THE SACRED ACTOR

Dr. Lou Montgomery

      Like the tribal shaman, healer, or magician, the dedicated conscious actor can serve a sacred function. In indigenous society such figures, David Abram points out, usually live on the spatial periphery of the village, not only to ensure privacy but to foster the role of intermediary. Likewise, the sacred actor lives at the edge of culture mediating between realms—the human community and the non-human. Whether this encompasses other creatures, the ensouled landscape, forces of nature, or invisible presences, the sacred actor/shaman/magician acts as translator and negotiator between the visible and the invisible. Enactments and journeys restore balance, serve as propitiations, and ensure reciprocities. The sacred actor negotiates with the Other in its myriad forms, dispelling negative imbalances, exorcising demonic forces, mirroring the denied and the hidden, and restoring equilibrium. The sacred artist is often marginalized, living at or on the border, many times through conscious volition.

     For myself, getting too enmeshed in local culture and social expectations, diminishes my capacity to bear witness through an clean impartial lens. Too much interaction and identification dulls my wit and cheats my vision. In order to monitor and reflect the pulse of the culture, some distance is required. For myself, it has manifested as a gypsy life, rooted not so much to specific people and places, as to following my elusive mercurial Muse. Often I have felt wedded to the Edge. Abram writes, “ The medicine person’s primary allegiance, then , is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded—it is from this that his or her power to alleviate human illness derives—and this sets the local magician apart from other persons.” ( 1) So the sacred actor often refines her or his craft in isolation, incubating for long periods, vascillating between dormant seclusion and manic extroversion,  appearing  incomprehensible and eccentric to others. The craft requires copious reverie, comfort with one’s inner wilds, and an intimacy with gestation’s endless unknowns.

     In terms of the origins of the sacred actor in history and myth, as touched upon earlier, the Dionysian tradition is crucial to anyone attempting to create soul-infused theatre. Dionysian consciousness understands that our stories’ conflicts are dramatic tensions rather than opposites. As James Hillman writes, “ we are composed of agonies not polarities.” ( 1 ) From the ancient Greek perspective, the actor takes on the role of “protagonist”—the one who is in “agony” and acts on behalf of the collective. Agos means both “cursed” and “sacred.”

       Theatrical embodiment originated in part with the pharmakos, who, in a Dionysian ritual procession, decoratively clad and garlanded, was with great ceremony and musical accompaniment, led around the city in order to absorb every pollution and miasma. He was then killed—either stoned, burned, or thrown off a cliff.  Or else he was simply exiled past the country’s border. As the pharmakos scapegoat sin carrier, he thus purged, protected, and purified the community. Through his sacrifice the polis was cleansed and burdens were lifted.

      Competitions of lamentations to the dithyramb, the choral musical accompaniment that attended the sacrifice of the bull or goat replacement for the human sacrifice, constituted the origin of tragedy. A bull prize was given to the winner of the dithyramb contest.  This singing contest evolved into the theatre chorus, out of which the first protagonist emerged. Tragadio means the song created on the occasion of a he-goat. Legend has it that Dionysus, the ‘wine-misted god himself, “ led the first song which then became a fixed choral creation with a definite form.  A circular chorus comprised of fifty men or boys sand around the altar of Dionysus and thus ensured the return of spring.  Comedy originated in the processional phallic songs and dances and intoxicated merriment and wit of the yearly religious festivals. In opposition to the cults of Apollo and Zeus, from its beginnings, the Dionysian theatre was democratic, open to all.  The foundations of Attic comedy were one of a phallic intimacy that was inclusive of the whole audience.  All inhibitions were set aside in universal comic unrestraint. The “enemy” who must die in atonement for the sins of the community was gloriously trampled as celebrants jumped on goatskins filled with wine.  The mythic god, who, in the glory of his youth must succumb to the violence of his Titanic enemies and be rent apart and devoured, as well as the celebratory god, who with dancing, running, and the brandishing of torches awakens the spirits of vegetation, inform the archetype of the Dionysian actor/protagonist.

      What is important to note here is that the shared communal experience was paramount, no doubt overwhelming. The chorus came before the solo actor; the actor/protagonist emerged—stepped forward out of the chorus communitas.  From group ritual, which enacted the return of the familiar and in which all participants stood on the same level, a separation that demarcated actor from spectator evolved. Once actors moved out of the chorus, the schematic for the reenactment of deeds from the past was born. A few could act for the many.  The creation of theatrical performance marked a rare sharply focused genesis of a Western art form.

       This sense of acting for the many is crucial, in my opinion, because it implies service to the community, indebtedness to truth, a humbling rather than exalted function.  While the sacred actor certainly entertains and elevates, there is a knowing submission on behalf of the greater whole. Acting on behalf of  is always in the background and infuses the interactive field between performer and actor.  When I know I am “on the mark” in the sense of being in sync and in the flow, it is when I know I am not speaking for myself but for the audience. I become empty and reed like as a larger truth passes through and sounds a clear note. The audience and I become a seamless whole, a mobius strip feedback loop continually reinforcing and amplifying one another.

     Perhaps this is the moment to introduce the idea of duende as it helps describe the difference between performance that is sacred versus mundane.  As we have been discussing, acting out is very Dionysian in that, like the Greek god, it is imbued with ambivilance, androgyny, ecstacy, and the danger of madness and death.  The most sublime elements of performance art, something flamenco artists call duende, refers to that mysterious mercurial presence that infuses an inspired performance that everyone senses but that defies explanation. Duende is like the thin razor’s edge between life and death and cannot appear unless there is the possibility of death.  A clear personal experience of duende  was seeing Marcel Marceau perform live at age seventy. His artistic essence charged the field so palpably with spiritual presence that it electrified the audience. We were held collectively in an almost excruciating suspension until  we could explode in response.  The gypsies call  the pain in the “deep song”, which is really a whole style of living, Pena Negra, or Black Pain.  Because Duende is linked to Dionysus, it electrifies, quickens, enlivens, touches death, and engenders a new quality of life. As duende, Dionysus writhes snake-like and is difficult to grasp. Yet duende is also hushed stillness. Ficino called it “serio ludere,” serious play. Duende implies being filled with the entheos of the god, yet being completely focused and concentrated.

      For the creative artist,  duende is a tightrope walk that asks: How does one stay drunk with the god, dance with him and distill the madness into metaphors that are lucid and contemporary? How does the artist experience ritualistic enthusiasm without sucuumbing to insanity or disease? How does one purposefully fall into inferiority, downwardness, weakness, unheroic strength, hysteria, and danger in order to discover ambiguity and androgyny without becoming depressed or passive? How does the artist work with Dionysian communal Eros? How does the artist make sacrifices, knowing that like Dionysus one will always be dismembered and persecuted? Sink in the mud, laugh and cry with her own people? How can she fight the bull ego in the corrida of the soul? Playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote that there were no maps or methods for finding the duende.  It implies a wounding that never closes; but within that wounding lie the inventive uniqueness of the artist’s work. Imagination, in the end, is not escaping from reality or unreal fantasy.  It is reality that is morally demanding. It is reality of the highest order.

      Now getting back again to the origins of the sacred actor and how she or he functions also as high priestess, archetypal psychologist or healing shaman, it is important to remember that the earliest dramatic poets sought to build a “house” and tend a polis, wherein humankind might find comfort and companionship in the face of a capricious and unpredictable Diety.  As C. Fred Alford writes, they sought to answer the question,

“ What happens when man [ or woman] looks around him [or her] world and finds that the arrogant prosper and the pious and temperate are led to disaster”? (2) 

     The poets confronted this reality and the doubt and confusion it engendered. Indeed, the poets confirm, people must suffer the brutal and  brutalizing confusions of the gods. Alford quotes Walter Nestle : “ Tragedy was born when myth began to be assessed from a citizen’s point of view” (3) Dionysus is the ultimate survivor in this culture of confusion because he is slippery, shape-shifting, and can’t be pinned down. The “Dionysian crisis”, in Alford’s viewpoint, occurred  when the polis discovered it was so bad, the world so confused, that even the gods could be contaminated. The passions that exist within the gods exist within us. Humans cannot be insulated from the caprice of the gods.  Thus there is rage, jealousy, envy, and greed. The Dionysian crisis was heightened when the poets began to envision a world more just, caring, and ideal that that ruled by the gods. The polis  tried to keep the gods at bay in an orgy of rage and in an attempt to wall out oikos –god-sent death, birth, Eros.  But of course the tragedies show that oikos will not leave the family alone and that pollution and disorder were overflowing.

     The Greeks believed that humans could be overwhelmed by ate, the passions of the gods, regardless of character.  This, of course, is more in line with Jung’s belief about the complexes; they have us rather than us having them.  Still, the protagonist was held accountable for his or her actions independent of his or her intentions. This understanding is fundamental to understanding the function of the archetypal protagonist, especially one whose call is to tend soul. The Greek protagonist demonstrated that we cannot disown our acts. Even if fate befalls us, we are held accountable.  The action was seen not from the perspective of the interiority of the actor/protagonist, but from within the web of relations in which she or he participated. Character is not destiny; rather destiny is character. The tragedies are an account of the horror and absurdity of existence that that “those the gods would destroy first they make crazy”. ( 4)  The poet’s job is but to tell the truth, or as Rilke said in his First Elegy, “ Beauty is nothing but the terror that we are just able to bear.” The plays are thus like purgations—safety valves.  They clarify the passions. Aristotle said that the tragedies were a form of action that served the polis  by means of pity and fear, which offers humanity something the gods cannot.  The tragic poets were great psychologists because they could portray external conflicts as internal ones and showed how culture acts like psyche.

       The ancient Greek protagonist embodied the outrage at the suffering that life inflicts on us and attempted to control his own death. But if death was inevitable, the tragedies provided an honorable place for death.  Bodies were washed, dressed, and shrouded on stage. Max Weber defined modernity in part as living in a dark iron cage because we don’t know how to die, or, for that matter, how to live in the face of death.  Writer and ceremonialist Martin Prechtel, who teaches from the perspective of contacting our indigenous roots and souls, emphasizes that our culture is sick in part because it cannot authentically grieve.  Without authentic passionate expressions of grief, we cannot “feed the holy”, that which feeds and sustains us, our beautiful flowering words and gestures and so both languish and starve. A culture can only sustain joy and thrive to the extent that it can honestly and unreservedly express pain and with acute passion lament its horrors. Thus, a vital function of the sacred actor is to create rich overflowing sensuous enactment and praise so as to feed the spirits  that we in turn may be nourished. 

      The Greek protagonist showed the polis that people are responsible without being necessarily free. She or he willingly embraced the role fate had chosen for them. Oedipus, in this sense, is rewarded at the end of his life because he had borne his moira with such dignity and grace. The katharsis thus cleanses the collective psyche. Pursuing this idea a little further, the Greek poets have something profound to teach us about how the role of protagonist, in its early archaic form, functioned within the community. For in considering taking up the role of protagonist, the one who acts on behalf of the collective, I have been especially keen to understand this archetype in the midst of a post-modern narcissistic culture which claims that people are free to be whatever they want.  Many people today are highly self-reflective without being responsible. Western culture has formed a myth rather than the actual creation of a “will to power” controlling center, which as T.S. Eliot tells us “cannot hold.’

     In our shattered world, our broken web of connections and perverted orders of relationships, responsible reciprocal duties and obligations need to be carried out. And that responsibility is relational, not individual.  What the Greek protagonist did was to carry and shoulder responsibility with pity and compassion. This protagonist did not ask if it was fair or not.  The concern is rather how to educate proper emotions.

     The protagonist seemed to be trying to teach us how to participate in our moira , our lot in life, rather than study how to gain control over our passions and fates.  The sacred actor is getting at something larger than the illusion of controlled selfhood.  It is an effort pointing in the direction of learning to accept the moira and the daimon of my own life and thus achieve authenticity.  To perform what is indeed carried—the passions as gods—is the most effective way I know to demonstrate that we are the gods’ locus but not their agents. Rather they pass through us like cosmic rays; we cannot shield ourselves from the gods. It implies taking my actions seriously, responsibly. Like the Greek poets who released pity and compassion as civilizing forces and thus educated the passions, I too want to offer my pity and compassion for self and other as balm in the face of the harshness of collective brutality and callousness.

      I was taught in graduate school by a brilliant and compassionate theatre professor that the actor is in essence the sacrificial lamb who atones for the “sins” of the audience. Making theatrical art has been the way I have enabled myself to see my life as a concretized embodied Other, distanced myself to get objectivity, and still penetrated to the core of an issue. As actor, I have embodied the role of witness to the truth and also been witnessed as truth-seeker.  The famous Polish director Jerzy Grotowski said that the only way to open up the “holy” is to be wholly free of complexes—totally free to respond unencumbered by fear.   Although I believe with Jung that perhaps at best we learn to carry our complexes throughout our life with more strength and dignity, nevertheless, the pharmakos  actor is wedded to this notion of continually moving past fear  toward transparency.

     The sacred actor dances with fear and death.  The archetypal actor crafts the art of distracting through entertainment while simultaneously embodying the sacrificial lamb who willingly transmutes the sins of the community. For me the actor is part scapegoat, part willingly led to the slaughter. She or he submits to dismemberment and humiliation yet knows the ecstasy of being transformed and resurrected. This is the attraction and repulsion of acting. It forces the sacred actor to ask: What does stepping on stage a soul-tender demand? What will be sacrificed? What part of me will die?

      The challenge of the sacred actor is to go beyond the narcissistic need for adulation, acceptance, and personal validation into becoming the communicator of numinous mystery and psychological depth—to reach through the veils and be transparent enough, empty enough, expendable enough, willing even to be impaled and penetrated through and through by the spear of truth. Acting is an excruciating terror and descent with no guarantee of an ascent.  The challenge is to allow the process to be visibly revealed in its rawness, its ruthlessness, and luminosity. Like the Tibetan Buddhist idea of the Bodhisattva, who, once enlightened,  is committed to remaining incarnate until the liberation of every sentient being is fulfilled, it asks virtually more than I can conceive of being capable of creating. On the other hand, it is hubris to refuse the call. It asks of the sacred actor a conjoint submission and taking up—and again embodying the Buddhist idea of tonglen, the practice of ever widening compassion held in the heart, a cracking open to encompass the global heart.