Ghosts Today
We told ourselves the modern world was disenchanted. Then we sold out a stadium, painted our faces in team colours, and screamed in unison at a man on a stage. The fire is still burning. We just put a roof over it.
No. 01
Ancient form
Communal ecstatic dance around a central fire
Forty thousand bodies, one stage, one rhythm, one light show standing in for the flames. The lead singer is the shaman; the encore is the second invocation.
No. 02
Ancient form
Mock-combat rituals enacting the hunt
Painted faces, team totems, war songs, a bounded field of play, a victorious and a defeated tribe. The stakes are symbolic. The grief is not.
No. 03
Ancient form
Initiation rites marking passage from youth to adulthood
A bounded time. A robe that hides the everyday self. An elder hands the initiate a scroll. The community witnesses. Without the witnesses the rite does not work.
No. 04
Ancient form
Mask traditions in which the wearer is, briefly, the spirit
An ordinary person enters the convention floor as Spider-Man, as Sailor Moon, as a character from a story the whole tribe knows. For the duration of the rite, they are.
No. 05
Ancient form
Tribal assembly with charismatic chief and call-and-response
A single elevated figure. A crowd that finishes their sentences. Lights, music, banners, chants. The form is older than every word being spoken.
No. 06
Ancient form
Burial rites with ochre, song, and procession (c. 100,000 BCE)
Black clothing as ritual costume. The eulogy as the storyteller's act. The procession as the oldest theatre route on earth.
"The actor and the audience are forty thousand years old. The proscenium arch is two thousand. Everything since is decoration."