Participatory Ritual and the Carnivalesque

Joel at the Burning Man festival

'A Delightful Chaos'
Jewish ritual in performance – and performance in Jewish ritual – creates ‘a delightful chaos’, a carnival in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of the word. We create a space where hierarchies are inverted, prohibitions abolished, costumes and masks worn, and the body and emotions rule as much as the head. We experience affirmation through the reflection of participants’ culturally-specific experience and framework, and suspension through the carnivalesque loss, reversal even, of received communal norms and mores.

Collective Agency
When a group sharing a set of experiences, understandings, values or cultural markers enter the ‘liminal space’ of performance, particularly carnivalesque performance involving participation,
not only can they be brought together but what they are coming together to mean is up for grabs. In other words, the borders of the temporary community are radically unstable and, if the performance is open enough, can be determined by the participants themselves. Participation in particular “voids destiny and fortune” (Richard Schechner, Environmental Theatre). Participants are affirmed in their specific identity but are granted collective agency over where the performance takes them. Moreover, if a piece of theatre can use a wide enough range of different cultural references so as to be as inclusive – if it can speak with a ‘soft cultural accent’ – then it is not just the ‘internal’ borders that are blurred and redrawn, but the very outer limits of the group. If you are ‘in the room’ then you are part of the “community for the time being”.

Joel modeling Jewish religious fashion

Bringing People In
That is why embodied performance, play and spectacle have such power in a Jewish communal context. It is the power to ‘bring people in’ at the same as confounding their expectations and giving a sense of possibility. For example, it’s what Storahtelling does in its approach to the Torah service, adapting the ancient tradition of the live translator or ‘meturgeman’ to create a new theatrical contribution to synagogue ritual. But the possibilities are endless. If we take ritual into the arena of participatory play we encourage engagement at the same time as experimentation. We create a space in which to try things out. And we include many who would otherwise walk away.

Joel Stanley is a Jewish educator, theatre practitioner and community organiser, working in a variety of Jewish communities in the UK and internationally. He is the Director of International Programming for Moishe House, a facilitator for Streetwise GB, a Mobile Maven for Storahtelling, and the Artistic Director of Merkavah Theatre Company.