On Creativity and the Future of Ritual

"...[T]o ponder the future of humanity is to consider the future of ritual." -Tom F. Driver in "The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Our Communities.

When I was about eleven, I was pulled into the flow of experimental theatre for the first time. What entered inside me before anything else was the smell of the room (paint, wood, bodies), the sound of creaking floorboards, anticipation moving in waves off the people around me, and an unexplained mystery arriving with the encroaching darkness. In that moment, I was time traveling: witnessing the birth of ritual, the birth of magic, the birth of mythology, the birth of community energy creation. In my small body, I wasn't capable of giving an intellectual framework to what I was experiencing, but I felt it. I watched people painted as cracked dolls convulsed across the stage. I learned what a blood capsule was as one of the actors bit down on one, streaming red down their chin. I watched and my spirit lifted off as the ancient, primal movement of actors opened up a space for what Aristotle called 'Catharsis,' a word that originates from the Greek Katharsis meaning "cleansing," "purging" or "purification."

Performance then, has the ability to open a space for personal and social transformation, and to make way for the creative expression of the ritual impulse. Dependent upon your point of view of spirituality writ large, this expression operates on multi-layered or multi-dimensional levels. These layers or levels are co-emergent with our essential humanity. Why is this? At our core, human beings are highly social, and require some level of community, shared narrative, belonging and connection. Rituals have evolved with us, and they are a quintessential part of our cultural and social expression, just as language is. We require ceremony and ritual as vital windows into our personal and collective soul health, healing and well being. They can center and anchor us during times of trouble, they can help to pull us through doorways of fear during times of transition, they can strengthen and deeply fix a moment into the timeline of our lives in moments of celebration. They can be defiantly beautiful in the face of horror and they can lend wise council to us in times of confusion.

In the early nineties, I stumbled across the work of the late Anthropologist Victor Turner and his book "From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play." Through his works, as well as the works of other anthropologists and academics, I began to slowly understand that the roots of ritual held a performative component and that all theatre, at its roots, is ritual, is story, is mythology. The concept of mythology, story, ritual and performance as well as what they mean can be vastly misunderstood and misrepresented within the current political and social climate. Take for instance, present media storied tactics that horribly co-opt the word "circus." This generates the idea that the circus, and by default "performance" is untrustworthy and something to be feared. That performance is false, fake or untrue with an almost bomb-like capacity to generate and spread wide social and cultural discord. Certainly, anyone can wield an idea, a framework or an energy. But how that idea manifests into the world is dependent upon the wielder.

At its highest function, performance does not spread hatred, but is the antithesis of this. Instead, it holds the capacity to help lessen both internal and external dissonance on a personal and societal level. Performance, ceremony, ritual and rites of passage as embodied community engagement and practice is a breath to breath, body to body, soul to soul experience. They move with great ease, one between the other. They are essential to our creative human expression, placing us squarely in the flow of the humbling and heart-breakingly beautiful oceanic depth of living and dying. They help communicate the language of our souls and by participating in them we participate in communicating to ourselves, each other, our communities and the Greater Spirit of Love that we are in a kind of holy communion. That we are the singers and the song.

Ritual performance is the active movement of universal energy into space and time that manifests itself with creativity, courageous heart, wisdom, dignity, humility, listening, love and an unflinching yet compassionate gaze. It is respectfully standing at the gates between the worlds and not forcing but allowing. It is dropping into the silence of the spirit and waiting. It is dance moving inside the body of the dancer. In this way, performance, mythology, creativity and ritual are intertwined, and they are tethered to the movement of the human soul. The dynamic enaction of the creative impulse channeled through the performance of ritual is embedded and embodied in the very matrix of the collective human unconscious.

So, what does this have to do with Tom Driver's thoughts? Pondering the future of humanity is pondering the future of ritual? Because we are the ritual moving through us. We are the myth. Joseph Campbell once said that "...ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.”  Who we are changes, where we are changes, how we are changes, what we are changes, why we are changes and we can no more stop this inexorable cyclical movement between life, death and re-birthing than we can catch the moon in a butterfly net. But our own inherent wisdom, that wisdom of the soul is such a powerful anchoring point. Being human can be a bittersweet business, with the terrible things and the beautiful things often co-existing in the same breath. Being alive is a courageous act. And yet we need now, more than ever, to create pathways and open windows and spaces that help give voice, that help us to centre, that let us grieve, that let us be in community exactly as who we are and how we are, that let us shout in laughter, that help us to make our way through, that give us celebration in the face of all that can be in this world with maddeningly joyful feet.