Transcript Turner & Drama

Turner & Drama
Anthropology of Performance:
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
PLEASE NOTE: YOUR JOURNAL PAGE HAS A SPELLCHECKER
“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 .....
WHAT IS CULTURE ?
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.
“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 modernity
Perspective provided a mathematical formula for ‘seeing’
Perspective orients the eye in relation to space in a new way
Perspective represents a rationalization of sight
The overemphasis on space divides the world into the observing subject &
material objects
Time itself is perceived as measurable, as a linear succession of moments
History 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”
WOULD BEGIN TO DESCRIBE THE POSTMODERN TUR
✴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?
Social Dramas
“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-foran- audience aspect”.
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).
INTERESTING COMMENTS FROM YOUR
READING NOTES:
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.
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?
MORE INTERESTING COMMENTS FROM YOUR
READING NOTES:
"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).
AND, ONE MORE INTERESTING COMMENT
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.
INTERESTING COMMENTS 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 audienceparticipation-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.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT .......
I have myself always argued for the importance of biological components in
symbolism, since I see the planet Terra as essentially a single developing system,
based, in its vital aspect, on cellular structures which display a remarkable
uniformity in different genera and species of living things. I am sure that a biologist
from outer space would find the various Terran life-forms to be made of similar
stuff, a planetary kinship group, from biological amoeba to high-cultural products
like the works of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Beethoven.
Mankind differs from most other ''kinds" in the degree of its self-consciousness, its
evolving reflexivity, made possible by language and the dialectic then made
mandatory between linguistic and biological modes of responding to environments
of varying kinds (Victor Turner, Anthropology of Performance: 13).