Ritual denotes an action or series of actions that are done in order to have an effect – to alter the weather, to bring prosperity or to move a person from one phase of life to another in a transitional rite of passage. Rituals can be distinguished from much performance in that they have at their centre active participation, someone or a group doing rather than presenting something. Rituals often have a religious or social function, for example in encouraging group cohesion.
It appears that rituals have more than a purely cultural foundation. Victor Turner explored this view and proposed that rituals have a biological basis and our participation in them is genetically conditioned. Turner’s anthropological fieldwork led later to his adoption of a process he called performing ethnography. Rituals were re-enacted in the classroom in order for students to learn about them through active participation rather than just observation, even if the ritual was decontextualized and performed. Investigation of current ritual practices has proved more fruitful than historically based analyses, partly because of the lack of information about pre-Dionysian rituals. They have offered practical materials for theatre artists like Tadashi Suzuki and Jerzy Grotowski. Some performance art and live art practitioners have adopted ritualistic elements as ways of structuring and framing their artworks, and fruitful comparisons have been made between Western magicians, performers or theatre artists and the shaman’s role as a conjuror or medicine man. At the core of the numerous comparisons that exist between rituals and performance lies the fact that performance shares with rituals a non-daily and specialized use of time and space, often enacted in buildings that are set aside for that purpose, like churches and mosques, or at least temporarily transformed from their daily use. As such, rituals are not to be distinguished and separated from performance, but, as Schechner has pointed out, they should rather be placed alongside each other on a continuum, their practices, functions, aesthetics and characteristics often overlapping and shared. From the RCTP
Image: Odin Teatret & CTLS Archives. Work Demonstration: The Whispering Winds. Director: Eugenio Barba. Photo © Tony D’Urso