6 Aussie Pride
Erving Goffman in 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' returns the ancient words of the theatre- the 'shill', 'claque', 'stick' and 'shillaber'.
"To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the manner of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony- as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community." (Goffman 1958:23)
This has me thinking. Ceremonies and ritual are not theatre. Theatre adopts aspects of ceremony and uses ritual elements but it is not either of these. Corroborees are not ceremonies either.
posted by Dominique at 6:45 pm
1 Comments:
Your post of 16 April was prescient. It seems you were already aware of the Anzac Day resurgence of the following week. Anzac Day(it seems to me) is headed in the direction of jingoistic ritual.
The Anzac spirit doesn't permit mention of the Aboriginal/settler conflicts. To mention those wars while we're within cooee of the hallowed 25 April would be heresy. After Anzac Day there is a ritual pause of one whole month, and then we turn to Sorry Day (ritual? theatre?); ...
... and after that NAIDOC week, which gives us theatre, at last abandoning ceremony.
Anzac-Day ceremony purports to be about remembering, but it is more about a major forgetting ('major' in the deleuzoguattarian sense).
In the essay 'What children say', Deleuze observes that Dionysus, the god of art, is also the god of 'places of passage and things of forgetting'. That essay relates well to the part played by painting and corroboree in establishing some land-history in Australia. There are different ways of performing Aussie pride.
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