Mission
MISSION
The Ritual Theatre creates original, site-specific, transformational
theatre for diverse inter-generational audiences. Our performances offer space for the emergence of authentic community, and seek to restore our much-needed connection with ritual and with place. Through site specific plays, installation-performances and other multidisciplinary work, we hope to nurture the inspired potential within each of us, and to deeply celebrate the cycles of love, loss
& renewal that make us human.
.
Ritual, Liminality & Transformation
We believe that the ritual function of theatre is a necessary part of creating healthy, wise, and just communities. And that hidden beneath our collective forgetting, we each have a desire to feel more deeply connected through ritual spaces. We still long for a village culture.
Ritual theatre is a healing practice. It is transformation. It is education... a path to remaking society in our true likeness.
Thus we cultivate experimental containers in which the liminal might be tempted to happen- inviting re-enchantment, reconnection and re-membering through technologies of theatre, storytelling and dance - as human beings have done for millennia. Ultimately the alchemy takes place in the permeable space between us - as both performers and audience meet in the emergent space of the Unknown.
What is Ritual?
A ritual is as an offering by an individual or group to the larger Universe, with the conscious intention to connect to our original state of interconnectedness or inter-being. This kind of offering is an expression of gratitude to Life itself, to our Ancestors, to Nature, and for the future generations.
Through ritual, we link the micro to the macrocosm - the experience or story of the isolated individual to that of the Collective. We re-member that the work of living a human life is both a solitary & shared effort.
In ritual we also make space for paradox: for the sacred & profane, the ugly & the beautiful, impermanence & eternity, and the vast expanse of human emotion & longing. In honoring our deepest desires and our most profound shadows, we encourage others to do the same.
The Ritual Theatre continues a lineage of remembrance inspired in particular by South Indian traditions in which theatre, dance, music along with all forms of art-making are seamlessly woven together, to create "a whole work of art". The notion of artistic disciplines being separate entities is not only foreign but unnatural to pre-colonial traditions around the globe. It's impossible to actually separate "theatre" from "dance", "performance" or "ritual". Instead, these are each recognized as aspects of a unified expression emerging from a shared ground; any given form speaking through its own unique language.
In Kerala, South India the term for all ritual arts is "nāden kāla" which translates to "arts of the land" , meaning that they sprang from and exist in relationship with the land and its people as part of a whole way of life. From their origins, ritual theatre forms took place site-specifically within sacred groves, agricultural fields, cremation grounds and temples and in relation to the spirits of the land or to one's ancestors. To have art & culture of one's own is to "play" ("kāla") in relationship with the rich textures of nature, place & peoples over a long period of time - one in which culture/art evolves, as our interdependent relationships deepen.
Decolonizing theatre in the West also calls for a profound honoring of the ritual performance traditions of People of Color of the Global Majority without appropriating them as yet another mode of unconscious extraction. As a WOC-founded company, and one of the first to coin the term "ritual theatre"in the US, we celebrate the work of BIPOC artists & performers, while also encouraging all of us to carry out the necessary work of ancestral healing & recovery.
Decolonizing Theatre
Re-membering a Village Way of Life
Our ultimate intention in creating ritual theatre is to help reclaim
"a village way of life" - one in which the arts are fundamental to the creation and maintenance of an authentic culture of place. In order to
do so, we must first redefine what constitutes theatre, who makes it,
who goes to see it, and why.
In pre-colonial traditions, artists were regarded as sacred emissaries of the Divine. The entire village - from infants to the elderly - would go out to experience annual ritual theatre which occurred in cyclic relationship to the sun, moon & stars. For both artists and audiences, art & theatre were practices of re-membering themselves as part of a greater Whole. Furthermore, artists were sustained through patronage models
embedded in the fabric of society, making performances free for all.
In contrast to this, in the industrialized, capitalized world, artists find themselves marginalized, and the arts themselves regarded as an accessory rather than as an intrinsic or sacred part of life. Theatre is most often the providence of the elite - those who can afford (time & money) to go out and see/consume it as a temporary escape from daily life.
These are two starkly different paradigms:
One, self-arising & regenerative. The other, colonized & extractive.
Our work is to reclaim the former.
Honoring the Land
The Ritual Theatre has been based in the lands of the Mahican Nation,
in what is presently called "The Berkshires, Western Massachusetts" on Turtle Island.
We acknowledge that these are stolen lands, and work to honor the memory and presence of
Indigenous ancestors and their descendants through our work in creating a place-based culture.