Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (review)

Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives is a timely meditation on understandings of event and eventhood, which have become increasingly important within performance studies. While the notion of event recalls the 1960/1970s avant-garde – the Happenings of Allan Kaprow, the experiments of John Cage, the performative actions of the political left – it has gained currency in recent years, particularly after 9/11, as a conceptual frame through which to question the evidentiary properties of the historical archive. Defined in the call for papers for the 2007 Performance Studies International conference as "an interruption that represents the not-yetimagined new," the event is conceived not as a chronologically bounded entity but as an occurrence that disrupts traditional notions of temporality. In Franko's words, by troubling the implicit usefulness of sequence and chronology for either "continuity" or "future change," the event by necessity "challenges ritual" (1). Drawing together ritual and event as a theoretical provocation – inspired by a 2003 conference that Franko organized – the book sets out to interrogate the ritualization of the event, on the one hand (in acts of remembering and mediatization), and the eventification of ritual action, on the other, the exposure of a ritual to "contingency, loss, and discontinuity" (3). The collection's bifurcated structure – "critical historiographies/ new formations" and "case studies from the performative and visual archives" – makes clear that there are two fascinating strands of thought: one rethinks early models of ritual through the lens of contemporary theory, and the other takes up the capacity of performance to ritually re-enact and "work through traumatic history" (114). While this conceptual frame is promising for the study of ritual and event respectively, it is not always successful in unifying the collection's disparate papers. It remains unclear how the historiographies of ritual in the first half (e.g., Sally A. Ness's discussion of Gregory Bateson's theory of ritual movement) line up with the case studies in the second half (e.g., the narrativization of terrorist events by the U.S. government following 9/11).

This structural issue aside, the reader will find an array of conceptually dazzling essays, each offering a theoretically sophisticated approach to the study of ritual and/or event. Several articles grapple with foundational theorists of these terms, offering alternative interpretations. Ness returns to Bateson's writings on Balinese ritual to tease out his understanding of movement as an embodied form of thought. Drawing on semiotic theory, she identifies a choreographic awareness in Bateson's work, which saw in ritual movement the possibility of transferring knowledge symbolically from one context of learning to another (14). Andrew C. Wegley targets structuralist blind spots in Victor Turner's widely accepted ritual model. Turner's "ritual[s] seems to have a perfect success rate," he argues, "but when does ritual not work?" (59). When does ritual "fail to successfully symbolize"? (68).

The collection also explores the performative effects of ritual, its abilities to make, and sometimes mend, social worlds. Ola Johansson connects ritual to performativity, arguing that "[r]itual does not merely show and tell, it makes things happen in the local and cosmic world" (35). He suggests that theatrefor development initiatives provide alternatives to traditional rituals in contemporary African communities by openly addressing AIDS and enacting resonant forms of redress in contexts where people are experiencing "the breakdown of religious life" (40). Thus he anticipates Janice Ross's essay on the dance rituals of Anna Halperin, which sought to heal by purging repressed emotions. Ross provides a therapeutic genealogy for the emergence of postmodern dance, which is a fine complement to Franko's essay on dance as "gift." Describing the call to action by artists following 9/11, Franko poses a number of evocative questions that resonate with Halperin's approach to dance as cure: "Can dance 'respond' to these events? . . . Can dance render (perhaps better than 'respond to') the disaster? What kind of 'giving back' would this rendering be?" (126).

These questions point to some of the most...