“Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.”  -G. K. Chesterton

If theater is a ritual, it is a ritual of death–of human sacrifice. I throw myself into the audience. I die as my character does. The audience members are my gods; I can only hope that my strange ritual will please them. I have been nearing death for weeks, months—destroying my body, my relationships, my corn and my wine for the sake of gods who do not exist yet. They are ghosts I have conjured up to fill the empty seats.

Then, suddenly, the gods become flesh and bone. They materialize out of thin air, offering me murmurs that signal to me their hunger to be satisfied by my ritual. Each, however, longs for something different from me, and I cannot possibly tear myself into enough pieces to satisfy all of them. Still, I prepare for the ritual. I paint my face and equip myself to spill my own blood. I pray this will move them, that my gods will respond with the thunderous approval of applause. They yearn for satisfaction from me and I yearn for proof of this satisfaction, for some evidence that I am a worthy disciple, or offering, or sacrifice. Sometimes I am offered the keys to heaven. Sometimes I am doomed to hell. But most often I am doomed to purgatory as the gods argue in the lobby. Then, I regrow my corn, re-ferment my wine, and begin the ritual again.

2.“When two people love each other, they don’t look at each other, they look in the same direction.”  -Ginger Rogers

It takes two of them to watch the show.

It is the Sunday matinee. An older couple sits behind me and to the left. As they focus their attention to the stage, they seem almost numb to the process, unimpressed. She loudly unwraps a lozenge, passes it to him; he gratefully accepts with a guttural cough that shakes the back of my seat. He slowly sinks back in his red-cushioned chair as a snore escapes his body. She doesn’t seem to notice. I imagine them doing this every Sunday: shuffling into the theater holding hands, taking turns napping and explaining the plot to each other. I wonder if I will do the same someday. Part of me hopes I won’t.

The character seizes, dies.

We part.

3.“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.”  -E. M. Forster

Theater never comes when we need it too. It is a memory or a prediction, enacted but never real. The actors and directors and stage managers are real, the thing they are trying to capture is real, but the performance is not. There is a gap between these things that can never be remedied. An unbridgeable world between the manmade and the natural. No matter how good the performances and staging are, no one is actually giving birth or dying onstage. Metaphorically maybe, but never actually. We are always watching the memory of birth, never the birth itself. Theater is adequate in its ability to elicit the feeling of the event, but will always fall short of creating the actual event.

4.“A prayer couched in the words of the soul, is far more powerful than any ritual.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Brida

The day after the end of winter, we walked. We walked in the rain until my feet were sore and my legs were red and my hair was drenched and my makeup ran – until the fog felt like an embrace and the puddle we walked by felt like coming home. We walked for four cigarettes. We walked like life cycles, like somewhere and nowhere to be, like we were ending and beginning at the same time. We walked like if we just went far enough, everything would make sense. We walked like the rain was holy water.

I am born again in the light of the wet concrete. For now.

5.“When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”  -Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

A friend once told me that holding a cup of tea elicits the same physical and emotional response as holding someone’s hand. While I’m not sure if this is at all scientifically accurate, I have to agree with the sentiment. There is something about holding a cup of tea as the early morning light streams through your window, reading a book, and listening to the breeze rustle the leaves outside that feels strikingly similar to home.

If theater is a ritual, it is, for the audience, as simple as a cup of tea in the morning: a comforting place that offers sacredness and irreverence simultaneously. Even though the object of ritual is profane and ordinary and in some ways inadequate, the experience it offers is not. How strange it is that the birth and death of another can feel like home. And yet, as I walk into the theater, find my seat, and watch the lights go down, that’s exactly what it feels like.

Ritual becomes, then, not a mode of recreation and remembrance that is doomed to fail, but rather an effort to create an entirely new experience, one that can take away our baggage and make us feel less alone. The ritual is the church and the church is home.

Because while a funeral is by no means a death, it is essential and immeasurably important to all who attend it. It is the creation of a community around a common experience and a common passion.

“Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”  -Derek Walcott

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Kellina Moore ’18 is the Assistant Editor of The Skidmore Theater Living Newsletter