Turner & Drama

Tonight’s schedule:✴Class Schedule changes✴Journal pages: examples✴Turner & Dionysus 69? ✴Group work✴Preparations for Wed’s class:✴Shaky’s theatre and popular/official cultures

Anthropology of Performance:

“When you read Turner's article, please keep in mind that what you need to do is to take some of the ideas, understandings, and insights that Turner presents and use them to inform your individual research and readings. I will give you examples of how to accomplish this once you have all presented me with some ideas for research and readings on your journal pages”.

examples .....

PLEASE NOTE: YOUR JOURNAL PAGE HAS A SPELL-CHECKER

Culture is an on-going process of creation, establishment, crisis, and innovation. People create social meanings and symbolic representations for those meanings; moments of crisis occur when old meanings no longer work to maintain social harmony; crisis evokes innovation and inspires the creation of new social meanings. It is in this sense that social reality can be understood as a cultural construction. Theatre artist try, most often, to capture the critical and innovative moments of the process, the moments when people experience a crisis or interruption in normal everyday life. Once captured and re-presented, the process of human relations and symbolic meanings can be explored and understood in new and different ways.

WHAT IS CULTURE ?

“For years, I have dreamed of a liberated anthropology. By “liberated” I mean free from certain prejudices... .” (Victor Turner,1.)

a systematic dehumanizing of the human subjects of study, regarding them as the bearers of an impersonal culture, or wax to be imprinted with cultural patterns ....

The rise of perspective is the key to modernityPerspective provided a mathematical formula for ‘seeing’Perspective orients the eye in relation to space in a new wayPerspective represents a rationalization of sightThe overemphasis on space divides the world into the observing subject &

material objectsTime itself is perceived as measurable, as a linear succession of momentsHistory becomes the story of ‘man’s gradual self-improvement through the

exercise of reason.

The Modern turn of thought :

“the perspectival model makes man the measure and measurer of all things”

HOW WOULD BEGIN TO DESCRIBE THE POSTMODERN TURN?

✴A ‘crossing over’ of disciplinary boundaries

✴Anthropologist, sociologist, theatre artist ...

✴ social systems are a field, loosely integrated processes

✴ “social drama” analysis

✴ “process and processional qualities

✴“this turn involves the processualization of spaces, its

temporalization, as against the spatialization of process or time”

✴Indeterminacy :truth?

“Crisis/conflict situations are inherently dramatic because participants not only do things, they try to show others what they are doing or have done: actions take on a performed-for-an- audience aspect”.

Social Dramas

SOCIAL DRAMAS/ PUBLIC ACTION: •breach: accepted social norms are broken in some way•crisis: the breach widens, the threshold is opened•redressive: mediation/ arbitration/judicial mechanisms: betweext and between.• Resolution or irreparable schism

WHAT TURNER WAS REALLY LOOKING FOR WAS THE ‘alive experience’ OF SYMBOLS IN ACTION -- OF THE ABSTRACT IN REALITY.

TURNER’S CONCEPT OF liminality, AS A REALM OF POSSIBILITY WHERE MEANING IS OPEN AND AMBIGUOUS, STRIKES ME AS A AN EXCELLENT WAY TO UNDERSTAND DRAMA

“IF DAILY LIVING IS A KIND OF THEATRE, SOCIAL DRAMA IS A KIND OF METATHEATRE, THAT IS, A DRAMATURGICAL LANGUAGE ABOUT THE LANGUAGE OF ORDINARY ROLE-PLAYING ...”

THE STUDY OF PROCESS AS PERFORMANCE

“ IN THE MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS, COGNITION, IDEA, RATIONALITY, WERE PARAMOUNT. IN THE POSTMODERN TURN, COGNITION IS NOT DETHRONED BUT RATHER TAKES ITS PLACE ON AN EQUAL FOOTING WITH volition and affect.”

When Turner explains ‘reflexivity,’ he says that in performing we reveal ourselves to ourselves. In other words, we do not learn about others, but about ourselves:

“the actor may come to know himself better through acting or enactment, or one set of human beings may come to know themselves better through observing and/or participating in performances by another group of people.”

Comunitas is the implicit law of ...

wholeness arising our of relations between totalities. But, comunitas is intrinsically dynamic, never quite realized. It is not being realized precisely because individuals and collectivities try to impose their cognitive schemata on one another (16).

Sally Moore: "Part of the process of trying to fix social reality involves representing it as a stable or immutable or at least controllable to this end, at least for a time."

Finally, the thought of "controlling" reality. We are on such a quest to control, I think it needs to be mentioned even more that our in ritualistic attempts (even right down to my grandfather and his medication), we create a ritual to form some kind of ownership, some kind of control.

INTERESTING COMMENTS FROM YOUR READING NOTES:

As Turner notes, "there is a major difference between linguistic and anthropological definitions of performance.

It is this line of thinking that opens my mind to the possibilities of research on areas of drama and performance not commonly associated with the theatre...such as digital drama or sports drama. Turner also mentions legal dramas as being performances from everyday life, however, Turner also emphasizes the order that these dramas take...

But if we were to draw the line somewhere. Classify this as performance and not that. Where would the line lie?

"Meaning is connected with the consummation of a process..." I find this a very provocative sentence. meaning requires or is connected to the process or context. Without the context, the meaning is lost..."The meaning of any given factor cannot be assessed until the whole process is past" (pg. 34).

While this implies that the true meaning of something (an event) cannot be processed until after the event has past, Turner does note that, "this does not, of course, prevent us from making judgments, both 'snap' and considered about the meaning of contemporary events, but every such judgment is necessarily provisional, and relative to the moment in which it is made" (pg. 34).

MORE INTERESTING COMMENTS FROM YOUR READING NOTES:

- I found the little aside on MacKay's theories on nonverbal communication pretty interesting. I'll be keeping my eyes on babies in the future. Sneaky little bastards.

AND, ONE MORE INTERESTING COMMENT FROM YOUR READING NOTES:

- I'm enjoying the second D69 review, mostly because it begins by outlining what I perceive to be the greatest issue with such an audience-participation-driven performance; that being audience reticence. According to this reviewer, a reluctant audience dramatically shifts the play's mood from the expected love-in to something far nastier.

INTERESTING COMMENTS FROM YOUR READING NOTES:

I have myself always argued for the importance of biological components insymbolism, since I see the planet Terra as essentially a single developing system,based, in its vital aspect, on cellular structures which display a remarkableuniformity in different genera and species of living things. I am sure that a biologistfrom outer space would find the various Terran life-forms to be made of similarstuff, a planetary kinship group, from biological amoeba to high-cultural productslike the works of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Beethoven.Mankind differs from most other ''kinds" in the degree of its self-consciousness, itsevolving reflexivity, made possible by language and the dialectic then mademandatory between linguistic and biological modes of responding to environmentsof varying kinds (Victor Turner, Anthropology of Performance: 13).

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT .......