Ritual Myth The Furies
&
What is Ritual ?
Life is rich with ritual and ceremony: birth and birthdays,
coming of age: drinking age, driving age, age of consent;
marriages and funerals, initiations, graduations, promotions,
resignations, retirements and reunions. Our time is 'set
aside' and divided with a week that begins, has a middle,
and ends with a day of rest; our year begins anew with
celebration and resolutions, special years are marked:
Olympic years, election years. These are all rites,
ceremonies, conventions, celebrations that mark the
passage of both time and social status, rites of passage that
tell us 'things have changed': they are moments and events
that mark transformation of both individuals and
communities. These are all rituals, and "rituals are key
features of the social life of every known society"
(Rothenbuhler 1998) ).
Drama 226
What is Drama?
Wed. May 7th 2008
How I came to think
It began on the Fringes ...
bout ritual
With the strangest experience ....
I need to tell you a little about the Fringe Festivals, first .....
1981 Edmonton, Brian Paisley jumps on a bar table in the
Strathcona pub .....as Fringe myth has it ( and I helped to shape that
myth)
My quest, I wanted to understand how the arena of a performance
effected both the artists and the audience. And by arena I mean the
total environment: the social, cultural and architectural spaces of the
performances.
In short, I wanted to see if ‘theatre’ did anything -- outside of the
literary.
And this is what I saw .....
Which lead me to read Victor Turner in an effort to understand what
it was that I thought I was seeing.
Turner was most interested in how people and
societies, and indeed, cultures change:
transformation.
ritual as a social process. culture is a "changing entity, influenced by 'root paradigms,' that is, by axiomatic frames, or deep myths, that
propel and transform people and groups at critical moments" culture was a constantly negotiated set of meanings. (1957), he introduced
the concept of social dramas
A great influence on Turner’s thinking, was van Gennep's work, Rites of Passage (1960, original 1909). Van Gennep,
a folklorist, theorized that rites of passage have three principle stages:rites of separation, margin or limen (i.e.,
threshold), and re aggregation.
Turner tossed van Gennep’s theory on rites
of passage, like pebble, into the pool of his
intellectual questions and watched the
ripples grow.
He introduced the term multivocality to indicate that one symbol may stand for many things. He suggested three
readings, or voices for symbols: indigenous meaning, the operational meaning and the positional meaning.
"Liminal entities are neither here nor there;
they are betwixt and between the positions assigned
(Turner, 1969:95).
and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial"
Liminality is a state of being in between phases.
In a rite of passage the individual in the liminal phase
is neither a member of the group she previously
belonged to nor is she a member of the group
she will belong to upon the completion of the rite.
Liminality
Closely associated to liminality is communitas which describes a society during a liminal period
I have used the term "anti-structure,"... to describe both
liminality and what I have called "communitas." I meant by it not
a structural reversal... but the liberation of human capacities of
cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative
constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social
statuses (1982:44). What I came to call the invisible rules, as I
began to see them ....
It is the potential of an anti-structured liminal person or liminal society (i.e., communitas) that makes Turner's ideas so engaging.
People or societies in a liminal phase are a "kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social
developments, of societal change" (Turner, 1982:45).
Social Dramas
How I came to think
It was 1970, and the first performance I
ever went to, on Avenue Road in
Toronto was Dionysus 69 .
about the
ancient
greek
theatre
And then it was 1989 and I was studying theatre in the
midst of the academic gender wars. So, naturally ...
The chorus asks:
Think yet, for what acquittal thou dost plead:
He who hath shed a mother's kindred blood,
Shall he in Argos dwell, where dwelt his sire?
How shall he stand before the city's shrines,
How share the clansmen's holy lustral bowl?
48
mythopoesis
And Apollo answers:
This too I answer; mark a soothfast word
Not the true parent is the woman's womb
That bears the child; she doth but nurse
the seed
New-sown: the male is parent; she for him,
As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ
Of life, unless the god its promise blight.
And proof hereof before you will I set.
Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be:
See at your side a witness of the same,
Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus,
Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered
nor fashioned, but a bud more bright
Than any goddess in her breast might bear.
And I, O Pallas, howsoe'er I may,
And the Furies answer ...
Woe on you, younger gods! the ancient right
Ye have o'erridden, rent it from my hands.
I am dishonoured of you, thrust to scorn!
But heavily my wrath
Why, one
might
would
anyone
Shall
on this ask,
land fling
forth the
drops that try
blastto
anddeny
burn, the most
Venom
of fundelmental
vengeance, that shall
work
such
scatherelationships?
obvious,
and
of
all
human
As I have suffered; where that dew shall fall,
Shall leafless blight arise,
Wasting Earth's offspring,-justice, hear my call!And thorough all the land in deadly wise
Shall scatter venom, to exude again
In pestilence on men.
What cry avails me now, what deed of blood,
Unto this land what dark despite?
Huh ???
The Erinyes
Greek myth and thought linked tyrants
with women, both because a rule
imposed illegitimately on the people
(tyranny) prevents the tyrant, who
must be guarded and secluded, from
indulging in the freedom of movement
characteristic of a free man and
because tyrants are inevitably tempted
to indulge appetites in a fashion
characteristic of women and
barbarians, both of whom are thought
to be naturally undisciplined. Foley,
1998, xviii - xix).
Text
With the Oresties, Aeschylus exploits these parallel cultural
assumptions about women and tyranny. In the second play of the
trilogy, The Libation Bearers, Clytemnenstra and Aegisthus rule
against the will of the people, Clytemnestra was a tyrant.
Have a great weekend