THE RIPPLE of brown muscles and the holocaust of feeling coming from the stage evoke memories of the Afro-American experience — an art compounded of the mix of cultures and races. But this ritual performance was never intended for a ceremonial ground in an African jungle. It is not part of the complex tribal memory of a people or the result of a shamans instruction. Rather, the dance was formulated in every detail by choreographer George Faison and relentlessly rehearsed by members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for presentation to a predominantly white audience at a Broadway theater. For many spectators, the dancing is the quintessence of primitive mysteries, while for others it amounts to Uncle Tom in tights.
The dance is called Gazelle, and like many of the Ailey Company works, it is about African ritual — though it is not really African and is not actually ritualistic in the formal meaning of the word. But, in an important new sense, Gazelle is nonetheless an authentic ritualization of the search of Black Americans for roots. It is a private ritual created by a modern incarnation of the shaman whom we call "the artist."
Whether ritual is tribal or private, it serves an urgent function both for the Blacks who lived for centuries in Africa and produced a rich civilization and for American Blacks who were deprived of their culture when they were abducted. Ritual sustains the life of a people by reshaping "nationalistic" experience into a significant form unique to the culture which produces it. Ritual is not a product of primitive people.
Rather, it is produced by all peoples still in touch with the capacity to express themselves in metaphor. Though ritual is primal, it is not primitive. It is neither simple, crude, nor barbaric. To the contrary, ritual is a complex, pervasive, and remarkably human process which exists everywhere in history and everywhere on Earth. It gives people an access to the ineffable and it provides them with ways of dealing with forces which seem beyond their comprehension and control.
There are two kinds of ritual. The first, studied by ethnologists, is familiar to us: it is an unself-conscious act without deliberate "aesthetic" concerns, arriving from anonymous tribal influences over many generations and epitomizing the groups fundamental value system. The second form of ritual is new: it is the creation of an exceptional individual who transforms his or her experience into a metaphoric idiom known as "art." These two ritual forms necessarily overlap. There is no question that idiosyncratic art is highly influenced by tribal rites.
This process is visible in the works of many twentieth-century artists of a highly individual style: Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain altered the development of art when they discovered African masks and conveyed their admiration for the artifacts to the young Picasso and Matisse. Henry Moore contributed a major new direction in sculpture through the influence on his work of the carved Chac-Mools found in pre-Columbian Middle America. And in dance, such innocent imitations as the tarantella in George Balanchines Roma and such potent emulations as the American Indian rites in Martha Graham s Primitive Mysteries are significant examples of the ways that tribal rituals shape and vitalize the idiosyncratic rites of artists.