ABSTRACT

In the theatre of the recent half century, knowing one’s self is made as impossible as knowing the present. By confronting the implications of habit, theatrical performance not only models Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the social construction of self and reality, it participates in it. However, by participating in the embodied construction of reality, performance reveals that embodied action can also take reality apart. Metatheatricality, a staple of postmodern performance, provides for the undoing of the structures that determine the limits of possibility. Theatre, here, is again flowing in a channel with religious ritual. The temple rituals that the Mormon community of Nauvoo, Illinois, created in the 1840s show the manner in which ritual can disassemble and rebuild a self as something it wasn’t before. Part of ritual’s force comes from its manner of countering physical habit and part comes from its inherent role playing. Psychologist Hjalmar Sundén’s identification of role playing as the ground of reality is evident in such mystics of the High Middle Ages as Margaret Ebner, whose visceral experience of divinity seems to have arisen from playing with a baby Jesus doll.