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Theatre Journal 53.4 (2001) 667-668



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Book Review

Rethinking Folk Drama


Rethinking Folk Drama. By Steve Tillis. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, no. 83. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999; pp. xvi + 226. $59.95.

The first step in rethinking folk drama is to define it carefully. Only then can meaningful comparisons between kinds of drama and across cultures be made. Steve Tillis's book is a ground-clearing exercise concerned with questions of terminology and definition.

After one hundred and forty pages we read:

folk drama is theatrical performance, within a frame of make-believe action shared by performers and audience, that is not fixed by authority but is based in living tradition and displays lesser or greater variation in its repetition of this tradition; its performance, enacted over time and space with practices of design, movement, speech, and/or music, engenders and/or enhances a sense of communal identity among those who participate in its delivery and reception

(140, emphasis in the original)

This is hardly a definition one can easily hold in the mind. Moreover, he tells us cryptically that in this definition, "significant clauses must be elided (and taken as implied)." Despite the length of his definition, I am unsure of its utility. If one grants that a performance can create a temporary sense of communal identity, then folk drama is not distinguished from commedia dell'arte or even from productions of plays by William Shakespeare. After tracing usages and definitions from Johann Gottfried von Herder onward for the one hundred and forty pages preceding his own definition, I found it [End Page 667] frustrating that Tillis continued to discuss others' terminology. I felt primed to move beyond that. Even in the final pages of the book he introduces another terminological distinction, between grouping plays by analogical features or by homological (genealogical) relationship.

A good editor might have persuaded him that analyses of Allardyce Nicoll's or Peter Szondi's definitions of drama, or a summary of Erving Goffman's characterizations of ritual are not really necessary. It is difficult to know what he has read since--sensibly, given the topic's scope--he gives us only a works cited. Given the wealth of works he could have used, his choice of those to discuss is puzzling.

Tillis has never met a scholar with whom he does not want to quibble. It is quibbling to quote sentences out of context, or to stretch a meaning beyond an author's intention. For example, he finds it "absurd" that Roger Abrahams says that in folk drama "'movement is subordinate to dialogue' (1972: 352)" (123). No such statement appears on that page, nor does that phrase appear at all, but on the next page Abrahams writes, in distinguishing drama (not folk drama) from ritual and dance, that the latter "[establish] meanings primarily through symbolic movements, while in drama, movement is commonly subordinated to dialogue" (353). Abrahams' concern is to distinguish folk drama from other forms of play activity and in that context he writes: "We may, for the moment, define folk drama as traditional play activity that relies primarily on dialogue to establish its meaning and that tells a story through the combination of dialogue and action" (353). Additionally, Tillis writes:

[R]itual origin as a defining characteristic of folk drama, as posited by Brandon . . . is utterly without merit. The game is given away by Brandon's statement that folk drama 'is linked with prehistoric animistic beliefs and ritual' (1967: 80). This is as pure a statement as one would find of the endurance, in the face of nearly a hundred years of devastating criticism, of Sir Edward Burnet Tylor's theory of cultural evolution.

[131]

The quoted phrase from James Brandon's Theatre in Southeast Asia does not say that folk drama developed from ritual. There can be other kinds of links. For example, Brandon notes that in 1630 a Javanese ruler "forbade the use of wayang beber [a storytelling form] for performances at animistic ruwatan ceremonies and ordered that only wayang kulit [shadow puppet dramas] could be the medium of performance" (45...

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