INTRODUCTION

Cultural performance
Cultural performances are expressive events
performed by at least one person for at least one
other.
They range from small scale practices such as
stroytelling and puppetry to large scale events such
as sports, concerts, religious rituals and Mexican
fiestas.

Cultural performance vs
everday life events
SPATIO-TEMPORAL FRAME:
Cultural performances typically take place at special
times in special places, and spectators know they are
watching a performance.
Broadway plays
Worshippers at a religious ceremony
Fife-eating juggler

Cultural performance vs
everday life events
STUCTURES
Each cultural performance possesses a clear set of
characteristics, identifiable by its rules, conventions,
and/or techniques such as actors singing lyrics
(western opera), actors crossing a bridgeway on each
entry and exit that join the green-room to a specially
constructed, resonant wooden stage (Japanese noh
theatre)

Cultural performance vs
everday life events
CONTENT
They may be based on traditional tales or myths,
contemporary events, or any human experience.
The contents allow members of the community to
reflect upon ideas, meanings, images, and/or
experience of the performance.
Theatre and drama
The English word theatre derives from the ancient
Greek theatron which meant seeing place and
referred to the hillside area on which Greek citizens
gathered to experience the plays competitively
produced in the context of an annual religious
festival.
Theatre and drama
The English word drama derives from the Greek
dran, meaning to do or to act. In the active sense of
the original Greek term, a dramatist is an individual
who undertakes, singly or with others, the act of
writing a play intended for performance.
In the western humanistic tradition that priviledges
texts, the word drama has come to refer to a kind
of literature intended to be read as well as
performed.
Theatre and drama
Europeans disdained and suppressed forms of
performance that did not fit western prototypes of
drama or theatre and in many areas actively
eradicated them.
THEATRE AS
COMMUNICATION
Merlin Donald

Episodic
Mimetic
Mythic
Theoretic
FOUR PHASES OF
HUMAN
EVOLUTION
-HUMAN
LANGUAGE AND
CONSCIOUSNESS
Modes of communication
For our earliest human ancestors direct perception
via the senses played an important role in survival
for hundreds of thousands of years. Our five senses
allow us directly and immediately to perceive and
respond to the environment in the here-and-now.
While our senses and perception continue to be
important to us today, we do not depend on them
for survival to the extent we once did, except in
natural disasters or violent conflict.
Engaging in participatory, communal, bodily-based
activities such as early forms of hunting, music,
dance and archaic ritual served both to heighten
ones sensory perceptions and awareness, and to
further orient and attune each person to others in
the immediate group and to the environment.
In these early practices, the human operated
primarily as a perceiver/doer/actor-in-the-world.
One engaged the world directly and immediately,
without the mediation of thinking about an
activity.
The episodic
M. Donald describes the earliest stage of human
evolution as being part of an episodic culture,
wherein one lives completely with the here-and-
now. There is no past and future, only the present.
The mimetic
Our primate ancestors also engaged in simple
mimesis (imitation). The ability to learn by imitating
behavior is essential to survival. Mimesis can also be
autotelic, that is, it has its own rewards that are
experienced as enjoyable and even playful.
In the mimetic phase, gesture, posture, and facial
expression begin to be used as early forms of non-
verbal communication.
Language
As the anatomical ability to breathe properly to
support speech evolved, the brain continued to
enlarge, and as more complex modes of thought
processes and language use evolved, the necessary
pathways developed.
What resulted was the distinctive capacity to use
language self-referentially, that is the ability to use
words that point to other words via syntax. This
development was only complete anatomically when
modern humans, Homo sapiens, became dominant,
approximately 150,000 years ago.
The mythic
Early forms of speech allowed communication and
planning sufficient for humans to cross seas, settle
villages, and further develop technology, hunting,
music, dance, rituals and narratives.
According to M. Donald, the evolution of human
speech and language transformed our mimetic
capabilities into the mythic phase of our
development. Telling stories about ourselves, our
communities, and our place in the world allowed
entirely new way of understanding and
representing reality.
In the mythic phase the earliest pre-literate oral
ritual and shamanic performances developed in
relatively intimate, small-scale communal settings.
The emergence of state
The need for survival and for a sense of belonging
and connectedness to others leads human beings to
organize themselves into communities.
The development of larger and more complex
modes of social organization such as chiefdoms
(and states) creates a social setting where, for the
first time, individuals understand that they are
connected to other people they have never seen.

Emergence of state and
writing
The earliest forms of state organization arose
around 3700 BCE in Mesopotamia and 3000 BCE in
Mesoamerica, some 2000 years ago in China,
Southeast Asia and the Andes region of South
America and over 1000 years ago in West Africa.
Leadership of a titled, hereditary leader a king
either divine or equivalent, the adoption of slavery
on a large scale, the development of state religions
with standardized temples.
The emergence of state and
writing
The first complete systems of writing developed
around the same time as the formation of early
states in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.
Where such complete systems of writing developed,
literate elites emerged in early states, creating some
of the socio-cultural conditions within which drama
and theatre developed.
Oral, Ritual and Shamanic
Performance
It is very difficult for use to conceive of an oral
universe of communication or thought except as a
variant of a literate universe.
For people within primary oral cultures, there is not
differentiation between a thought and the words
which express it. Saying something is intending
something. Ones word is final authority. Ones
actions require no authority outside themselves.
The very materiality of written words historically
engaged the development of a distinction between
what is written and the ideas that the words
represent.
From the root word for the act of speaking,
oration is derived ratio for rational thought. It
is argued that literacy creates two different worlds
the world which we hear and see or the world of
talk and action.
The second world is the imperceptible mental world
of thoughts, desires and intentions.
The literate Greeks by the time of Plato and
Aristotle created for the west this second space
which houses thoughts, intentions and desires. The
Western metaphorical space was called psyche, and
is usually known today as the mind.
Oral performance
What is known is learned through direct
participation and/or apprenticeship rather than
abstract study.
In primary oral cultures human beings are the only
potential repository for traditional oral narratives,
myths, tales, proverbs, classificatory names,
information on how to perform a ritual, tell/sing a
monumental epic story, etc.
Initial learning though
listening, doing, direct
imitation of teacher/elder,
and repetition, allows a
neophyte to reach a
sufficient level of mastery
to enable improvisation
within the limits of
accepted convention.
The hearer does not
attempt to analyze,
understand, or interpret
what is heard, but
experiences, absorbs the
musicality of the voice ---
its timbre, tone, amplitude,
pitch, resonance, vibraion,
and shape as the voice
moves between sounding
and silences. Reception is
perception, not meaning.
Seeing
Just as listening is an epsodic mode of
communication that helps create a mythic world,
so does seeing.
Among the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, West
Africa, the oral elaboration of a story by an excellent
teller makes the story a spectacle.
As seen in early caves paintings, some of the earliest
forms of oral performance no doubt literally made
use of images as a memory aid for the teller andd to
enchance the pleasure of the audience.
Picture-recitation the telling of lengthy stories
with pictures.
For example, Iranian pardadar. The Pardadar would
point to various episodes as he sang the progression
of the story. The paintings could illustrate the
tragedy of Karbala or a tale from the national
legends and could be rolled up for ease of
transportation.
A Javanese wayang beber
scrool used for the narrator
(dalang) as he speaks and
chants a story.
Daland unfolds an
horizontal scroll on which
are painted a series of
scenes as he chants and
speaks the story the scroll
reveals. Six to eight scrolls
are required to tell an
entire story

Serious listening and or
seeing characterize many
archaic modes of
performance which engage
the spectators senses
directly, and help create
ones relation to the world
understood through myth
not history.
Myths, epics, and even
tales are traditionally
context-specigic; thats like
rituals they are told and
enacted within a context
that specifies precisely
when or where each story
is to be communicated.

Oral texts and their transmission
under the written sign
Early examples
Gilgamesh -- Sumerian epic
Mahabbarata Indian epic
Iliad and Odyssey
All we possess of these traditions,
especially in the west is a suggestion of
these traditions in the forms of texts. But
in other parts of the world, among the
native peoples in Asia and Africa for
example, oral performances still abound.
Veda
The oldest form of continuous oral performance in
the world is chanting of Vedas.
The vedas have continued to be transmitted orally
from generation to generation down to the present
day by socially highranking, male priestly
communities, for whom recitation of Vedas is their
lifes work and purpose an unbroken line of
transmission for over 3,000 years.
The prodigious task of memorization is necessary so
that each boy can chant the Vedic verses
appropriate for each of the spesific rituals required
to sustain Brahmin life, function as a priest in the
temples, and collectively perform the lengthy
sacrificial rituals understood to be necessary to
sustain the universe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPcasmn0cRU
Why perform rituals?
Many archaic prayers, incancations, rituals and the like
were developed and performed in order to actualize,
stabilize, or rectify human relationships to the immanent
powers of the cosmos within the immediate
environment.
Sacred words or ritual landscapes do not represent or
mean something, nor is it necessary for them to be
interpreted; rather they are understood to have power in
and of themselves.
By its very design, a particular ritual lanscape is assumed
to actualize a relationship to the sacred.
Why perform rituals?
Different types of cultural specialists are understood to
possess a divine gift or ability to access and develop
special powers to diagnose and/or heal an illness, to
read signs of the future, to conquer an opponent or an
enemey army or to uphold the universe itself.
For example: Shaman (one who is excited, moved,
raised) refers to a traditional branch of religious
specialists believed to be able to heal a variety of
illnesses, counteract misfortune, or to solve personal or
social dilemnas after entering a state of trance to
communicate with the powers in the unseen world.

The henge monuments
Henges are specially constructed to interact with the
landscape and thereby create what is known as a ritual
landscape.
One hypothesis is that the henges were built to align
with, for example, the three middle stars within the
constellation Orion.
Since the three linked henges reproduce the precise
configuration of Orions Belt, those gathered would have
experiences a moment of union of earth and sky a
womb like encirclement of self/community with their
cosmos.
The henge monuments
There was a richly
elaborated system of ritual
performance taking place
within them to orient the
peoples of the period
within personally, socially,
and cosmologically spesific
spatial and temporal
frames that must have
given shape and
meaning to their lives.
The shape and meaning
derived from their
involvement