Cad Baniker Pala: The Return to Ritual and Folk Form in Avant-garde
Cad Baniker Pala: The Return to Ritual and Folk Form in Avant-garde

Summary/Abstract: Certain ritual aspects of theatre have been increasingly appearing in the avant-garde drama in India, particularly since the 1970s, which Victor Turner would have called ‘performing ethnography’ (Turner 1998: 63). In his essay “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama?” Turner, who had first hand experience of Indian drama, discusses the “developmental relationship from ritual to theatre” and maintains that “both ritual and theatre crucially involve liminal events and processes and have an important aspect of social metacommentary” (ib.). In this context Turner also rightly points out that theatre is the inheritor of that great multifaceted system of preindustrial ritual which embraces ideas and images of cosmos and chaos, interdigitates clowns and their foolery with gods and their solemnity, and uses all the sensory codes to produce symphonies in more than music: the intertwining of dance, body languages of many kinds, song, chant, architectural forms, incense, offerings, ritualized feasting and drinking, body painting, as also the enacting of mythic and heroic plots drawn from oral traditions.[...]

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