Word: shamanism
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...belongs to the actor - or the character - who is always "on." He is the metaphor matador, the tale twister, the verbal bully who mesmerizes those onstage and in the audience with his endless conjury of felicitous syllables. He is the theater's grand gabby old man, the shaman, the incantator, who goes back to Aeschylus and forward to O'Neill and Osborne, Stoppard and Shepard. Put a spotlight on him, and the eloquence swells, the spell continues. He simply will not shut...
...those who refuse to become part of the extended family, there is a price to pay. They are 'ostracized and denied important services. If their ailing children are sent to the tribal shaman rather than the clinic, the parents may be denied the permits required to take a long bus trip or change jobs. An unemployed villager who refuses a job in the tinsmithy or furniture shop will be banished from Luhanga because it is assumed that, out of work, he will soon start stealing...
...contrast, "The Tree of Life" uses nothing but metaphoric gesture: expressive intent informs each movement. The work is simply structured One group of dancers works as a unit into which three characters--"the shaman," "the first horse," and "the mother"--emerge and recede. The section motifs, derived from imporivsation directed by guest choreographer Aileen Passloff, are simple as well: huddling in a mass, journeying in a chain of linked arms, imitating birds and horses and animal-demons. Yet the logic of how one section plays off against the next is puzzling. What sort of beings are these--ancient creatures, spirits...
...mythical hero of his last album, Natty Dread, has already become a national symbol. Marley is a cynosure both in Jamaican society and in the trenchtown ghetto where he grew up. He seldom appears in either milieu, but when he does, it is with a retinue that includes a shaman, a cook, one "herbsman" laden with marijuana, and several athletes...
...versatile. As a new wave of show-biz biographies gloomily illustrates, stars must now be pumped up into symbols of their profession or indictments of their society. It was in just this spirit of distorted inflation that Albert Goldman last year took Lenny Bruce from shlepper to counterculture shaman in 13 uneasy chapters...