Shamanic Imaginaries and Gestures on the Contemporary Stage
A constellation of contemporary stage artists today mobilizes modes of thought, practices, and aesthetics derived from shamanism—a relational technology designed to establish dialogue with spirits for healing purposes, which requires displacing the ontological boundaries structuring modern thought. Shamanism appears as a reservoir of possibilities from which each artist draws according to their needs, without claiming shaman status. This research thus avoids the pitfall of a binary opposition—are these artists engaged in an authentic shamanic approach or merely representing this imaginary?—to examine instead what these borrowings open as becomings for theater. Thus, the question formulated by anthropologist Tania Stolze Lima: “What does shamanism allow contemporary theater to become?” (apud Carneiro da Cunha, 2020) designates a process where shamanism acts as a force that displaces the very nature of theater, making it become-other. This perspective aligns with current research on aesthetic mutations that interrogate the consequences of major societal upheavals of our time (technological, economic, sociological, political, ecological, health-related…) on our systems of artistic representation and what art can do in the face of these upheavals (UR Arts: Practices and Poetics, University of Rennes 2, program “Observatory of Aesthetic Mutations,” 2022-2026). This thesis therefore considers these borrowings from shamanism as revealing this transformation of theater, which is currently rethinking its modes of being and action in the world, including the blurring of dichotomies structuring Western thought (human/non-human, life/death, self/world, visible/invisible…). The opposition between real and imaginary particularly structures this research, for when this distinction wavers, it troubles all boundaries. To fully deploy this conceptual framework, the imaginary in our analysis encompasses two meanings. On one hand, what pertains to fiction, an illusion distancing individuals from reality. Western modernity assumes a separation between art and life, between the world and its representation, where peoples with shamans leave the question open (Stépanoff, 2019). On the other hand, we consider the imaginary as the ontological foundation allowing other configurations of the world to emerge. This capacity of a community to conceive (to imagine) other possibilities thus establishes the existence of a battle of imaginaries whose outcome determines our reality. Thus, this analytical framework allows us to analyze from different angles how certain practices of the contemporary stage are worked by an essence of shamanism and through which creative gestures these artists translate it to the stage.
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