The god of theatre
In Ancient Greece, plays were performed in honour of Dionysos – god of wine, of the mask, and of theatre. Above all, Dionysos is the god who dissolves boundaries – between god and human, human and animal, woman and man, old and young, the individual and the group. Dionysos is the god who takes you beyond your normality, beyond the limitations of your everyday human condition.
When, in rehearsal, the actor leaves her or his self behind, and for the very first time experiences him or herself as being the character they are ‘playing,’ it is a genuinely Dionysian moment – for Dionysos is the god who takes you beyond your narrow self. It’s crucial that this ‘Dionysian moment’ arises in the first full sense of being the character. What happens after that is less clear-cut. But what exactly happens in this moment? Do you ‘get inside the character’? Or does the character ‘get inside you’?
In order to try to answer this, I’ll first take a tour through the sacred origins of theatre….
Why Dionysos? Jean-Pierre Vernant and Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux write, “The invention of theater, a literary genre that presented fiction onstage as if it were real, could only make its impact within the framework of the cult of Dionysus, the god of illusions, confusion, and the constant muddling of reality and appearances, truth and fiction.” (“Features of the Mask in Ancient Greece” in Jean Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p.205.) Walter Otto says, “The grandeur of the idea of Dionysus lives on in tragedy…. The wearer of the mask… is himself and yet someone else. Madness has touched him – something of the mystery of the mad god, something of the spirit of the dual being who lives in the mask and whose most recent descendant is the actor.” (Dionysus: Myth and Cult, pp. 209-10.)
If we compare the case of India (where theatre also emerged in ancient times), the myth of the origin of theatre as described in the Natya Sastra (‘Drama Manual’) directly involves many gods, not just one, although strictly speaking Bhrama has the greatest responsibility simply because he is the Creator. Even so, it is reasonable to associate theatre more with the god Shiva, the ‘Lord of the Dance’ because, in a very general way, drama grows out of dance. Interestingly, Shiva is not conceived as the creator of dance but as its rememberer. This is because dance, unlike drama, is held to be without origin. (Bharat Gupt, Dramatic Concepts: Greek and Indian, p. 73.)
Perhaps a closer analogy with Greece may be found in Africa, at least according to Wole Soyinka’s account in Chapter One of Myth, Literature and the African World. Soyinka associates African, more specifically Yoruba, ritual drama, which already has a ‘tragic feeling,’ with the god Ogun, who shares a number of characteristics with Dionysos, above all his “incorporation of seemingly contradictory elements” and his ability to cross the transitional abyss between the different worlds. The latter is exactly what the actor in ritual drama must do to reach the spirit world. And just as Ogun was torn apart by cosmic winds on his journey, so the actor must prepare mentally and physically for his “disintegration and re-assembly”. Lastly, the consumption of palm wine is mandatory in Ogun’s worship. Dionysos, of course, is the god of wine.
Putting it crudely, we can say that Dionysos is a god ‘with a foot in two camps,’ the divine and the human. This is because he is a god with a human mother, Semele, who was impregnated by Zeus. He seems much more willing and likely to ‘just appear’ among humans than his fellow gods; ‘Olympian isolationism’ is not for him. Moreover, he often appears in human form. But he also demands recognition of his divinity, with terrible consequences if this is not granted. If it is granted, his followers discover the divine within themselves, powers and domains of being beyond the normal, everyday confines; they are taken ‘beyond themselves’ in literal ecstasy, standing outside themselves. The keyword here is beyond. You may have something divine ‘within’ yourself, but, properly understood, it comes from elsewhere. This aspect of Dionysos is symbolized by the mask, with which he is much more closely associated than any other god. Any mask inscribes an absence, something beyond it that is not the mask itself; but it also promises the ‘Dionysian moment’ in which this absent referent seems to enter the mask, in a way that cannot quite be understood or predicted.
This answers the question I left hanging earlier. When, in rehearsals, you feel really in the character and in the dramatic situation for the very first time, you should really understand it the other way round; suddenly the character and the dramatic situation are in you.
Because something has arrived here from that elsewhere.
Lastly, in relation to the nature of masks Otto cites a saying among certain peoples that “spirits have no back” (91). That is, they always appear facing you; you are caught in their gaze; you cannot walk round them. Dionysos is like this. On some vases he is painted head turned to face out at the viewer, although all the others, including gods, are in profile. Similarly a mask represents one aspect, the face, of a being, not the back of the head. By extension, theatre as a whole has exactly the same characteristic – the world on stage “has no back”; if you look for it, you end up backstage! What does this tell us? That Dionysos is not just there in the front row, a cult statue, watching the play alongside his priest (as was customary in ancient Athens). He is also in the performance, which is itself a kind of elaborate mask, looking back at us, the audience.
When you watch a live play, therefore, you also get caught in the god’s gaze.
Lastly, here's a link to something I wrote a few years ago about the almost entirely lost genre of the ancient satyr play, which once had a very special role in the intimate association of the god Dionysos with the practice of theatre. In it I refer to quite a few of the exercises included in Re-Imagining Your Body. In fact I might even claim that there's something truly Dionysian in re-imagining your body!