Shadows from the Planet Fire
A ritual performance developed by the ensemble through trance and pre-Christian, Slavic ritual expressions
Metamorphosis Theatre, Baltic House Theater, St. Petersburg and tour of Ural Mountain region and the Ukraine
devised directed
FINDING THE RHYTHM
Their interest in Slavic rituals was at odds with how they trained themselves. Though they had a stated interest in ritual their training was more typical of theatre and the portrayal of character and mainstream Western perspectives. I mentioned this inconsistency to them. They responded by saying they went to theatre for lack of any other viable medium of developing ritual expression.
Is the language and methods of theatre suited to the objectives and function of ritual? There is crossover for sure. For the lack of a coherent Slavic ritual language—there were no elders to refer to and be taught by—they went to the tradition of theatre. Theatre was in a sense, an elder, and the only extant tradition bearer. They were searchers led by inherent need, trying their best to put fragments together as to recreate a pathway to the ritual longing that lay within them. They were not very different from the many and varied attempts of a return to ritual expressed in other Western and industrialized nations. New age shamanism, witches, and healing, playback theatre and other forms of psychodrama, drama therapy, neo-paganism, the men’s movement, and other expressions in the West are all struggling with the re-establishment of a method and vocabulary by which to express ritual and community.
The Metamorphosis group members were similar in one essential way to other indigenous groups I have worked with. They had lost a part of themselves. The seventy years of Sovietism had dislocated them from their rich cultural traditions by imposing and enforcing and alien social and political order. So thorough and insidious had the dislocation been they had little sense of self, their own feelings and body. If you only have little then you must begin with what you have. Yourself. The work had to begin with a rediscovery of self. The self would provide the foundation of the reimagined community.
To begin we established daily Yoga programs as to open the body to possibilities of feeling and being. The stress of the monumental changes surrounding them was also in their bodies preventing them from becoming available to the work. As a second stage of body awareness we initiated rhythm awareness work. On the basis of my experience with other indigenous groups, I knew it was important to re-establish an awareness of rhythm in their bodies and life. The initiation of rhythm awareness would lead to the re-establishment of Slavic cultural rhythm awareness, and from that foundation, subsequent work would flow.
Initial exercises brought awareness to the basic rhythms of life, the heartbeat and breath. Often semi-meditative, these exercise explorations established of the basic self and one’s basic rhythm. The explorations reminded us of the simple and basic: that the self is the origin of performance. The body is the medium of expression for the internal, self. By apprehending the internal one can better express the external if not the eternal self.
from: Finding a Way Back