WHAT IS “RITUAL THEATER” TO ME
My understanding of ritual theater is about creating a safe place, where we feel free to expand our awareness, allow ourselves to feel deeply inside, experience and embody the subtle, pure, authentic essence of who we are on deeper levels of our existence. It’s about the balance between receptivity and activity - allowing of taking time for the vision to come to us before we take action. It’s about inviting more of ourselves to be embodied, the multidimensionality of our being and different invisible realities to be experienced and then expressed through movement, voice, storytelling… For me theater is a tool for becoming conscious of sacredness of ourselves, the nature and life itself.
In those few days of being together we will devote our attention to deepening our awareness of the natural world. We will have a rare opportunity of spending time in the embrace of the WILDERNESS. In order to become able to feel the subtle beauty of nature and her beings, as well as ourselves as a being of nature, we will need to step out of comfort cone and open our ability of perception to the simplicity of silence.
ROMANA ERCEGOVIC, Ph.D, is a theatre artist, dramatist and researcher, actor in puppet theater for children, storyteller…
As a student of dramaturgy at Theatre Academy in Ljubljana, she soon realized that theater art has lost its original purpose. So she devoted last 15 years to profound research of the ancient understandings of art, the rituals of different indigenous cultures, the contemporary practices of ritual theater - with the intention of developing a new approach to theater. She realized that the basics of the ancient approach to the original ritual forms of theater was the direct connection to the spiritual realms, to deeper layers of human being and to the natural world, which can be accessible to us also today, in contemporary society and art, by expanding the consciousness and nourishing the connection with our own uniquely intuitive vision. During years she has been practicing different ways of connecting to this inner knowingness, applying the intuitive method of creative process to creation of several performances in the Ritual Theater Soul of the Earth (Prayer to the Earth, Electra, White Buffalo Woman, Mary Magdalene).
At her master degree study at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, she theoretically developed her vision of theatre art and explained it in the thesis Ritual Theatre in a Feminine Way: Ritual Theatre as a Tool for Re-Awakening the Sacred Perception. Her latest research The Contemporary Ritual Theatre: The Greek Mysteries and their Influence on Revitalization of Rituality in the Theatre of the 20th and 21st Century, demonstrates the evidence that the ritual revitalization phenomenon in the context of European theatre which occurred in the beginning of the 20th century, is directly connected to the heritage of European archaic Neolithic culture, the so-called religion of the Goddess which has been preserved in the form of Greek mysteries, particularly those within the cult of goddess Demeter, as it is the case of Eleusinian mysteries.
Romana presented her performances, lectures and workshops in Slovenia, USA, Massachusetts, California, Arizona; Russia, Italy and Serbia.
More about Romana and her Ritual Theater Soul of the Earth:
http://www.souloftheearththeater.com/en/index.aspx
