
Collective Creation of the Living Theatre [New York, 1971], p. 57). Even if the "rite" uses mantras
designed to be efficacious by means of sound patterns, are the sound patterns in English as effica-
cious as those in Hindi? Are those improvised as effective as those whose sound values have been
carefully designed? Does the audience member realize he is hearing mantras? And if he is aware
that mantras are considered efficacious on the Indian subcontinent, does he himself consider them
so?

18 Paper given at the Rassegna Internazionale de Teatri Stabili, Florence, April, 1974.

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323 / "RITUAL" IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE AND CRITICISM

same strategy that informed primitive ritual theatre."'9 To hope for the union of
actors and spectators is to criticize the alienation of everyday life. To insist on the
ecstatic experience is to criticize and to escape the drabness of the everyday world.
The vision is Nietzsche's vision of Dionysian tragedy, caught up in which "for a
brief moment we become, ourselves, the primal Being."20 But, as Bert States writes:

It would appear that the more civilized or diversified the society, the less capable it is
of lyric rapture, however much it may yearn for something to be rapturous about.
Perhaps the best indication in our time is the current theatre of audience "involvement"
and "free" improvisation, which seems to polarize audiences sharply. It is what Pol-
onius might call lyric-dialectical theatre: It wants, on one hand, to embrace the
possibilities of group transport (or what Philip Wheelwright calls "throbbing to-
gether"); but on the other, it wants to be an instrument of reform, either of social
structure or of orthodox art. What this theatre does not have, of course, is the union
and devotion of "the higher community" upon which ritual art seems to depend; its
audiences, like all modern audiences, come for a variety of reasons: some out of
curiosity, some to jeer, some to participate, and some to eavesdrop while others
participate.21

Moreover, even though Kostelanetz and Schechner come close to equating audience
participation and ritual, such participation is the exception rather than the rule in
traditional societies. There rituals tend to be carried out by a clearly defined group-
by members of a club or society, by members of an age-group, or by priests. Unless
it is a specifically women's ritual, women are rarely performers. Far from there
being physical involvement of the spectators, they tend to be controlled by strict
rules. In many parts of Africa, for example, it is considered physically dangerous
to touch performers in ritual or traditional dramatic performances, since they may
be possessed by powerful spirits. Indeed, rites are often carried out away from the
village, or those who are not initiates into the group that performs the rites are
warned by bullroarers and whistles to stay in their dwelling. Of course, the ritual
may still emphasize and celebrate the corporateness of the whole community, even
if there is no physical involvement of the spectators or no spectators at all. The
emphasis upon physical participation in contemporary American performances
presumably springs from the inability of the performers to assume that they act
for the whole group; hence, the need to induce the audience members to commit
themselves to the action.

III

The artist, as I have said, is free to find inspiration where he can; and is free not
to define the terms with which he is working. The scholar and critic, however, should
not simply accept the usage of practitioners nor, in the case of "ritual," that of his
own predecessors. To do so risks forfeiting one means of evaluating the artwork,
that of comparing the relationship of premises to production, and discourages the
examination of the appropriateness of the premises themselves.

19 The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York, 1968), p. 25.

20 The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffling (New York, 1956), p. 102.
21 Irony and Drama: A Poetics (Ithaca, 1971), pp. 219-220. I would, of course, suggest that the
term "ritual art" is at best awkward, at worst self-contradictory.

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324 / ETJ, October 1976

Literary critics, of course, have applied the term ritual to a far wider range of
works than those which their creators claim to be ritual or ritualistic. While theatre
practitioners have sought to recapture ritual's alleged communion of spectators and
performers, literary critics have generally sought in ritual some principles of repeti-
tive structure. Ritual, however, is not to be distinguished from other types of cul-
tural expression by structure but by the attitude toward it held by participants and
other members of the community, notably their belief in its efficacy. From this
awkward fact, perhaps, comes the vagueness of most literary definitions of ritual.
Some critics have escaped vagueness by selecting a particular ritual as a paradigmatic
form for literature. The difficulty with that, as Wallace Douglas long ago pointed
out, is that different critics choose different kinds of rituals as paradigms.22 Nor
can the critic have any assurance that the structure he takes from ritual is in fact
only to be derived thence; year-king rituals and The Mikado, for example, might
both be expressions of the same predilections within the human mind.23

At present, in any case, the tendency seems to be not to take fertility rites, rites
of passage, or dithyrambs as paradigmatic forms, but to use "ritual" in a very broad
sense. One fears that the term will soon rival "symbol" and "metaphor," uncertain
conveyors of meaning unless each critic declares the sense in which he understands
them. Unfortunately, there is not yet the same self-consciousness about the use of
the term ritual. "Symbol" and "metaphor" are traditional and necessary terms, but
if each critic is to redefine ritual to suit his own uses, he does so in defiance of the
term's meaning in its own, non-literary sphere.

Adoption of the term ritual to describe theatre events sprang from a sense that
they had or sought qualities markedly different from the norms of Western dramatic
performance. Ironically, what those particular qualities are cannot be clearly con-
veyed by an undefined term; yet if clearly defined, the term may prove inappropriate
to the performance. The term ritual tells us something about the performers' aspira-
tions; applied to literary structure, it tells us something about the changing modes
of scholarly perception; but when applied as loosely as it commonly has been, it
tells us less about the qualities of the works themselves than the reader needs to
know.24

22 "The Meanings of 'Myth' in Modern Criticism" (1953), reprinted in Myth and Literature:
Contemporary Theory and Practice (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966), p. 121.
23 For further comment on this point, see Frye, p. 46.
24 I thank Ruby Cohn, Esther M. Jackson, George R. Kernodle, E. T. Kirby, Alan P. Merriam,
and Nelvin Vos for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. That version was delivered at
the 1974 MLA convention.

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