ABSTRACT
Everyone knows the theatre originated out of ritual; the textbooks tell us so: ‘The origins of theatre go back far into the past, to the religious rites of the earliest communities’ (Hartnoll 1968:7). They even know what these rituals were: ‘Songs and dances in honour of a god, performed by priests and worshippers dressed in animal skins, and of a portrayal of his birth, death and resurrection’ (ibid.). If one asks how they (can) know this, they tell us that ‘even now similar ceremonies can be discovered among primitive peoples’ (ibid.). Despite their conceding that the process ‘must have been a slow one and it is not possible to pinpoint exactly the various stages’ (ibid.: 8), the primary sequence is unquestioned-and universal: in a recent expose of the inadequacies of most textbooks’ coverage of Asian theatres, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei castigated a number of authors for not-‘correctly’—identifying the origins of Noh (and Chinese and Indian theatre, etc.) in shamanism (and Shinto harvest rituals, ancestor worship, etc., etc.; Sorgenfrei 1997:229, 237, 241).
