[page 42]

Timothy D. Hoare(1)

Pulling the Siamese Dragon:
Performance as a Theological Agenda For Christian Ritual Practice

I

To speak with any clarity about performance as a thing, an act, or a process is a complicated affair. One must proceed with caution, for performance as an idea is a kind of cultural catch-all for myriad connotations, designations and usages that extend well beyond the boundaries of what we traditionally understand as definitive performance contexts. Performance means everything and means nothing. It can embody eternity within a gesture or a word, it can be, as Aristotle assessed it, an imitation of an action, and it can be an empty rubric or mechanical act that seems to take “an eternity” to complete. To be sure, we speak of theatre, dance, or ritual as performance; but we also refer to one’s ability to carry out a function (role?) in any given professional or personal situation (scenario?) as performance.

What, if anything, is created in performance? The threefold agenda of this article is based upon the assumption that a discernible reality is created in performance that is beyond that of the elements which constitute it. Firstly, I shall suggest that whatever its particular medium may be, e.g., theatre, dance, ritual, liturgy, or sacrament, the expressive and revelatory power of performance is not grounded in the pretentious manufacture of delusion as imitation or “make-believe” but in the qualitative ambiguity and relational tension of illusion as virtual reality in its own right.

Secondly, throughout the course of my research in the performance and teaching of mime and mask traditions, it has become apparent to me that particular varieties of Asian religious/aesthetic sensibility have long understood that revelation is not a matter of resolving ambiguity but of wrestling with and maintaining its inherent relational tensions as expressive channels whereby one may encounter the otherness of the sacred. Theatrical performance is one of the primary ways in which many of these cultures have achieved and articulated such encounters. As an example of this performative consciousness, this paper shall focus on certain aspects of one Asian theatrical performance art: the classical masked theatre, or Khon, of Thailand.

[page 43] Lastly, this paper will offer both theological and biblical foundations to support the suggestion that performance embodies profound implications for the Western consciousness which has traditionally regarded the ambiguities and relational tensions of performance as “duplicities” that require resolution, closure and synthesis. By virtue of its very ambiguity, performance constitutes an act of faithful integrity that should be taken seriously, particularly in determining just what we intend by our liturgical engagement in the expressive activities that we embrace as sacramental.

I now offer the following as a working definition of performance. This definition will serve as a backdrop for this paper’s threefold agenda:

Performance is a symbolic expression that rehearses, celebrates or shapes the consciousness and identity of a particular community or the human community at large. Liturgically, theatrically, politically or socially, performance informs us as to who we are, reminds us who we have been and envisions who we are capable of becoming as human beings living in relational tension with one another, with history, with the environment and with the Holy.

II

In order to appreciate fully this definition of performance, we must free ourselves from the restrictions of normative usage. “Tension” is not to be equated with “conflict.” Tension is not an undesirable state or condition but a creative dynamic of relational differentiation. On the other hand, we must also avoid equating tension with “harmony” or “cooperation,” for these concepts connote a sense of homogeneity that negates the essential differentiation by resolving the relationship into closure. So perhaps we could say that while both harmony and conflict focus upon the resolution of elements, tension is concerned with the denial of closure and the maintenance of irresolution.

As an implicit aspect of relational tension in performance, irresolution is, of course, ambiguity. Performance conveys a time and space that is both “here and now” and “there and then.” It presents an actor who is both a self and a role or it invites an audience to be at once present and remote. In performance, sound and utterance are often only wrinklers of silence; gesture and movement but shapers of stillness. In relational tensions such as these, elements are never resolved into one [p. 50] another (or one over the other) but in constant play and dynamic negotiation.

In his book, The Language of the Rite, Roger Grainger addresses this ambiguity in terms of the paradox of human relations. “Paradoxical as it may seem,” says Grainger, “the unity of [humankind] depends upon what keeps people apart. It is the obstacle of differentiation, the division into selves, which permits the movement of relation, the soul’s outgoing gesture.”(2) [page 44] Therefore, what we enact relationally with one another is dependent upon our differentiation from one another.

Performance is, by its very nature, a symbolic form, but not in the discursive sense of leading directly or conceptually to a fixed unequivocal referent. Rather, performance is a nondiscursive symbol that has no referent beyond its own embodiment; by virtue of the relational tension of the elements that constitute it, performance is expressive in and of itself. As Susanne Langer writes, the nondiscursive symbol is “an articulate but nondiscursive form having import without conventional reference, and therefore presenting itself... as a ‘significant form’ in which the factor of significance is not logically discriminated but felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function.” (3)

It is this “felt quality” that director and playwright Antonin Artaud sought in theatrical performance. He discovered it neither in Europe nor in America but in Asia where performance imitates nothing, deludes no one but invokes illusion-- a virtual reality of a wholly separate order. In his commentary on Artaud’s interest in Asian theatrical traditions, Leonard Pronko observed that:

This electric current, quivering always between being and nothingness, points to a world of Absolutes, the invisible world of cosmic forces which should be the real occupation of the theatre. Like religious ritual, the drama should be that meeting point where human and nonhuman, meaning and chaos, finite and infinite, come together. (4)

The ambiguous “quivering current” of illusion gives performance its life and breath. As such, performance is a dwelling place of both the aesthetic and the religious imagination which, I would contend, are one and the same.

While it may be said that anything of theological significance has “religious” import, it does not follow that everything of religious import is “theological,” insofar as theology is understood as a systematic doctrine or a confession articulated in faithful response to the revelation of a divine power or will. The Christian church, for example, as an institution and tradition that is grounded in a particular interaction of human history and divine revelation, has religious import but an expression of religious import does not have to point toward or “mean” such a tradition, Christian or otherwise. By virtue of its capacity to invoke and express an “ultimate reality” that is beyond the time, space and sum of the temporal elements that constitute it, anything--an experience, an artistic creation, a relationship, a performance--can embody religious import. As novelist Madeline L’Engle writes, “there is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred.” (5)

Thomas Martland observes that such expressive forms do not point toward what already [page 45] is; rather, they create what is, perhaps even what has never been, in that they “open their followers out from an inherited way of seeing things, from an inherited structure of reality... They reconstruct the world with new fundamentals.” (6)

But with a subtle shift one can also say that such a form or experience reveals and affirms a reality that always has been, i.e., a reality that exists but one to which we have heretofore been blind, so to speak. In so doing, the religious form not only reveals the eternal; it also transforms the manner in which we perceive the temporal. As an example, consider this brief exchange from an early conversation between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kennedy was most certainly expressing his solidarity with the vision of the civil rights movement when he said (and I paraphrase), “Bear with us, Dr. King; your people will get their constitutional rights.” Dr. King replied quietly, “No, Mr. Kennedy, you’re mistaken; we’ve always had them.” (7)

Suffice it to say that when such a transformation of reality occurs in performance or in any other sphere of human experience, it is an act of grace. Not only does it express a particular “felt quality” to the human imagination but it challenges our assumptions about “the way things are” by revealing an alternative vision of reality.

Let us now examine how these qualities are expressed in the performance of the classical masked theatre, or Khon, of Thailand.

III

The Palatine Law of King Boromtrailokanot (Trailok), dated at 1450 CE during Thailand’s Ayutthaya Period describes an unusual ritual performance that served as a major element in the royal coronation ceremonies. The participants enacted as ancient Hindu myth that appears in both the Indian Ramayana and the Mahabharata, known generally as “the churning of the ocean.” (8) As told in the Ramakien, the Thai version of the Ramayana, the gods and the demons approached the supreme deities Pra Isuan and Pra Narai, imploring simultaneously, “Give us the divine amarit (ambrosia) so that we may attain immortality.” They were told that if they really wanted it, then they must extract it from the ocean in the following manner:

In the midst of the ocean was a high mountain around which was coiled a great seven-headed dragon. The gods were to pull on the tail of the dragon, while demons pulled on the heads. Using the dragon as a churning rope, they twisted the mountain back and forth in a pivotal motion, thereby producing the ambrosia from the waters around and beneath the mountain. As is usually the case in these cosmic affairs, the gods were the ultimate recipients of the divine elixir [page 46] and were subsequently able to defeat the demons in the ensuing battle over the legitimacy of their claim, which was indeed questionable. As the Ramakien continues, their conflict is eventually incarnated on earth as the protohistorical war between Ram, Prince of Ayutthaya and the demon Totsagan, King of Longka.

The Thais refer to this myth as chahk nahk deuk dahm bahn, or “the pulling of the dragon.” In its fifteenth century rendition as a ritual performance, the ambrosia was regarded as what might be best described as an expression of pure creative potential. That is, as the fruit of the relational tension of the divine and the demonic, the ambrosia symbolized the creative potential of the newly-crowned or renewed administration, to be energized and implemented at its own discretion for better or for worse--or perhaps for naught, which would be worst of all.

As both mythic narrative and ritual performance, this ancient story has something extremely significant to say about the nature of performance as a genre of human expressive behavior. Appropriately, the fifteenth century ritual performance of the pulling of the Siamese dragon provides us with such a context, in that it is the earliest known record of anything resembling the Thai theatrical performance art known as Khon, or the classical masked dance/ dramatization of the Ramakien. It is therefore fitting that we examine a chosen facet of Khon as a contextual model of this expressive capacity of performance.

Regardless of this evolutionary connection between an ancient ritual performance and an ancient-and-now-contemporary theatrical performance, my scholarly interest in Khon as performance is hardly a random one. Having never been reduced to an object of Western colonization (a fact of which Thais are very proud), Thailand avoided the tragedy of cultural fragmentation and amnesia that plagued many of her Southeast Asian neighbors. At the same time, however, Thailand never enjoyed the attention of Western scholarship. Ironically, this former negligence can be the current researcher’s blessing, for under such isolated conditions, Khon has maintained itself as an exceptionally pure art form, both in training and production. A prime example of this purity is found in the ambiguous relational tension of actor and role that is grounded in the paradoxical mystery of the mask.

Both ritually and theatrically, the ancient desire for transformation and transcendence is manifested in the paradox of self repulsion and self possession. In order for the magic and the metamorphosis to work, it is necessary both to conceal one’s identity and somehow to free oneself from the chains of the corporeal. By donning a mask, the ancient priest or shaman hid--and therefore preserved--his/her countenance, and yet at the same time opened--and therefore gave up--his/her body to the admittance and the assimilation of another spirit: that of the god or demon he/she sought to placate or that of the animal or enemy he/she sought to subdue in the hunt or in warfare. Is the actor’s task all that different? One “assimilates” a role in a similar manner. Like the ancient ritualist, the masked actor does not wipe out but preserves his/her spirit and simultaneously gives up his/her body to another spirit. As such, the performer is not him/herself but is also not not him/herself, for the self as identity is never simply erased; it always exists in tension with the role. It is through this ambiguous relational tension of body and mask, of self possession and being possessed, that the illusion of character is generated, that the [page 47] otherness of the divine or demonic is sustained.

The relational tension of self and mask creates a powerful illusion, a pure appearance that dwells in that ambiguous realm between the real and the unreal, between the corporeality of form and the void of space. And whether one is a contemporary theatrical spectator or a participant in an ancient tribal ritual, the experience is the same. As Joseph Campbell has observed, such an experience is hardly a matter of credulity but of its temporary suspension in deference to a playful and yet earnest participation within a sphere where one can be genuinely frightened by, and in awe of, a visage that he/she knows perfectly well to be a masked--and mortal--performer. (9)

Because the mask is such a multi-dimensional expressive form, it should be quite clear that Khon is something more than a simple entertainment. In the West, for example, we continue to foster a vague notion of theatre as having had ritual implications of an undetermined sort during some undetermined time in antiquity; in Khon, however, these implications are central and it is in the mask that they are expressed.

While engaged in my field research at the College of Dramatic Arts in Bangkok, I had the opportunity to meet with a mask-maker who works at the National Theatre, which is literally next-door to the College of Dramatic Arts. As one might guess, such a profession is passed down through one’s family; he learned the art from his father and he will give it to his children. From the initial creation of the basic shape from a master mold, to the application of the many intricate pieces of lacquered ornamentation, to the painting of the definitive curve of the eyebrow, every step is carried out by hand. The work requires not only a carefully trained hand and a sharp eye but a disciplined heart as well. He told me that the construction of many of the masks is routine, even second nature after so many years. But if he is creating the mask of a god, or if he has been commissioned by a performer to make a mask of the monkey Hanuman or the demon Totsagan, he will go to the temple beforehand in order to pray to the Buddha and to give alms to the monks in tribute to his father. He will not drink, smoke or “carouse” while the mask is in progress.

The Khon mask is therefore regarded as an embodied spirit, albeit a dormant one until the mask is actually worn. In its presence, one conducts oneself with the same deference and respect that one would afford another living being. Thus, in accordance with normative Thai etiquette, one never places a mask on the ground, steps over it or points toward it with the foot. To sit or to stand above the mask is to make one-self superior to the spirit it embodies.

This deference to the mask governs the wearing of it as well. No one--at least no one who is knowledgeable--would dare to put on a mask that is not his/hers. Even the performer must engage in rituals of initiation as a part of training before being granted the privilege of wearing the mask of the role for which one trains. Indeed, it is said that if an uninitiated or “outside” person puts on a Khon mask, he/she will be unable to remove it ever again! Whether or not such a thing is in fact believed by the Thai is hardly the point; its significance lies in what it says about the sacred relationship between mask and wearer.

[page 48] In the performance of Khon, the mask is a relational “tent of meeting” between actor and role, between temporal and eternal. So much so that prior to every performance of Khon, the masks are set up on an altar-like table at center stage, oftentimes in full view of the house. The performers pay homage and make offerings to the spirits of the characters and master teachers by invoking and acknowledging their presence within the shape of the masks. This ritual invocation implicitly affirms another sacred relational tension, in that the primary audience is composed not of the people who come to the theatre but the spirits of these characters and teachers. Those who hold the tickets are present more as witnesses to--and therefore participants in--the eternal performance.

IV

The suggestion that performance may serve as a theological agenda addresses and challenges the very assumptions which often inform our overall perception of the sacred. Historically, the Christian theological consciousness has exhibited little positive interest in the ambiguities, relational tensions and “duplicities” of performance but a great preoccupation, on the other hand, with the inherent nature of the respective elements which constitute it.

The traditional approaches to the performance of Eucharist are informing in this respect. In the definitive arguments over its sacramental character, the consecrated elements of bread and wine are generally regarded in one of two ways. Either they are embraced objectively as the corporeal embodiments of grace, or, by way of reaction, they are disregarded as “only symbols” which, in one’s profound misappropriation of the term, usually means little more than a kind of “visual aid” that points to something one privately considers to be rather preposterous within the parameters of an empirical world.

If the breadth of one’s capacity for theological conception is wholly discursive, i.e., delimited by objective reality at one end and mere signification at the other, where, then, are we to seek the ambrosia if it be neither here nor there? As Joseph Campbell has written:

It must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever its sense has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the door. (10)

The only option remaining is the ambiguous realm of performance, in which the operative presupposition is neither belief nor disbelief but disengagement from the discursive restrictions of both. “When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” (11)

We need to recognize that which is fundamental to the celebration of Eucharist: the [page 49] performative significance of Jesus’ engagement in table relationships.

Ideally, the preparation, the presentation and the consumption of food and drink are nothing less than art forms: performative contexts for the intimacy of human relationship. On the other hand, the table can also serve as a paradigmatic microcosm of one’s overall socio-economic assumptions. Such a table becomes a barrier which is indicative of exclusivism or even the sexist and/or racist denial of another’s personhood. For Jesus, however, the table was a context for teaching and, as expressed in the previous citation from the Gospel of Luke, revelatory disclosure. But Jesus was most readily identified, not by his eating and drinking in themselves, but by the circumstances within which he did no: he ate and drank with sinners and tax collectors. (12)

As John Burkhart writes, “Meals are, so to speak, among his ‘means of grace.” (13) By radically opening his table as a context for intimate relation with the marginalized and the poor, Jesus revealed the eternity of God’s graceful presence in the temporal experience of eating and drinking with them. It was not revealed in that from which they partook but in the relational act of doing so. There is nothing sacred about this bread until I share it with you; there is nothing eternal about this cup until we both drink from it. And it is this graceful eternity that Jesus revealed in the temporality of the “upper room.” So also, our sacramental performance should not be regarded solely as the remembrance of a particular meal but as the celebration of that which is revealed in all of them: the prophetic vision--the ambrosia--of an alternative social reality. And the remarkable thing is that the performance does not envision something new as much as it recovers something quite old, something to which we have perhaps been blind, either by unconscious negligence or by conscious will:

A man once gave a great banquet, and he invited many; and at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, “Come; for all is now ready.” But they all alike began to make excuses.. Then the householder said in anger to his servant, “Go quickly into the streets and the lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.... God out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. (14)

The performance of sacrament is relational because the performance of relationship is sacramental. Not unlike the Siamese dragon and the Kingdom of Ayutthaya, Christian sacrament is a metaphor that expresses the very spirit of Biblical theology overall. Consider: 1] The entire biblical experience is grounded in the premise that covenantal being can never be a matter of promoting the polarity of divine chosenness over that of human ethical behavior but of revealing and living out the contingencies of both in relational tension. 2] Ideally, God is “imaged” in human-kind. As an “image of God,” the human being is like a mask through which God is revealed and yet hidden. 3] The incarnation in Jesus Christ unites the divine and the human in an [page 50] irresolvable ambiguity, thereby revealing and yet hiding a vital otherness that is beyond the sum of the parts which constitute it. 4] The sacramental is like a mask through which God is revealed and yet hidden.

V

The dramatist has long known that performance is a creative response to the ambiguity of our human condition. As David George writes, “Drama has always been about choice but the existential freedom it therefore proclaims is always a prelude to suicide, for any choice privileges one of two available options and amputates the other. Performing--so long as it sustains--prolongs the suspense by holding two options in a state of suspended irresolution. In a world of diminishing options and rapidly disappearing alternatives, such an activity cannot be worthless.” (15) Our performative experience of relation--with one another, with history, with the environment and ultimately with the Holy--is sometimes fleetingly present, often shadowed in ambiguity, but always enticingly real.

“Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?” (16) If the inquiry or response is but a desperate quest for clarity and resolution, we are selling ourselves tragically short. In performance, truth dwells amidst the ambiguity of the pulling of the Siamese dragon: may we continue to wrestle with it faithfully as a vital expression of both the quandary of our humanness and the grace of God among us.

Endnotes

1. Dr. Timothy D. Hoare is Assistant Professor of Religion and Theatre at Missouri Valley College. Dr. Hoare’s full-length book of the same title, Pulling the Siamese Dragon, was published in October 1996 by the University Press of America.
2. R. Grainger, The Language of the Rite (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974) xi.
3. S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953) 31-32.
4. L. Pronko, Theatre East and West (Berkeley: University of California Press,1967) 16.
5. M. L’Engle, Walking on Water (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1980) 50.
6. T. Martland, “Question: When Is Religion Art? Answer: When it is a Jar.” D. Apostolos-Cappadona, ed. Art, Creativity and the Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 1984) 259.
7. Source unknown; a prime example of great words that ones hears cited in a forgotten context but is forever unable to locate in print.
8. Ramayana (1,45); Mahabharata (1.17). For an isolated translation of the myth itself, see, e.g. W. O’Flaherty, trans., Hindu Myths (London: Penguin Books, 1975) 23.
9. J. Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol.1 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960) 23.
10. Campbell, The Masks of God, 27.
11. Luke 24.30-31. Oxford Annotated Bible.
12. Matthew 11.19; Mark 2.13-17; Luke 14.15-24; 15.1-2;19.1-10.
13. J. Burkhart, Worship (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) 83.
14. Luke 14.16-18, 21, 23. Oxford Annotated Bible.
15. D. George, “On Ambiguity: Towards a Post-Modem Performance Theory.” Theatre Research International, Vol. 14, No. I (Spring, 1989) 81.
16. John 18.38, Oxford Annotated Bible.