Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 11 Number 1, April 2010

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Holm, Bent, Bent Flemming Nielsen and Karen Vedel, editors. Religion, Ritual, Theater, Frankfurt, Germany, Peter Lang GmbH, 2009, 266pp. ISBN: 978-3-631-57627-4 $69.95 US

Reviewed by

Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon

Temple University

Religion, Ritual, Theater is a collection of essays exposing and critiquing the connections between the performance of religious rituals, cultural rituals and theatrical performance. Divided into four components: I. Embodiment, Textuality and Space; II. Transpositions, Rituality and Theatricality; III. Tradition, Evocation and Staging and IV. Theory, Accounts and Reconsiderations; Bent Holms et al have pulled together scholars from anthropology, theater, history and performance who are all working in and re-examining perspectives and approaches on the intersections between ritual studies, theater and religion.

All but two of the papers in this collection were originally presented at the International Religion, Ritual and Theatre Conference at the University of Copenhagen (April 2006).  Many of the articles use new conceptions of cognition and interpretation to the links between ritual and theater through embodiment, process and practice.

Looking at 16^th century decorations, Bent Flemming Nielsen exposes how “[e]very religion has its ways and methods in maintaining the sacred.”  (Nielson, 2009: 20) Ritualizing the body of Christ in both Catholic and Protestant churches regardless of the theological message prompted people to act in ritual ways. That ritual activity can provoke practitioners to make new associations and interpretations. Suggesting that all cultures mediate their ritual practices and tradition through intellectual reflection Nielsen’s article, by way of introduction, provides a reference for ritual theories on action and practice. (Nielsen, 21)

Mette Braun’s chapter, “Monks in Space” offers a historical case study examining ritual praxis as viewed through an interpretive text. `Looking at the spatial dynamics of the monks in the Cistercian monastery, Braun exposes the correlation between the spatial arrangement of the cloisters along with their ritual processions and the hierarchical charge of the monks of the order. Braun’s article critiques how one “ritual” gives meaning to the other and vice versa.

Thomas Hoffman’s chapter “The Intercourse of Prayer: Notes on an Erotic Passage in the Arabian Nights and the Islamic Ritual Prayer”, relies on the earlier work of anthropologist Victor Turner and performance studies scholar Richard Schechner. Hoffman’s work exposes the erotic and religious/ritual content in The Arabian Nights in contrast to more disciplined Islamic ritual prayers.  

In section 2: Transpositions Rituality and Theatricality, William Sax’s chapter, “Ritual Theater and Hinduism” looks at Ta’ziyeh “ritual dramas’ of Iran and how the human body moving about, both, among the people and on stage creates an opportunity for the “ideal experience”. Because Indian theater is as much a part of Indian dance and vice versa, Sax’s article details some of the classic mind/body elements of Indian aesthetics that each rasika or connoisseur must have to fully appreciate the regional performances of the social dramas. Sax’s work further looks at how those social dramas are “owned” and reinvigorated through their performances in local communities.

In “Performing Heritage: Rituals Turned Theatre in Uttarakhand, North India” by Karin Polit, her chapter exposes the tensions between efforts to preserve cultural rituals through tourism apart from a justification for our fascination with “the exotic” fueled by capitalism and the global marketplace. As Polit outlines, elements of what was once ‘village theater” in the central Himalayan region, are now being “owned” by groups of local people throughout Uttarakhand and routinely performed beyond their traditional borders for a wider audience’s artistic consumption. But as Polit learns, these “embodied practices” are triggering “embodied memory” and for the audience who are linked by group membership and a shared cultural competency, these performances are becoming “embodied ritual”.

In “Kutiyattam: Beyond Religion and Ritual Observance”, Gopal Venu, a performer and Kutiyattam scholar, conceptualizes Kutiyattam as one of the oldest surviving Sanskrit theatre traditions in the canon of Indian theater. Venu’s chapter demonstrates the uniqueness of the ritual observance of that aesthetic when embodied by an accomplished actor.

Section three in Religion, Ritual, Theater, is called (III) Tradition, Evocation and Singing; and in the chapter by Bent Holm “Animations of Legendary Figures: Indian and European “Minor” Theatre Forms Contextualized and Defamiliarized”, the author looks at the cross cultural uses of masks, puppets, marionettes and shadow puppetry. Again, tied to preservation, tourism and notions of identity, the popularity of indigenous minor theater traditions in India and in Italy has led, according to Holm to a resurgence in puppet-plays, master classes and craft families. The analysis of these new, minor forms of theater reveals connections between human imagination, concepts of “magic” and local identity.

In “Religious Judgment or Ghost Story: Modern Productions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni”, Nils Holger Peterson discusses the connections between opera and religious ritual. Peterson analyzes several historically based performances of Don Giovanni and probes how religious ritual informs or detracts from the historical narrative in “historically-informed” music performances.

Karen Vedel’s article, “Ancestral Voices in Contemporary Performance: The Use of Trance in Vincent Mantsoe’s Men Jaro (2006)” looks at the work of South African performance artist Vincent Mantsoe’s use of trance both as theatrical device and aesthetic process. Trained by his mother, a traditional “Zulu” traditional healer, Vedel points out how Mantsoe’s choreographic reference and movement vocabulary is referenced by his ritual practices and his ability in performance to tap into traditional “trance” states, highlighting the notion of ”in-between space” in his work as theatrical spectacle. As Vedel’s ethnography points, deeply spiritual to the dancer and his family, touring the phenomenon as “the exotic”, Mantsoe’s “trance-dance” has made him the darling of contemporary South African dance.

The final section of the book is called IV. Theory, Accounts and Reconsiderations. In this section, Jean Marie Pradier contextualizes the conflation of the ready terms in the coherence of religion, theater and ritual studies like: ritual, action, embodiment and praxis and how the changing definitions of some of those terms took shape because of the earlier work by pioneers such as James Grier Miller, Stanislavsky, Charles Laughlin Jr. Marcel Mauss, Marcel Jousse, AFC Wallace and others.

And finally, Jens Kreinath winds the collection up with “Virtuality and Mimesis: Toward An Aesthetics of Ritual Performances as Embodied Forms of Religious Practice.” Kreinath cautions the reader that definitions of what constitutes “ritual” versus the “performance of ritual” will often depend on the discipline in question and the historical moment. “Although ritual performances are, according to Victor Turner, framed by particular rules they are by no means rigid, fixed, or stereotypical.” (Kreinath: 235) Rather, as Kreinath suggests, the rituals that become the cultural performance are not cut off from their actual meaning in real life. Ritual becomes performative reality.

Appealing to scholars and students working in dance, theater, anthropology, cultural, performance and ritual studies, this text Religion, Ritual, Theater, edited by Bent Holm, Bent Flemming Nielsen and Karen Vedel advances the scholarship and points of intersection of three of our most closely-linked cultural practices. Although none of the researchers brought together in this collection offer a clear cut point of departure where one phenomenon or cultural practice ends and another one begins, Religion, Ritual, Theater (Peter Lang, 2009) should be a must have addition to your performance and religious ritual library.