In a seminar on Ritual in the Theatre at the New Theatre Festival in Baltimore in 1978, Richard Schechner described Jerzy Grotowski’s use of Kathakali as “a transformation… a genuine use of ritual cross-culturally” (Schechner 1978, 94). More provocatively than any writer on the theatre today, he has argued, theorised and speculated about cross cultural exchanges between theatrical traditions in the East and the West. In recent years, he has spent much time in India where he has observed and recorded performances of Chhau, Kathakali and the Ramlila. Unlike most American scholars of theatre in the East who tend to focus on particular theatrical traditions, Schechner’s reflections on Indian theatre cannot be studied in isolation from his comments on Balinese or Japanese theatre. Often, they are enclosed within his own views of performance, ethology, kinesics, the rehearsal process, “selective inattention”, and the use of ritual in theatre. Schechner’s eclectic interests and modes of perception are as prodigious as they are occasionally bewildering. Not inappropriately, he once remarked: “I want to reveal myself as a set of disconnected thoughts, which is the way I am. I want to celebrate my fragmentation” (Schechner 1978, 92).

Schechner’s writings conspicuously reveal his state of fragmentation. His texts and productions can be viewed as networks of interlocking structures, passages and spaces which frequently do not connect or cohere. This seeming randomness conceals a very alert and fundamentally sceptical mode of inquiry. In fact, if there is one quality that characterises Schechner’s writings on theatre, it is scepticism. More succinctly than any writer, he has demystified lndian theatre, divesting it of its sacred and metaphysical associations. While Schechner is surely correct in emphasising that the religious festivals of India like the Ramlila and the Kumbh Mela are also vibrant entertainments and function as economic and educational centres, he tends to emphasise the social and theatrical aspects of these festivals at the expense of the spiritual. The Ramlila is less of a mela than he makes it out to be. Thousands of Indians, including villagers and vagrants, deprived of the basic necessities of life, turn to the rituals in the Ramlila not merely for their theatrical vitality (which should not be ignored) but for a spiritual guidance that invigorates them to face their lot in life with some resilience and courage.

Secular activities in religious festivals like the Ramlila are notoriously deceptive. They are frequently so alluring that Western viewers unfamiliar with Indian rituals tend to concentrate on the fun and forget about the worship of the gods. A more rational response, which is Schechner’s more often than not, is to view the secular and the sacred in some kind of analogous relationship. But the Ramlila ultimately transcends any analysis that isolates equivalents between its structures of ceremony and play. Its ritual complexity lies not in the coexistence of the secular and the sacred but in the interpenetration, as it were, of these two seemingly irreconcilable states of being.

Schechner’s most perceptive comments on the interpenetration of disparate activities relate to the 31st day of the Ramlila when three distinct activities exist within one another like the layers of a seed. He sees the Maharaja worshipping the swarups (the boys who play the gods) as an act of cosmic significance, which is contained within a mythic event—the Maharaja welcoming visiting royalty— which in turn is contained within the social order of Ramnagar when the entertainers are finally paid for their services during the festival.1 This interpenetration of the secular and the sacred applies as much to the activities surrounding the Ramlila as to the performances themselves. The swarups do not merely represent deities; they are incarnations of the gods themselves.

When Schechner asked the actor who played Rama what he felt when the people touched his feet, the boy replied: “Feeling of god is in me.” Similarly, the veteran actor who has played the sage Narad muni for over three decades is Narad muni in everyday life. His spectators are his devotees. For Schechner, quite understandably, the actor is not a saint. Revealing his fundamentally sceptical mode of thinking, Schechner says, “This man is not Narad-muni, but also he is not not Narad-muni: he performs in the field between a negative and double negative, a f ield of limitless potential, free as it is from both the person (not) and the person impersonated (not not)” (Schechner 1981, 88).

In articulating this mode of acting, Schechner is characteristically rash in associating it with the actor playing Narad muni and with Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet. It is not that this mode of acting does not apply to the two actors, but the point is that it applies in totally different ways. Schechner fails to acknowledge that Narad-muni’s degree of absorption in his role is of a very different order from Olivier’s in Hamlet. Besides, his continuation of the role in everyday life (when is he ever not Narad-muni?) has no parallel, to my mind, in Western theatre. Then also the social context of Narad-muni and Hamlet as roles is radically different. With very few exceptions (notably Oberammergau), there is no tradition in contemporary Western theatre of actors representing gods and divine figures as there is in religious dramas performed in India today. The core of spiritual belief embedded in the role of Narad-muni transfigures the performance in a way that one cannot expect from any performance of Hamlet.

Underlying Schechner’s method in applying theoretical models to differing performance traditions is his faith in “universals”. In Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance, he emphatically states: “It is my belief that performance and theatre are universal, but that drama is not” (Schechner 1977, 600)2. Performances, I believe, differ as much from culture to culture as dramas do, even though recurrences of structure and patterns of movement may be found in the creation of their spectacles. Schechner’s approach is to isolate a ritual structure or process from its particular social context and then apply it to another disparate context. His approach is shared by other social scientists and anthropologists who have recently turned to the theatre to explain activities and rituals in terms of games and texts. Victor Turner’s all-encompassing concept of “social drama”, for example, has been applied to rites and picaresque narratives, to Icelandic sagas and Caribbean carnivals. “Turner’s Western pattern of breach, crisis, redressive action and reintegration,” Schechner believes, “is actually universal… the theatre of every culture I know about also conforms [to this dramatic paradigm].” (Schechner 1977, 121)

Though this statement needs illustration, which Schechner does not provide, it is unlikely that paradigms (such as Turner’s) can be applied to theatrical traditions in the East and West without blurring their considerable differences. Even if the structure of a particular performance by the Living Theatre (an American theatre company founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck) corresponded to a segment from the Ramlila (and this is purely a hypothesis on my part), they would still mean two different things to their respective audiences. And what they mean ultimately constitutes what they are. Clifford Geertz has argued perceptively against “universal” structures in interdisciplinary studies of the social sciences: 

Formally similar processes have different content. They say, as we might put it, rather different things, and thus have rather different implications for social life. And though ritual theorists are hardly incognisant of that fact, they are, precisely because they are so concerned with the general movement of things, ill-equipped to deal with it. (1980, 173)

Schechner frequently neutralises the content of a particular ritual (or “meaning” as he prefers to call it) by concentrating on its “physical action”. When a ritual is taken from its original setting and integrated into one of his productions, the objective is to find an equivalent meaning for the ritual in an American context. For instance, in the Performance Group’s production of Mother Courage directed by Schechner, food was served during intermission, just as people in the highlands of New Guinea distribute pig meat during some of their festivals. The problem with such an action is that there may not be an equivalent for pig meat in American culture. Soup and bread (with or without Swiss cheese) may not embody American social structure for Americans the way pig meat embodies the social structure of New Guinea for its residents.

On other occasions, Schechner acknowledges that the meaning of a particular ritual is altered when that ritual is transplanted from its own culture into another. What is ignored in this process is the interpretation of the ritual’s meaning. Schechner’s approach is to play “the physical action” of the ritual and to accept whatever meaning emerges from it. Frequently, this meaning is a travesty of what the ritual once signified. For instance, the “birth ritual” in Dionysus in ’69 was “taken” from the Asmat in West Irian. “It meant something different to us,” Schechner explains, “but I didn’t play the meaning, I played the physical action. You go to another country to see your own more clearly.” (Schechner 1978, 97)

But what about the “other” culture? Are its rituals there simply to be used in an arbitrary, personal way? Is it fair to take a ceremony from it that is part of its heritage, divest it of its original meaning, and then replay it for its “physical action”? These questions, which may seem naïve and redundant to most social thinkers, concern the ethics of representation. It is with this issue in mind that I question Schechner’s view that “any ritual can be lifted from its original setting and performed as theatre” (Schechner 1977, 86). I believe that this is a gross overstatement. Schechner needs to acknowledge that there are rituals rooted in spiritual contexts to which they are inextricably linked. Not all rituals are “acts of instrumentation”, to use Alexander Alland’s term. If rituals, particularly those associated with sacred ceremonies, have to be used or reproduced in the theatre, a confrontation of their “meaning” is as important as an examination of their “physical action”. For instance, if elements of the Mass had to be reproduced in Indian theatre, it would be necessary not merely to perform the ritual gestures associated with the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine, but it would also be imperative to know something about Christ’s death in relation to those gestures and believe in it. 

Schechner’s pragmatic belief that meaning is in doing applies, I believe, to performances within his own tradition where the “entire performance score”, to use his words, is shaped from “ordinary life” (Schechner 1978, 93). The words and actions that constitute the score have familiar associations: they represent a consistent behaviour, a grammar of action. But when a ritual is used from a non Western culture, its words and actions are unfamiliar. The responsibility of any director, then, is first to learn what the ritual means within its own culture, and then to reflect on what it could mean in his own. Merely “doing” a ritual from another culture without knowing or caring what it means risks a simplification and distortion of its content.

Underlying Schechner’s advocacy of the use of rituals in theatre is a specific attitude towards differences between cultures. “The difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ isn’t so great,” he informed the participants in a seminar on Ritual in the Theatre held in Baltimore in 1978. While this attitude seemed at first open and generous, it became clear that Schechner was not really interested in understanding the perspective of other cultures on their own rituals. Ultimately, he used the supposed lack of differences between cultures as a rationale for interpreting rituals in a personal way. According to him, Kathakali is no different from Hamlet insofar as every performance of Shakespeare’s play is an “editing of the text” just as every performance of Kathakali by a great dancer like Gopinath is a recreation of the rules. (Schechner 1978, 94)

Apart from freely associating “ritual” with Kathakali (which can be more accurately viewed as a theatre-dance tradition incorporating ritual elements within its performance structure and rehearsal process), this statement reveals the limitations of analogical thinking in cross-cultural contexts. Contrary to what Schechner has stated, the degree to which a Kathakali dancer can deviate from the rules is considerably less than for an actor playing Hamlet. What are the rules for playing Hamlet anyway? There is a performance tradition, but nothing so codified as the system of acting Kathakali prescribed in acting manuals, where the minutiae of mudras, eye movements and emotional states to be portrayed are intricately documented. What Schechner has not acknowledged is that there are rules in Kathakali that remain more or less fixed. If a great dancer like Gopinath (who is really an exception among classical Indian dancers) “puts his own stamp” on a tradition, in Schechner’s words, his deviation from the rules ironically calls attention to them. Certainly, every great dancer will shape a mudra individually just as every actor will speak “To be, or not to be” differently, but the dancer will invariably keep in mind the mudra as he learned it from his guru, whereas the actor is relatively free to interpret Hamlet’s soliloquy in a manner that seems appropriate to his inner life. 

Schechner is surely aware of the guru shishya (teacher-disciple) relationship that is integrally related to performance traditions in India. An Indian dancer performs, in a certain sense, on behalf of his guru who has instilled the moves of the dance within him. As Schechner has observed, “A Balinese or Indian dance guru passes on the moves of the dance, often standing behind the student, manipulating her as if she were a puppet until, as the Balinese say, the dance ‘goes into the body,’” (Schechner 1978, 93). But the performance itself, Schechner believes, unlike the rehearsal process, is “truly contingent, an ever-changing lila” (Schechner 1981, 106). I believe that Schechner exaggerates the quality of contingency in classical Indian dance theatre, where even the most improvised sections of choreography (and they are relatively few compared to a raga, which is based on the principle of improvisation) function within strict limits.

I should also point out how deceptive it is to compare performance traditions in the East and the West using fixed criteria. It is not that Indian theatre is more “contingent” than Western theatre during performance, as Schechner says; the point is that they are “contingent” in totally different ways. There is an equivocal nature to the terms Schechner often uses, such as “score” and “flow” (which are predominantly Western conceptions), that conceals the fact that there are more differences than similarities in a cross-cultural examination of theatre.

With the development of international transport, the growth of the tourist industry and the widespread use of cameras and film, the world has shrunk as it were, and rituals, which were once strange sights and sounds for artistes like Gordon Craig, have now become increasingly available. Perhaps it is this accessibility of rituals that has tempted theatre practitioners like Schechner to overly familiarise them. T he most blatant manifestation of this accessibility is the emergence of “cultural tourism”. Schechner’s enthusiastic support for this phenomenon is problematic since it concentrates more on what tourism has opened up for Westerners (in terms of rituals, rites and ceremonies that were once inaccessible) and less on the effect of tourism on the rituals themselves. Here again, I believe Schechner’s pragmatism, so innately American (if I may insert a cultural bias on my part), leads him to view the distortion or disappearance of a particular ritual with a certain “moral neutrality”, to use a term created by Kenneth Tynan (1977, 20) to describe Peter Brook’s attitude to the Ik.3

Schechner has no contempt for the changes in genuine performances that have resulted from commercialism and audience pressures. He asks (quite unaccountably to my mind), “At what moment does a tourist show become itself an authentic theatrical art?” (Schechner 1977, 82) This question, which seems to view culture as a product that can be recycled, could emerge only from a mind shaped by the needs of a technological society. In India, the recycling of garbage has yet to be widely accepted as a practice; as for the recycling of culture, the conversion of the spurious into the “authentic”, it is a totally alien concept. Significantly, when Schechner was once asked how one can distinguish between “a genuine ritual” and “a fabricated one”, he responded with a question: “Does it make any difference?” (Schechner 1978, 99) My answer to that question is an affirmative one.

Fabricated rituals are not at all difficult to find in contemporary theatre. Schechner himself has acknowledged that “most of the ritual of theatre in our culture comes during rehearsals. The ritual we see in performance is false” (Schechner 1978, 95). A fabricated ritual is frequently distinguished by the lack of skill and accuracy with which it is executed. Even more conspicuous is the lack of belief in the ritual itself. The most virtuosic display of the gestures and movements in a ritual can be ultimately false if they are emptied of content.

An unfortunate development of cultural tourism has been the influx of fabricated rituals within the cultures of these rituals. It is bad enough if a ritual from India, for example, is travestied in the West, but it is worse when this ritual loses its significance in India itself. The practitioners of many traditional dances and rituals in India no longer perform for the gods; they perform for tourists who come to the villages armed with their cameras, dressed in kurtas and beads. In payment for their performances, the actors no longer receive prasad (sacred food)— they get dollars or marks or yen or (when the tourists are Indian) rupees.

It should be emphasised that there is a difference between exchanging a ritual for a song or a performance (as Brook “traded culture” with the Africans) and exchanging a ritual for money. In many situations where money is used, the “cultural exchange” becomes a pretext for an economic exchange, a business transaction. And money, which constitutively signifies power, is very powerful in an impoverished country like India. The outsiders who give it are the ones who control this cultural exchange and however cosmopolitan or altruistic they may be, they are still figures of authority. They dominate by their very presence in the villages and rural areas of India where most of the traditional dances and dramas are performed.

Sometimes the mere presence of tourists at performances in Indian cities is jarring enough. At a rare performance of the ancient Chhau dances in Calcutta, I confronted some of the ironies of cultural tourism. Chhau dancers are villagers from the districts of Seraikella, Mayurbhanj and Purulia in Eastern India. Most of them work as labourers, farmhands and rickshaw pullers during the day. It is amazing how, with all their difficulties, they are able to preserve and perfect the intricacies of this highly complex dance tradition. From where I was sitting, I could see the dancers waiting in the wings for their entrances. Before they entered, I saw them touch the ground with their hands to invoke the blessing of the gods. This gesture was ignored by the horde of American and European photographers in front of the stage who clicked cameras with callous indifference throughout the performance. At particularly dynamic moments in the dance, they yelled out instructions to one another over the ritual beating of the drums and the clashing of the cymbals. There was something greedy in the way they vied with one another for the best shots.

At the end of the performance, the dancers assembled onstage and folded their hands in the traditional gesture of namaste. In this gesture, which evoked an aura of submission, and the glittering array of cameras and zoom lenses and projectors—a minuscule representation of Western technology and power—I saw two conflicting worlds. Unlike Schechner, I am sceptical that the theatre is in the process of discovering “a world of colliding cultures no longer dominated by Europeans and Americans, and no longer dominable by anyone” (Schechner 1981, 113). The Chhau performance made me realise, only too bitterly, how easy it is for the West to assert its dominance by virtue of its economic and technological power.

If interculturalism in the theatre is to be more than a vision, there has to be a fairer exchange between theatrical traditions in the East and the West. At the moment, it is Westerners who have initiated (and controlled) the exchange. It is they who have come to countries like India and taken its rituals and techniques (either through photographs, documentation or actual borrowings). The sheer poverty, if not destitution, of most performers in India clearly minimises their possibilities of travelling to the West. Only a few Indian gurus and dancers have had the opportunity to visit European and American countries for lecture demonstrations and classes. Likewise, the exposure of many Western scholars and artistes to the performance traditions of Kathakali, Chhau and Yakshagana remains limited in duration and depth.

What is urgently needed is a more sustained dialogue and exchange of ideas, techniques and performance skills between performers and scholars from India and the Western world. Seminars on interculturalism in theatre can certainly play a valuable role in fostering a closer understanding between the different cultures, though the discussions in the seminars are more likely to generate performance theories rather than performances. Perhaps, a more enduring and vital form of exchange can emerge from the creation of workshops involving Indian and Western performers where communities, however fragile and fleeting, can exist for brief periods of time, and where differences can be sustained within harmonious experiences.