WHAT IS RITUAL THEATRE?
The Ritual Theatre company has its roots in the ritual drama traditions of South India, where there is no separation between art and social, healing, or spiritual experience. Dance & theatre are fluid mediums, with most folks forms best translated as 'ritual-dance-theatre'. What we now call "multidisciplinary" was simply the way things were for thousands of years. Whole communities and families went to witness seasonal performances - which were often outdoors, and in or near a sacred grove or temple - to restore meaning to their lives, to reconnect to the sacred and to place, to experience communal catharsis and remember the humor of being human.
In South Asian ritual theatre traditions, as in much of the pre-colonial world, the experience involves all five senses and beyond. The audience is merged into one mass of humanity- warmed and held, absorbed in the sounds, sights and smells of the otherworld - together in the present, and yet timeless. The liminal threshold is the palpable undercurrent of ritual itself - its availability and numinous power undoubted by village audiences. Very often performances span the entire night- which is the way many ritual traditions around the world have functioned- the tiredness one experiences in the wee hours serving to further disintegrate the veil of separation between one's egoic self and the larger Self or Whole.
While many live ritual performance traditions are rapidly fading in India as elsewhere due to the hyper-modernization and commodification of life and culture, I've had the privilege witnessing many of these forms, and also of performing myself to full audiences of villages and families (parents, grandparents & children in clusters of 100-200 people) during my Kerala Cycle Yathra in 2006, where they were completely rapt in the middle of village commons or a family courtyard. While also trained in the Western theatre, these sense memories have informed and sustained my personal and collective experiments in theatre which would flower in 2012 as 'The Ritual Theatre' (initially 'Rogue Angel').
In many of the world's earth-based traditions, the role of the ritual performer and that of the shamanic practitioner often blur together. The performer's task is to facilitate an initiatory reconnection and expansion for those whom they serve: to help us re-assemble the incoherent parts of our being and thus recover our essential natures. In order to do this, the performer must feel and express the whole range of human emotion and experience - from grief to rage, to the most sublime transcendence. When the performer truly goes there, the audience can feel it, and they go there too. Coming through the journey together, we each re-emerge more whole.
Within ritual theatre traditions, the relationship between audience and performer is not an exchange of capital for entertainment, but a pact to renew a shared web of meaning and belonging. An audience member leaves a performance feeling cleansed- as through they've been restored from the inside out. The performer, the people, and the place - all combined - do that; synergize a kind of magic for those present, for everyone in the village, and for the ancestors and the spirits of the land. At the same time, in certain traditions in South India, the performance must be carried out even when no audience is present- as an offering of gratitude to the Great Mother Devi - for all the unseen beings present, and so that the lives of everyone in the village may thrive. Thus the work of the ritual performer was, (and I believe still is) necessary in order to proactively sustain order and harmony in the cosmos. Towards this end humanity has created countless intricate cultural technologies- i.e. songs, stories, instruments, dances, costumes, masks and rituals- to continually restore our connection to Creation.
The task of the new ritual theatre performer is to elaborate on what the old role once was. In the modern context, the small self must find its way back to the Big Self without much of a road map. Whereas in the past, there was a well-worn path to get there and back, and there were guides. Now one must find one's own way - alone or together, though better together. The gift of not having a map is that there are endless possibilities. The danger is that it can be easy to get lost.
We now find ourselves in a digital-centric world, not only invoking the idea of a village where there is none, but also calling forth the spirit of the emerging global village- the imperfect by-product of the globalization project. As such we must be willing and able to meet and contend with the complexities of our own lostness vis-à-vis diaspora, colonization, capitalism, and the attendant twin realities of cultural erasure & appropriation.
Thus, ritual theatre is most certainly not an escape from the difficulties of earthly existence, but a way to bravely and compassionately bring illumination to it. And for the modern ritual performer, the act is as much a process of healing/
wholing for the personal self as it is for the collective Self. That is to say, it's perhaps more intrinsically selfish than it was in the past. Yet what heals the self, heals all, when done with that understanding. Moving my grief, liberates the grief of others. My own liberation enables the liberation of all beings, as Buddhist traditions so beautifully teach us.
Because of this, new ritual theatre requires a fresh depth of vulnerability. Whether in solo or ensemble work, I have always emphasized the necessity of there being a real, direct and personal need to perform in this way, and to engage in artistic-spiritual inquiry. Without such an authentic need - without something at stake - you can't enter into a contract to serve, or to liberate. One must truly have something to risk, to lose, and therefore to find.
Such a commitment to expose the incredible tenderness of the self to the fierce elements of the Unknown, Longing, Nature, and to other human beings, is found in the work of contemporary luminaries who've offered up new forms of ritual/dance/theatre. These have included, among others - Pina Bausch, Anna Halprin, originators of Japanese Butoh - esp Kazuo Ono and Min Tanaka, and among these for me my teachers - Diego Piñon and his Body Ritual Movement, and Atsushi Takenouchi's JINEN Butoh.
We too often think of our pain as our own, but it is shared, just as our longing to love and be loved is deeply universal. Our foibles are so very human- which is what the Clown teaches us... That we can in fact laugh at ourselves, and at the whole elaborate mess we ourselves have made, because perhaps then (and only then) we might have a chance at getting out of it.
I am convinced that the path out of the conundrum of modernity involves re-learning how to laugh and cry together, and make beauty from the madness. And as we stumble onward, we must remind ourselves that ritual, and ritual theatre, isn't so much about our individual "self"- a contrived figment of modern colonial society - but rather an offering we make to forces much greater than "me" so that - as Martín Prechtel eloquently writes- Life may continue to live - through as, around us, with us and as us.
It is precisely this art of offering that new ritual theatre practitioners attempt to rediscover and make fresh pathways into, with a vulnerability and honesty which the chaos and uncertainty of our current time demands. I believe there is a hunger for reconnection & authenticity in our modern isolated lives- a hunger so profoundly buried that we don't even feel it. But, it's there... Hidden underneath our collective amnesia, we long to come alive again. To grieve and to laugh, to re-member and be transformed, together.
-©Pooja Prema,
Founder & Artistic Director, 2024