Re: RAT Presenting Ritual that is Theater-Based

[Alfred Vitale <alfredvitale@yahoo.com>]

--- Cat Hebert <virtualdrama@juno.com> wrote:

> What I think I would prefer  to make sure of is that
> it is something
> primarily theater-based, not a formal religious /
> spiritual / tested
> incantation / spell cycle / trance form, and not too
> long so we get
> active discussion of the notion of ritual. (Just off
> the top of my head,
> I'd say that some brief series of ritual /
> ceremonies that exemplify
> different aspects of the ritual -- and could have
> discussion between --
> would be my idea of the  ideal balance.) Some fuller
> ritual held in the
> evening is another story. 

this isn't too far from what i was planning. you can't
disseminate intense religious philosophy/practice in a
short time. i'm thinking more like antero alli's
"generic forms", the meta-structure of ritual (which
is, ultimately, performance based).  

> (A few
> years ago we ran into a group of college theater
> students who had found a
> 13th century spell text buried in a library in the
> South and thought it
> would be "cool" [TRANS; "dish"] to translate them
> and enact them as
> theater. Not good. Very not good. We had to pull in
> a voodoo practitioner
> from New Orleans to stop the students from getting
> sick all the time. And
> this wasn't sympathetic magic. None of the kids
> believed in the ritual.
> It just sounded interesting.)

our group is very well-versed in such things...we can
talk about what makes ritual theater successful or
potentially successful, and what makes it fail. what
happened above is typical...a form is resurrected,
using technologies specifically formulated to be
worked with certain energies. you don't have to
believe in ritual for it to have repercussions...the
structure of ritual itself is sometimes enough to jar
us. 
 
> What would be great to get
> out of a
> performance/workshop would be to see how people can
> create their own
> rituals -- besides existing ones, the power (and
> danger) of ritual and
> the mechanism of incorporating it into theater.

great! this is pretty much in line with what we'd be
doing. it's a workshop, after all...what fun would it
be if we merely pranced around and showed you our
ritual work? ideally, i'd like the workshop to address
the tech of ritual (in general) and the aspects of
ritual that make it work, and make it fail...i'm sure
that you theater-folk will find parallels in theater.
perhaps at the end of the workshop, we can brainstorm
for a quick ritual performance spontaneously designed
based on the will of the attendees.

alfred



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