“Without symbolism there could be no culture”
Mary LeCron Foster, p. 366

“Performance anthropology”, a term (or discipline) coined by Victor Turner, studies different types of cultural performances such as carnival, ritual, theatre and poetry, which are considered by the author to be “an essential part of the anthropology of experience and an explanation of life itself”1. From Hollywood to Bali and classical Athens, the present paper will focus on the way symbolic discourse is engaged into a “deep” social commentary developed by a particular community in times of crisis, and subsequently how meaning is expressed and conveyed on the theatrical stage by an artist to the broader audience.
One of the most important concepts analyzed by Turner is that of social drama, with its four phases: breach, crisis, redress and either reintegration or recognition of schism, believed to be in direct relation to different genres of cultural performance and translated into stage drama by socially positioned actors: “The stage drama, when it is meant to do more then entertain – though entertainment is always one of its vital aims – is a meta-commentary, explicit or implicit, witting or unwitting, on the major social dramas of its social context”2. Clifford Geertz alongside Victor Turner cited above, was perhaps one of the first anthropologists who considered that theatre is a sort of metaphorical commentary defining it as “a story a group tells itself about itself”, a reading of its experience and an interpretive reenactment of it as well. Much like Freud’s theory of patent and latent meaning, Turner envisaged a relation between social drama and stage drama as one of interdependence emphasizing also two ways of looking at an event: from the manifest, visible realm and from the latent, hidden or unconscious3.