Ritual and Theater: an Examination of Performance Forms in the Contemporary American Theater.

Abstract

The dissertation explores the attempts of contemporary American theater groups to create ritual, in the ceremonial sense, in their performances. It begins by surveying the loose and excessive ways the term ritual has been used by theater writers and producers and proposes to correct the consequent confusion by offering a description of ritual's key features as established by anthropologists, particularly Roy A. Rappaport and Victor Turner who have done seminal work on ritual's structure. The structures of ritual and theater are compared as subclasses of a large class of human behavior, performance. The comparison provides a basis for addressing a number of issues: Which theater groups or individuals are actually exploring ritual? What do they underst and ritual to mean? What is the nature of ritual's force? It is possible to achieve that force in theatrical performance? The method of research is participant observation. The structural analysis is applied to the training, rehearsal, and performance of a number of theater groups and solo performers, principally El Teatro Campesino, The Bread and Puppet Theater, The Iowa Theater Lab, and Paul Iorio and Kenneth Fite. Also considered, although in less depth, are the ProVisional Theater and The Performance Group. Each of these groups or individuals was observed over a number of days or weeks by the researcher who also conducted interviews and participated in workshops and performances. The hypothesis tested in the study is that the structures of ritual and of theater are inherently too different for either to encompass the other. The research shows that groups that do succeed in creating rituals are no longer performing theater. Other conclusions of the dissertation include the following: (1) It is very rare that any theater group succeeds in creating a ritual. Of the groups studied, only El Teatro Campesino and Paul Iorio, each in one performance, could be said to have performed a ritual. (2) The features of ritual that are most difficult to achieve in the theater are forming the assembly into a congregation rather than an audience, making efficacious rather than affective performances, and creating a reiterative rather than an imitative context. (3) As performances move towards ritual, whether or not they actually become ritual, they become less like theater. (4) Theater groups are more likely to create rituals in the rehearsal process when an audience does not have to be accommodated.