Theoretical Origins Of Theatre

Theatre has not developed and flourished in every human society though the seeds of the theatre

RITUAL Virtually every society, large and small, depends on rituals to smooth the machinery of daily life, and to ensure the continuity of cultural norms. (See Leonel Mitchell The Meaning of Ritual) Rituals themselves grew (if not evolved) out of attempts to control the vagaries of nature by means of the two kinds of sympathetic magic: homeopathic and contagious.* Rituals which took on "dramatic" characteristics served many purposes in many cultures ranging from success in the hunt and control of the weather, to fertility, to celebration and initiation (rites of passage), to funerary. It is hardly surprising that many rituals become "religious" in nature or spring from religious impulses. The spectacular element in many religious rituals, coupled with impersonation related to sympathetic magic in those same rituals clearly lend themselves to "dramatic" events. Such religious, albeit pagan rituals existed in many places including ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and still exist in many cultures today from India to Africa. The transition from ritual to drama will be examined in the theatrical activities of Ancient Greece which began at festivals related to the worship of Dionysus.

IMITATION "mimesis" Aristotle theorized that man is instictively imitative. He argued that children learn by imitating adults. We all imitate others whom we admire. When we see a pitiful creature in life, we may react in horror or disgust, but when we see an actor successfully imitate such an action, it gives us pleasure. For Plato (and later St. Augustine of Hippo), imitation was removed from the Truth, and should be avoided, but Aristotle found imitation aesthetically superior to life.

STORYTELLING In virtually every culture where theatre exists, a tradition of the oral performance of myths and legends precedes the appearance of epic poetry and dramatic literature and performance. These performances may have evolved from some Paleolithic fellow--Sir George Frazer calls him Og-- acting out, and perhaps embellishing stories of his adventures on the hunt and enlisting one of his number to join him by impersonating his quarry. Some have suggested a practical application of such stories not unlike the instinctual "dances" of bees, which seem to educate other bees where food can be found. Some stories dealt with the exploits of great men, or extraordinary events. Some were used to illustrate cultural norms or values and may or may not have any basis in "fact." These attained the status of "myth." Cultural history abounds in examples of these mythic stories from Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Sanskrit Ramayana and Mahabharata to the songs of the Celtic Bards and scaelige like Beowulf, the chansons of the menestrels and troubadours, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and even our American story of the boy Washington chopping down the cherry tree and being unable to lie about it. This instinct for storytelling provides a framework in which the theatre can flourish. Storytelling is a necessary, but not sufficient

FANTASY Many modern psychologists claim that human beings have a gift for fantasy, an instinct for fiction, if you will. One such argument holds that flights of fantasy act as a shield against--or an escape from--the harshness of reality. The leap from daydreams to acting out is a logical one. Perhaps this springs from the same source as the impulse to indulge in sympathetic magic, but on an unconscious level. We see it in a trivial sense in a number of recent "graphic novels" and the acting out of the present-day "goths."

With the strong caveat that it is unwise to ascribe behaviors found in primitive people in remote areas of the contemporary world to the ancients, nontheless, clear anthropological evidence of the existence of all these aboriginal dramatic impulses in the human psyche is manifest in the periodic festivals of the Gimi Tribe of New Guinea.

*See esp. Sir George James Frazer's The Golden Bough; Mircea Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas, 3 vol.