writers are still telling stories which tell people what they have been experiencing and
what they have been up to.
In modern theatre ritual story telling has seen an increase. In ritual theatre we
have been learning about stories being told as a ritual and we have learned some
examples.
They most obvious example of story telling as a ritual has to be Augusto
Boal’s Playback Theatre. This is a type of theatre that uses ritual to celebrate or help
people come to terms with an experience that they have had. It involves a member of
the audience to volunteer a past experience, or a story that has happened to them, and
to tell it to a group of actors with the help of a director, or a conductor. The actors
then perform elements of the story to an audience and to the person who’s story it is.
This type of theatre has been called ‘Theatre of the cave’ as it does bare
resemblance to the first days of theatre when the days events were acted out in the
cave mans cave. Jo Salas, who was an original member of Boal’s Playback Theatre,
has said that it relates to an ‘ancient impulse to communicate and dramatise ones’
experience’ . I can agree with this quote as it has been proved correct as we are still
telling stories today.
Another experience of storytelling as ritual was in our performance for our
assessment. The group I was in did a ritual performance about money, which was very
important and help full to me. As I analysed our performance I began to think of my
own life and how the performance we produced was very much like a story of what
had happened to me. Based around the work of David Bueys, and his work of healing
and cleansing of an experience, I found that our ritual piece in which we are forced to
sign our lives away to banks, and to debts was like an experience of mine that I
recently had in which I found myself three thousand pounds in debt to a bank and
with no means of being able to pay it off. Luckily my parents came to the rescue
(good old parents!!) but I found that by telling the story as a ritual it helped me come
to terms with what had happened to me.
Tim Etchells, of Forced Entertainment once said that ‘writing (a story) is a
kind of acting.’. When I first heard this, I was a bit bemused by what he meant by
it. (I was in arguments for theatre at the time) But after doing the ritual course, I’ve
come to take a meaning away from it. In my understanding, he means that in writing
you have to give up a lot of your feelings, which is a bit like a cost. In doing so, you
are therefore investing a part of your life and feelings to a play, which is a bit of a risk
to yourself as you are giving your inner, deepest thoughts away. This is a lot like
ritual as by performing, or acting in ritual, there is a certain element of cost, risk and
investment involved. Tim Etchells work with Forced Entertainment shows this
especially with the 2000 performance of ‘Scar Stories’ in which a group of
researchers asked people about how they had gotten their scars, and then a group of 2
people performed a ritual in a theatre which, was supposed of be like an operating
theatre in its design, and told stories about the scars, and develop a series of accidents,
operations and fights.
One of the best form of story telling that I have read about is by a group called
the Metamorphic Ritual Theatre group, who performed a pieces on Norse, Germanic
myths. One performance they did was in Vienna, where they performed ritual acts and
seemed to be punishments upon themselves in order to tell a story. One story they did
with ‘Terra Tenumbra’ involved them depicting Norse legend by doing such things as
piercing their spines eighteen times with feathers (to represent Odin’s pain with
hanging from a tree) as well as being pierced on the wrists and ankles and joined
together (person to person) by rubber threads so that they have no choice but to move
together (this was supposed to represent the ravens of thought and memory). As well
as having less obvious rituals in place, they was also a lot of chanting of the Norse
holy book as well as a man hanging upside down from his ankle to represent Odin.
This was a performance called the ‘Eight Gates’.
Today story telling as a ritual is still going on. There are numerous theatres
depicted to just this, and in its stories it is either, celebrating, or, commiserating, life’s
experiences. There are groups such as Forced Entertainment or the Metamorphic
Ritual Theatre group who are celebrating experiences through ritual. There are also
theatres devoted to ritual storytelling such as Lalish ritual-theatrelab in Vienna. There
are also festivals such as the Brighton Occulture Festival, which are all for ritual story
telling. All theses examples, and the once that I have experienced are here to show
how story telling as a ritual can be used as a dramatic force to celebrate the experience
of an individual, or of a myth that has grow out of an individuals experience.
Interview with Tm Etchells in Alternative Theatre.com
From Forced Entertainments Website
Metamorphic Ritual Theatre’s Website.
