(...)All around us there are rituals: repetitive behaviour patterns performed with meaning and symbolic representation. It is the fact that ritual is so present, that religion is so openly talked and assumed that attracts so much the western tourist to India! The easy acess to another's culture!
It is to compensate the somehow lack of ritualistic performance, collective behaviour, gathering, coreographed rehearsed movement, that people come to the East, in search of the "mystical".

What we call the mystic behaviour is a result of a meaningfull act. It is born in the mental projections of ourselves (our thoughts and emotions) upon our actions (movements and interactions) filling them with meaning, attention, believes, awareness. Ritual is a manifestation of a conscious behavioural pattern. These physical-mind connection, its present awareness, lacking so much in the western society can only be replaced by one act: the performative act.

Theatre is the new ritual, a spiritual awareness exercise, a collective gathering. It's the salvation of Unity in Society, the unique possible replacement of Religious Thought and Practices. It is though not a religion, or a set of believes, but rather a collective act, it's impulsive rather then a form of control.

It is then fundamental that its development aims the sacred, the rite, the ritual, the collective and its clear purpose is to enshorten the gap between the individual and the collective consciouness.
It is therefore most important for all theatre practicioners to consider envolving the audience in their performance, and to offer this performance to a superior consciouness, the Cosmic Order, as a collective and sacred ritual.

That was always and it will always be the place of succefull performance in societies, and if History didn't happen in cycles we couldn't be so sure that research for the modern performance lays ultimately on the ancient roots of Performative social Behaviour- RITUAL!

from : " modern rituals"- a book of performative research in Eastern Cultures by Ana Baldaia