earticle

영어

Ritual is discerned not as religion alone. but as a pattern conceived for the purpose of healing and rejuvenating a specific community, one that understands innate illustrative icons and symbols--music, dance. language and folklore. It is in this sense that Black drama has been delineated as ritual or ritualistic. Black artists facilitate the paradoxical process of refusing Western models through African ritual, what really turns out to be a denial of, arid reaction against, Euro-Western archetypes. For the Black playwrights such as Baraka and Shange, the quest into the ritual pattern is more than just another abstract aesthetic inquiry It represents, rather, both a means of emotional and spiritual self-preservation and a ritual of symbolic transformation. Baraka employs ritual to present theatre for social change. His theatre is one with an explicit social message that hopes to arouse audiences' social awareness and move that audience to social action. Shange's choreopoem is an innovative theatrical expression that combines poetry. prose, song. dance, and music to arouse an emotional response in the audience. Those elements define a distinctly Afro-American ritual heritage. As a theatrical expression, the ritual device of their plays emerge from a distinctly African tradition of storytelling, of movement. and of emotional catharsis.