THE NATURE OF RITUAL

Modern preconceptions

Artaud expressed more passionately and forcefully than anyone else in the twentieth century the idea that psychological theatre is physically inert and spiritually sterile. He witnessed his ideal of ‘pure’ theatre when Balinese dancers visited a colonial exhibition in Paris in 1931, and he declared that their performance had ‘the solemnity of a holy ritual’. In a sense this decontextualized dance-drama moved Artaud precisely because he could not understand it. He discerned ‘a horde of ritualized gestures in it to which we have no key’, and because he had no key, he was free to see these gestures as ‘strange signs matching some dark prodigious reality we have repressed once and for all here in the West’. Perhaps Artaud would have reacted in the same way if, somehow, ancient Greek actors transported from the past had invaded the colonial exhibition. Perhaps he would have loaded on to the past the same romantic longing that he attached to the Orient, for a life that was spiritual rather than alienated.