http://www2.scenekunst.no/egenkritikk_7098.nml

See pictures of the premiere on the page VALONGO of this blog.

Valongo is a theatrical performance based on recent Brazilian history. The point of departure is the discovery in 1996 of a slave cemetery hidden beneath the district of Gamboa, former Valongo, in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1772 and 1830 the place – now known as “Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos” – was used by the authorities as a mass grave for the newly arrived slaves from Africa. This fact gave origin to a series of questions that culminated in the performance process: what is the relation between funerals and human value? How much of the history of the Black peoples is hidden under the soil? Is it possible to get this history back?
In this short performance, the artist offers a reflection upon the emptiness that is part of the identity of a Black Brazilian woman.

To be performed on April 16th and 17th at 7 p.m. and April 18th at 6 p.m. At Studio MoA, Hausmanns gate 34 Oslo. More pictures on the page VALONGO of this blog.

Everything in this video is casual. I had made a path shot outdoors in the afternoon but it was not good. I wasted it and when I got to my apartment hours later I decided to make a path video in the lift. In my imagination I would take a ride in the empty lift, down and then up. But there were a friend and two neighbors in the lift and then…

Watch my path 3 on the page videos of this blog.

To Richard Schechner, “ritual has been considered: 1) as part of the evolutionary development of animals; 2) as structures with formal qualities and definable relationships; 3) as symbolic system of meaning; 4) as performative actions or processes; 5) as experiences.”[1]

Prior to Schechner, Victor Turner – among others – has worked with this concept. In From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, Turner discusses his own previous definition of the term in the light of the thought of other anthropologists:

“In earlier publications I defined ‘ritual’ as a ‘prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over technological routine, having reference to beliefs in invisible beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects’ (…) I still find this definition operationally useful despite Sir Edmund Leach, and other anthropologists of his ilk, who would eliminate the religious component and regard ritual as ‘stereotyped behavior which is potent in itself in terms of the cultural conventions of the actors, though not potential in a rational-technical sense’ and which serves to communicate information about a culture’s most cherished values.”[2]

Turner states that this expanded, not necessarily religion-related definition opens one’s mind to think ritual as performance, understanding ritual as a process made of a frame (rules) and actions that transcend this frame.[3]

Following this path, Nick Couldry enumerates two relevant aspects of ritual: formalized action, that is, doing things in a certain pre-established way, and action involving transcendent values, as in sacred ceremonies.[4] Couldry conveys an aspect of ritual that would be very appropriate to analyze Whitney Houston’s interview to Oprah: media ritual. “Media rituals are any actions organized around key media-related categories and boundaries whose performance reinforces, indeed helps legitimate, the underlying ‘value’ expressed in the idea that the media is our access point to our social centre”[5] According to Couldry, media rituals reinforce the myth (in Barthesian sense) of mediated centre, the belief or assumption that the world has a social centre and the mass media “speaks for that centre”[6]. This myth lies in the very centre of media’s self-maintenance instinct.

[2] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, (New York, PAJ Publications: 1982), 79.

[3] Ibid, ibidem.

[4] Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, (London, Routledge: 2003), 3. An article by Couldry, “Media Rituals, Beyond Functionalism” is included in the anthology Media Anthropology edited by Eric W. Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman. I decided to use Couldry’s book in order to have a deeper understanding of rituals in media.

[5] Ibid, 2.

[6] Ibid, ibidem.

For Geertz, religion is a system of symbols that contributes to the establishment of deep and lasting feelings in the human subject, by formulating concepts on the general conditions of existence and giving these concepts such an aura of factuality that the feelings and motivations seem unique and real.

It sounds like a definition of religion made by a non-believer. Or what?

Another interesting thing is how much Christianity in Northern Europe has taken distance from symbols and myths – perhaps as a consequence of Reformation. One consequence of this distancing  is that West-European theatre has become so secularized that one has to analyze/experience other theatre traditions (both in time and space, I mean both in other historic periods and other places in the globe) in order to understand the original relation between theatre and religion.

The book is written in Danish.