#performance theory

YES ok so basically rituals are a huge part of the way that human beings make identity, community, and meaning. Everything a ritual. It's why churches use them, it's why governments use them. The more *ritual* your thing has, the more easy it is to make people believe the thing you want them to believe. This is good when it is good, and also very, very bad!

For example:

Good ritual: me and my mom bake an apple pie every year together on thanksgiving (bringing you close to your mom, giving you a sense of time and place together, imbuing meaning and memory both to the actions and making MORE meaning every time you repeat the action)

Bad ritual: we cross our hearts and blindly swear allegiance to our (christian) god and government every morning (does not encourage free thought, is a repetitive gesture that promotes conformity and discourages the individual from asking why the ritual is done, and discourages questioning authority).

I studied ritual under the frame of performance theory rather than anthropology, but the performance theory I read was pulling from anthropology a lot. Mine was about how identity is made in ritual via witchcraft (in the modern way we view it).

There is a "cycle" and "stages" of ritual that I have unfortunately forgotten the entire wheel of (because I've been out of grad school doing nothing with my life for [REDACTED] years) but the gist of it boils down to:

you set aside a time and space, removing yourself from the "mundane" flow of life

this creates a liminal space (you are between the time you entered the ritual and the time you exited)

within that liminal space-time, you perform actions that help solidify social or personal meaning

ritual cooldown

return to the mundane (sometimes transformed)

There are gradual transformational rituals (baking a pie with your mom every year turns into you passing it down to your kids, now you are the mom in that scenario) and there are transformational rituals that happen all at once, where you go from an immediate one state to other. (Graduations, weddings). Essentially, when a ritual is happening, you are in-between states and identities like that.

Aaand that's what I got for you today.

I'm two days into exploring performance theory (originally developed by Richard Schechner as A Thing but floating about in the world for much longer than that) for a book chapter on applying it to magical rituals.

Now I'm wondering about whether there's a way of developing it into something about Murderbot Diaries, especially the way the TV version developed the Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (and that other show) as a means of frame narrative but dramatic performance of what Murderbot is experiencing emotionally.

The story so far: I'm starting with Schechner's article on the early 20th century Cambridge anthropologists, who decided that all Ancient Greek tragedy and comedy were productions of an ancient primal ritual. Schechner argues that they crowbarred their idea of a "primal ritual" of death and rebirth into places where it didn't exist.

He's going to go on to develop ideas about how performance, ritual, objects, people, and a host of other things interact with each other. It might be a good way of thinking about how the Murderbot TV show uses the relationship between the Captain and Navbot as a way to mirror but also reveal SecUnit's fears about his developing attachment to Mensah.

ALSO I discovered the theorist Erving Goffman, who wrote at length on the "presentation of the self". I've ordered the book so I can dig in deeper. I mentioned it in the catalogue essay I finished last month. It's all about how we perform different identities and might provide a basis for thinking about how SecUnit performs his expected role while hiding his true self.

(I have a whole thing I'd like to do about the nature of SecUnit's capacity to download and store entertainment as a kind of "space" where the performances take place for it and then it and ART when they watch stuff together but that's very esoteric and academic.)

performance theory