ABSTRACT
Ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes employs the term “pilgrimage” to describe his experience of Active Culture, the participatory paratheatrical activities initiated by members of the Laboratory Theatre in the 1970s. Grimes writes:
A pilgrim is a person in motion […] an ordinary person […] proceeding through extraordinary space—in-between space, liminal, threshold space, boundary crossings, […] paraordinary space. Grotowski calls this space ‘paratheatrical.’ It is parareligious as well […] Yet ‘paraordinary’ does not mean ‘supernatural.’ It means very-natural, very-ordinary, authentically simple and direct. […] The form of a pilgrimage is makeshift, improvised, spontaneous. (“Route to the Mountain: A Prose Meditation on Grotowski as Pilgrim” 248–49)
