Community Restoration and Ritual Experimentation

                                                Ronald L. Grimes and Susan L. Scott

 

Below is a conversation between Susan Scott, founder of the award-winning Walkerton Water Stories Project (WWSP), and Ron Grimes, Director of the Ritual Studies Lab. Susan, a writer, and Ron, a ritual studies scholar, contemplate the possibilities for ritual and performance in starkly contrasting spaces: a barn near Walkerton, Ontario, site of a devastating tainted-water scandal, and the Ritual Studies Lab, a workshop once housed in Waterloo, Ontario, a university town. The timber-frame barn became the pop-up gallery and performance site of the WWSP, a modest humanitarian arts initiative created in response to the water tragedy. By contrast, the Ritual Studies Lab was a site of experimentation and research on ritual. The Lab persisted for thirty years, migrating discreetly between a series of bungalows the university had earmarked for demolition. The barn, despite its advanced age, is still standing. The Lab became portable, no longer confined to a building.

SS: Pairing an old barn with the Lab—what could they possibly have in common? What springs to mind is that they both served as working sites but also as retreats, as designated spaces for action and for contemplation. I’ve known about the Ritual Studies Lab for years. I confess I was curious, but I would not have made a good student.

RG: Even though I call it the Lab, there was never a single place. The Lab was conducted in a classroom, in an old house. The Lab migrated among a series of houses that the university had purchased and slated for eventual destruction to make room for new classrooms and dormitories. Lab spaces were typically the living and dining rooms of 1940s bungalows. Classes held in them were wonderfully, and necessarily, small—about a dozen students. Other university units stashed in houses tried to make them over into offices. We didn’t. We tried to honor the spirits of those poor, deceased houses. Sometimes our ritualized acts of honoring were ludic; sometimes, serious. Whether anyone believed in them or not didn’t matter. We made the rooms look sanctuary- or altar-like. Each one resembled a cluttered New Mexico santuario or a 17^th century cabinet of wonder; peculiar things hung out of drawers and perched atop bookcases. Bones and rags and dried flowers hung from ceilings and walls. As students came and went, year after year, they left gifts, often handmade or found objects, which became ritual implements or ceremonial decor used by the next generation of students. Drawing on such deposits I would spin “ancestral” tales about the forebears of that year’s class. From the outside, the labs were mere dilapidated houses, with bricks crumbling and paint peeling. From the inside, they were warm nests—at first a little strange, later ironically or playfully sacred. There was no furniture, only a carpet, typically threadbare. We sat (and played and danced and meditated) on the floor. “Grounding,” I’d say when a student would ask why. “It’s for grounding. That’s why we’re down here on the floor.”

Tell me about the barn at Stonyground. I saw it only once.

SS: It’s a striking example of the timber-frame barns that were once the hallmark of family farms all across Ontario. Big boxy outbuildings, most of them unpainted. Home to pigeons and mice and the cats who chased them. Livestock housed in the ground-floor stalls, corn stacked in the silo, hay stowed in the mow. A lot of barns are being razed now—it can cost up to $10,000 to keep a barn standing or to knock it down. So, a standing barn like the one we used at Stonyground signifies a real commitment. Either the owners are farming—which itself is a huge commitment—or they’ve set their sights on innovating with the space. Barns are invitations to imagining. I think of them as a kind of nest, as cabinet of wonder. Even when abandoned, a barn remains a kind of incubator.

Stonyground is a working farm that became renowned for its landscape architecture after retired scholar Douglas Chambers inherited the farm in the 1980s. It had been in his family for generations, in a historic district of the province known as the Queen’s Bush—a million acres first “taken up from the Crown” in 1850, when the influx of settlers resulted in its “opening.” That’s the language used. Land is “taken” and “opened.” The goal was to claim the last great swath of forested terrain after the Treaty of 1837 paved the way by relocating the Saugeen Ojibway “up peninsula.” Remove native people from the arable land and sell it to the settlers. That was the colonizing plan. So, while a barn evokes stability, the story of the land is unsettled, and conflicted.

Stonyground was new to me in 2002. We used it as a staging ground to present the fruits of a project we’d created the year before. The “we” being an ad hoc group of us that formed in response to the disaster. There had to be a role for artists, we felt, in the long hard road of recovery. In our case, we felt we had a role to play, collecting people’s stories, helping re-imagine, recast or co-create—pick your verb. The notion was that helping Walkerton tell its own stories “by mouth or by hand” might contribute to collective healing efforts.

RG: And Walkerton is?

SS: Walkerton is a small farm town in southern Ontario. As the county seat of Bruce, the town is home to the courthouse and the jail. There’s a Tim Hortons, also, by the river. And a lovely river town it was until May 2000, when the word “Walkerton” suddenly became synonymous with disaster. A devastating E.-coli epidemic had sickened 2,500 residents—meaning half the town. Seven people died, despite the best efforts of the local hospital. As it turns out, heavy spring rains had led to flooding that carried cattle run-off from a farmer’s field right into one municipal well—Well 14—that housed a failed filtration system. The result was pure disaster, with contaminated water pouring straight from people’s taps.

RG: Tragedy and scandal, on the one hand, and art and innovation, on the other. That’s quite the gulf.

SS: Yes, exactly. Walkerton’s identity, like that of Stonyground, is tied to the land. The pragmatics of living, the local sensibilities, are rooted in the region’s farming history. Stonyground rests on an incline near the Saugeen River and is linked to other farms and towns by two-lane roads, rolling fields and stands of hardwood bush. When we were there, in the month of May, Stonyground’s working landscape was in bloom, beautified by literary gardens and whimsical plantings. Old implements converted into sculptures. I found all of it transporting. My own home farm is in Bruce County, which I suppose makes me an urban-rural hybrid who is drawn to layered landscapes. When I stepped into the fragrant hay mow in Douglas Chambers’s barn, I felt right at home.

On the other hand, there’s no denying the tension, trying to launch unconventional labor (art-making) in a conventional (farm) setting. Bruce County is far from urban din and arty preoccupations. There was no arts council, no arts infrastructure we could draw on for support. On the other hand, you have these great canopies of clouds and fields and this immense quiet. On the human side, there’s a clannish preoccupation with roots. The old ways are revered. Outsiders remain suspect. I discovered a whole lost branch of my family during the project, which meant a lot to me, but to others not so much. But that’s to be expected under the circumstances. You can just imagine the impact of intruders—reporters, lawyers, engineers, health experts, and so on—all flooding the area, trying to make sense of the water scandal. Add to that a troupe of artists? For a lot of people it was all too much.

RG: So why go there? Why meddle in Walkerton’s affairs?

SS: Good question. As I say, my roots are in the county—so even though I didn’t know a soul in town, I felt I needed to respond. And I was simply one of thousands. Countless people donated time, talents and resources. Fresh water was shipped in from as far away as Fiji. I first heard about the outbreak on the news after the May long weekend in 2000: reports of helicopters airlifting children to hospitals, schools and business shuttered. It was a mystery what was making people sick. Health authorities suspected tainted water, but there was no proof. People were told to stay hydrated, it’s what you do when you fall sick. It took time to confirm the nightmarish news that the town’s own water was the culprit. Tap water was killing people. The E.-coli crisis was the great Canadian wake-up call. If a water disaster of that magnitude could happen in a bucolic place like Walkerton, it could happen anywhere, to anyone.                                                                     

RG: You initiated the Walkerton Water Stories Project. Why respond to an environmental crisis with stories rather than with science?

SS: Well, at first, I had no clue how to respond. What I had were vague questions about the shape of healing. What do you do when the very things that sustain a place—in this case, humans, cattle, water—are suddenly villainized? I was stewing about all this, as the tragedy unfolded and there was this terrible sense of helplessness. Six weeks or so later, at an ecology and performance conference in the UK, I ran into an old friend, Basia Irland, and when I told her what was happening, she said “Well, if you collect the stories, I’ll make a container for them.” And that was that. I felt commissioned. I knew I needed to act. And when I looked around at all these UK artists engaged in grassroots work, and their practices were down-to-earth, and wildly inventive, I thought, why can’t we do this at home? At the time Community Arts was still a relatively new concept to a lot of us, so it took some time to find other artists who felt the way I did, who would join me in co-creating something.

Long story short, a storyteller, visual artist, and I came together, and once we got some funding, we brought Basia in as well, to partner with a local citizens group on a community arts outreach program we called the Walkerton Water Stories Project. The aim was to collaborate with townspeople using different art forms—visual, performative, literary. Whatever folks were drawn to, whatever they could manage, whatever was some combination of pragmatic and cathartic. And whatever arts were made would then be presented or exhibited, given back to the community, as a means of helping to restore its dignity. I mean, you can just imagine what it means to be from “the bad water town.” The shunning, the shame, the property values plummeting, and so on. So, really what we launched was a restoration project. By taking back their story—telling things their way—people could reclaim their relationship to water. As it happens, Walkerton has an incredibly rich water history. Sudden storms, wild floods—the town had seen it all. People had been coping with calamity for generations, long before the deluge of forensic experts and legal analysts that swooped in, in 2000. Our group stumbled on that kind of natural and cultural history, and it’s then we understood that our role as artists was to listen, to attend, and to offer the tools for storytelling. We were diggers and dowsers, really, drawing local knowledge to the surface, trying to redirect the flow.

RG: How does the barn figure into all this?

SS: The water contaminant was cattle run-off, so wouldn’t a barn be the obvious place to gather? Stonyground became the restoration site—where the stories came to roost. We wanted to offset the bad news—medical and legal—with alternative inquiries in story, art, and song. So, we took over the place, really. Decorated the hayloft with bales and quilts. Feasted, wandered, sang. The fieldstone stable of the barn housed the Water Stories Prints exhibit that had been made by high school students under the guidance of Wesley Bates. Basia’s Walkerton Life Vest was displayed alongside the eerie E.-coli Scrolls—these eerie, ephemeral banners she had silk-screened. Singer-songwriter James Gordon held a rousing concert, followed by the stunning storytelling performance by Mary-Eileen McClear. It was she who breathed life into the script I’d written, Water Finds a Voice, based on the oral stories we had gathered.

Now, what about the Lab? Wasn’t it a ritual-and-arts kind of place?

RG: Like the barn, the Ritual Studies Lab was a place of storytelling, art, and song, and a place to experiment with the elements of ritual—action, space, objects, light, water, soil. That’s why we called it a lab. We could have called it a studio. There was truth in both labels, the one suggesting scientific research and the other, artistic work. The courses taught there were ritual  studies courses. For a while, I taught some of them collaboratively with a wandering, ex-Jesuit clown, Ken Feit. Since lab courses were taught at a provincial (state) university, we didn’t dare call the lab a “sanctuary.” Ritual studies, like anthropology and other social scientific disciplines, was—and still is—struggling with issues of cultural appropriation and representation, so a basic principle was never to imitate or pilfer existing ritual traditions, even though a particular element might echo a specific tradition.

Lab work was not religious, even though it was about religion and required ritualized labor. “Ritual-makers,” I’d say, “are merely plumbers, specialists in how to do things with water and buckets and mud and toys and masks and….” The work of the lab was to demystify the act of ritual construction and then to re-mystify it, but in such a way that a student of ritual would never again be tempted to think of ritual as beyond critique. That was the scholarly aim—to show how ritual acts could be constructed and subsequently deconstructed. Our approach to ritual was, you might say, domestic rather than ecclesiastical. For the most part, it was down to earth rather than lofty, ordinary rather than extraordinary.

But there were exceptions. Near the end of most courses, we’d leap out of the urban university classroom into a rural setting. We’d head to the countryside, hunker down in a barn, hide, then seek, in the woods. We made a radical shift from the ordinariness of classrooms and domestic spaces. We created or found a liminal space, something neither here nor there. Because we were working on death rites, we needed not only mystery but also more physical space, free from administrators or spectators. Once we went to a colleague’s farm, which had a spacious barn and crowded cemetery. Another time we used a Mennonite church camp. One time, we used on-campus portables and slept there until campus security caught us.

SS: What did you do in the sessions?

RG: Most of the regular class sessions proceeded in silence or with relatively little talk. There were the usual kinds of reading and writing assignments. There was time for reflection and discussion at the end of each session, but the beginning and middle consisted of “activities,” the most generic term I could find. The most frequently asked question was: What are these? Exercises? Games? Rituals? Drama? I’d reply, “You tell me.” The most interesting moments were those for which we couldn’t find a label. Some students would give up categorizing; others would still be driving themselves crazy at the end of the term, trying to classify what we were doing. Some of the activities were adapted from various sources: actor-training, martial arts, religious dance, and traditional storytelling; others were made up. The aim was to work with elements—the stuff—of ritual. So, for example, we might spend a session working with water or earth or a piece of rope or a plastic doll, or we’d circle a story with actions, then circle it again and again.

What about the barn? Your “restoration of stories” is an attractive notion, but what good is a barn, really? Do you ever worry that barns are just a relic of a past, a left-over from dying rural culture?

SS: You’d think so, but in some ways, barns are all the rage. They’re being retrofitted for recording studios, performances, galleries and workshops. This is an adaptive phase for vernacular architecture and land use. Like old churches, which are facing the same crises when it comes to sustainable use and upkeep, barns are outsize symbols of communal life.                                                                                                    

RG: I’m intrigued by the possibility of barn performances and barn galleries, but mainly because such events contradict my experience of actual, working barns. I grew up on a New Mexico farm-ranch where cows, pigs, and mice were slaughtered in the barn. Nobody else went there except my dad and me. The barn was a terribly lonely guy-space; women seldom went there. I can’t imagine that Ontario barns are very different from New Mexico barns.

SS: Well, there’s that! Traditionally, a barn is a heavily gendered site—as a girl, I was not allowed in barns. Having grown up in the city, my mom saw them as dangerous and dirty. Also as financial sinkholes, as in the old adage, “The house is nothing to look at, but the barn’s sure nice.” But a farm community has a stake in barns. Building them took master framers and dozens of men to raise the timbers. Thanks to the women, everyone ate well. My great-great-granddad Nathaniel Leeder, and his son, Ed, listed the supplies needed for a barn-raising. Historical accounts like the Leeder daybook (1854-1904) show how critical the whole process was not just to the survival of a family but to the health of the community. Everything from threshing, logging, and wood-cutting to quilting and sewing was done collectively, and barn-raisings became the hub of social gatherings, or “bees,” that helped offset the hardship and isolation of settler life. The most spectacular of all these events were the barn bees.

RG: One of the most shocking sights to me on the night of the Stonyground performance and celebration was all those tables laden with food. Where I grew up, barns were full of manure, and it was my responsibility to shovel it. The sight of edible things in a place where I expect vile runny stuff was both delightful and disconcerting.

SS: Exactly! I had the same reaction. But traditionally, the climax of barn bees was feasting and dancing. Out came the fiddles under moonlight for the christening of the threshing floor—and that of course was an open space in a liminal time that marked the triumph of one more communal effort. Like building, food preparation was a form of competition and display. The Barns of the Queen’s Bush lists as food for a crew of one hundred seventy-five men: “115 lemon pies, 500 doughnuts, 15 cakes, 16 chickens, 3 hams, 50 pounds roast beef….” Adapted barns, such as the one at Stonyground, make it possible to revive the spirit of these festive rituals.

RG: So, the food at Stonyground wasn’t just fuel; it was also performance. The barn and the grounds became a work of art.

SS: Yes. Of course, there’s an underside to the notion of barn as sacred space. Barns are also barriers. They signal the reclamation of the bush and land, the triumph of human ingenuity over the wild. Like the grid-shaped landscape over which a barn presides, the structure marks the ascendancy of the dominant culture, of right angles over randomness and curvature, of stone and wood and iron over the natural cycles of chaos and decline. As the agrarian culture that once shaped the destiny of field, wood, stone, and cattle tilts into decline, there’s a need for new myths and rituals. The question now is, when it’s all torn down, what will be reclaimed? What will be repurposed, and why?

There were once long-term plans for Stonyground that included conferences and workshops, so who knows, the barn may yet one day function as a lab. But if labs are prototypes for knowledge-gathering, what happened that you lost the Ritual Studies Lab?

RG: I didn’t quite lose the lab. It was gobbled up by a land-locked, therefore land-hungry, institution. I wanted a lab with no chairs, no desks and no equipment—a bare room. And universities can’t stand bare rooms. To create any kind of experimental space at a university, you have to call it either a lab or a studio and fill it with expensive equipment. I would have preferred to call our space an incubation chamber, a place where one sleeps in search of a revelation or vision. Since such chambers died out in ancient Greece, I knew I would never get away with dubbing the place “The Ritual Studies Incubation Chamber.” It was a coin toss between “lab” and “studio.” In the end, I went with “lab,” echoing perhaps the Polish Theatre Lab directed with Jerzy Grotowski. When he invited me to Poland, Grotowski was working with ritual, although it took in him twenty years to admit that out loud.

SS: Was the association of the Ritual Studies Lab with the Polish Theatre Lab explicit?

RG: No, I wasn’t doing theater. Besides, the university administration, not unlike the communist Polish government, would never have tolerated whirling with Sufis in the dark forest or trance-dancing with Haitians in a barn. The Polish Theatre Lab was originally in an urban theater, but, by the time I went there, Grotowski was carrying out his international experiments in a rural area that crisscrossed an old German-Polish border. The German trees stood all in a row, plantation style, and the Polish trees were randomly planted. As we whirled in the dark, we could always tell when we were passing from the one territory to the other. If we whirled long enough, the birds and deer would start to follow us, unafraid. This was Grotowski’s Tree of People Project; he was experimenting to see if people of different religions, cultures, and nationalities could interact ritually without talk or discussion.

SS: When the Lab shut down, you didn’t take it on the road, despite the hunger for experiential learning. Why is that? You don’t feel you have a responsibility to continue in some form?

RG: In the current intellectual climate, I don’t trust the hunger. The shift from experience-hunger to grade-hunger has been remarkable and pronounced. I love road shows. I’ve studied a few, such as turn-of-the-century “native” medicine shows, as well as Tibetan Buddhist monks on the circuit, but the last thing I want to do is to conduct a road show. Road shows are just exotic forms of evangelism. I don’t like working with unprepared audiences. I don’t like the “stir ‘em up and leave town” ethic. It’s easy to create deeply moving experiences that can’t be sustained beyond a weekend, highs that can’t really be integrated into everyday life. But I have no interest in stoking the fires of such experiences. I much prefer working with groups that are together for longer periods than a week. In Lab courses I would have a twelve- to thirteen-week term—occasionally even a 26-week one—in which to get to know participants. I prefer to work across longer periods of time.  Brief periods invite irresponsibility. Ritual requires time to be ingrained; even more time to be constructed or critiqued.

Anyway, to answer your question: I would, in fact, teach more Lab style courses if the circumstances were right. Since they are not, I’ll watch and wait.

SS: By ritual standards, your courses were short, even though the Lab was long-lasting.

RG: That’s true, but I was not trying to equip students with new rites to displace old ones. I was trying to get them to think about the processes of ritual construction and ritual criticism. In this respect, activities in the Ritual Studies Lab were consistent with the standard university agenda, to get people to think analytically and critically. Instead of trying to create experiences that wowed participants, I would break those experiences up by teaching students to step out of the experience to critique and reflect on them. I was trying to normalize the cycle of creativity, participation, and critical reflection so that all three moments in the process required each other, belonged together. I wasn’t trying to create an alternative tradition but generate an alternative attitude.

SS: And your attempts at normalizing that cycle are controversial.

RG: For sure, but not so much in the Lab or at my own university as in scholarly circles. The mere phrase “ritual criticism” raises hackles, and the very title of my book Ritual Criticism stirs up trouble. In that book I argue against standard definitions and theories of ritual insofar as they ignore or preclude the creative and critical processes that suffuse ritual. Ritual is usually defined as traditional, not creative; it is supposedly beyond criticism. But it isn’t, not really. Evaluating ritual activity is a normal part of ritual enactment. People are always complaining about, revising, or trying to improve weddings, funerals, and other kinds of ritual. The criteria are contested, but so are the criteria for making moral or aesthetic judgments.

For me, the real problem in both the Lab and in actual ritual circumstances isn’t theory or definition; it’s time. There just isn’t time for adequate ritual planning or ritual evaluation. Ritual is time-consuming, so it doesn’t easily fit into a consumer society’s cost-effectiveness models.

SS: Time is critical, isn’t it? Our work in Walkerton was far too compressed. People were just beginning to make the connections when it was time to wrap things up. Such is the nature of grant-driven projects. Time is strained by granting cycles, by expectations around what are reasonable periods for preparation, production, and critical reflection. For this kind of ecological and cultural restoration to succeed, we really need sustained periods of contemplative work based on ritual cycles of time. What we need, after poet Jannie Edwards, is “slow art.” Interdisciplinary teams of artists and scholars need to be able to work together in long-term residencies, where there’s time to dwell. Having too little time, especially on the heels of calamity and trauma, makes the work problematic. The question of how to work in community raises not only research and pedagogical issues but deeply ethical ones as well.

RG: You’re right. At Union Theological Seminary in New York City, theologian Tom Driver, performance theorist and practitioner Richard Schechner, and I had a public discussion about performance. One of the central questions was about the relationship between ritual and ethics. The ritual-ethics connection is a major theme in Driver’s Liberating Rites. Now that he’s retired from teaching, he’s become a dedicated social activist, so one of his questions to Schechner and me was, “Why don’t you spend more time on ethics in your ritual theory and pedagogy?” I understood why he posed the question.

I have interest in ethical issues–the environment, social justice, gender equality–but I’ve never made them a central focus of my own research and writing. One reason is because white North American cultures are so Protestantized that they tend to reduce everything, including religion, to ethics. As a result, it’s hard to get people to focus on ritual. Everyone wants to reduce ritual to ethics or politics or psychology. So, I’ve made it my business to focus stubbornly on ritual itself.

SS: Ah, yes, you yourself are a product of Protestant formation, so you understand it well. Do you have no interest, then, in applying ritual to ethical problems?

RG: Sure, I do. I was involved in the repatriation and re-burial controversies. I’m interested in the ethical and ritualistic problems of re-burying the excavated remains of Native people. I don’t avoid such activities either in class or in writing, but I typically become interested in them as ritual problems first, not as ethical issues. Once you become immersed in such a problem, you realize that rituals and ethics are always entangled. I suppose I’m saying that the ritual-ethics distinction is a gestalt question, a matter of which you cast as figure (or center) and which you make ground (background). Driver tends to put ethics in the foreground and cast other things in the background. I tend to put ritual in the foreground and cast everything else in the background. In both cases, ritual and ethics are integrally related, but the emphasis is different. In a sense, my whole academic career has been about trying to perceive anything in the world through the lens of ritual. I’ve taken up all sorts of issues, always relating them to ritual. I’m not saying that I experience the world that way, only that I have experimented with what you might call a ritual view of the world.

When you went to Walkerton, did you have an ethical agenda? Were you trying to change the world under the force of a moral imperative?

SS: We went in a year after the crisis, which we thought would be too late. But as it turns out, in a lot of ways that was too early. Our asking questions, trying to organize events, were experienced as pressure. People were still trying to recover, trying to court a normal life again. And this was in a rural county, remember. Imagine making a pitch to town council (which I did), to support storytelling as a mode of community restoration. That was unintelligible, really.

RG: That’s not surprising. Was the town council thrilled to hear that you were “divining,” listening to wells and ditches?

SS: Good point. Actually, we didn’t burden them with that—having artists underfoot was bad enough. The trouble was, we were asking people to remember what they most wanted to forget: “Stories, what for? You’re rubbing salt in the wound.”

So we began talking about natural history and cultural history, asking how we might bridge the two. Tradition and stewardship are central to farm communities; collecting, preserving, and reviving local knowledge of the land underlies the whole notion of environmental stewardship and ecological restoration. So, just as you wanted the Lab to focus on the elements of ritual, we wanted to get at concrete experience, the details and images embedded in the stories. People need good water stories as much as they need good, clean water. That was our position. What the project underscored is how much work is needed to get this message across. Simply put, we need to get a whole lot better at linking human stories with landscape stories. At making the connection.

RG: Around the university there’s much discussion about ethical issues, but little of that discourse has anything to do with the ethics of built, on-campus spaces. University ethics these days focus mainly on ethnicity, gender, safety, or accessibility. There is plenty of discussion about dangerous spaces and dangerous substances, but the talk, as well as the action, is driven by fears of lawsuits. Almost never do you hear a discussion of the ethics of a space as common as the classroom. One hears complaining about classroom functionality or lack of it, comments on a building’s aesthetics (university architecture being what it is), but little is said about either the ritual or the ethics of building, inhabiting, or tearing down such places. The ritual studies labs were pulled down unceremoniously except for the gestures I committed (as if they were crimes) shortly before demolition.

SS: Such as?

RG: Such as burning leaves, carrying out doorknobs, giving away ceremonial paraphernalia, saying goodbye to rooms. These were not acts commissioned by the university’s ceremonials committee or authorized by the institution. They were surreptitious acts of guerilla ritualizing committed, probably, in violation of some fire code or other rule.

SS: So the space and objects were sacred?

RG: I never labelled them that way, but they were special. Lab spaces were special to me and a few others, and I sometimes felt sadness, nostalgia, or anger when the buildings were demolished. At the end of a course, there was always a rite of exit. We would say goodbye to the space itself. I never viewed our nests as mere public classrooms. But does that make them sacred? Calling an act sacred is a little like declaring one’s own deed to be just. I prefer to leave it to others to confer the ultimate-value labels. By the standards of university ethics, the truly sacred spaces are those in which the most energy, imagination, and money are invested, namely science labs, ball courts, and business classrooms.

SS: Strange, how easy it is to overlook the juxtaposition of sacred and profane. Isn’t water sacred? Isn’t that what we mean by “pure”? In Walkerton, Well Number Five once stood in a grove of trees, right next to the farmer’s field that flooded during that deadly deluge. Now the well house is gone, and the site is razed, yet here’s a site crying out for restoration.

Mary Douglas defines evil as matter out of place, and the water tragedy begs for this kind of analysis. E.-coli 0157 is a bacteria found in cattle feces, but it’s deadly to humans. When cattle runoff failed to be purified at the water treatment plant, tainted water flowed right into people’s taps. The contamination that began with eroded boundaries between local sources of sustenance (cows and water, farms and wells) led to the discovery of astonishing transgressions, ranging from misplaced wells to forged documents and breach of trust. The results were criminal. Can we really fathom sacred space if we bracket out boundary transgression and displacement? Restoration, to be holistic, must be ecological, cultural and spiritual. Only then can it play its rightful role.

What’s left of all the groundwork you’ve done? Do you see signs of the Ritual Studies Lab now? Does anything from it survive?

RG: The people who experienced it are all in diaspora now, afloat on the great sea of undifferentiated, global secularism, ritualizing as best they can. Some of the objects are still around. Not long ago, I handed a mat and a cushion to a former student, saying “This is the dismembered body of the Ritual Studies Lab.” He was Catholic enough, and Buddhist enough, to laugh and be grateful for both the action and the words.

SS: Is that how you wanted it all to end?

RG: Well, death being what it is, institutions have life spans. The Lab had a good life of thirty years. That’s almost my entire academic career, so I can’t complain. And stories trickle back, even now. Lab students initiated the Velvet Carnival in Prague, as well as the Walk of Wisdom in the Netherlands. Students who are now nurses or doctors or chaplains or parents say they find multiple uses for the ritual sensibilities cultivated in the Lab. Sometimes the consequences seem to match my intentions, which is more than one can say about learning situations in which there more talk than action.

Anyway, you’re asking a hard question: What does it all amount to? Will it last? Let me ask you a parallel question. Regardless of where the Water Stories images and performance originated, once the performance levitated the barn—and I think it really did—did local people absorb it? Does this ecological-narrative practice continue? Or, more pointedly, can such impulses survive rural inertia any more than ritual impulses in the Lab can survive the reconstruction of university culture based on business models?

SS: As much as I’d like to say yes, the answer is no. Walkerton lacks the infrastructure to support this kind of work. For two years, we ran the project out of our partner group’s environmental resource center, but when the funding failed, the center closed. People were drained—exhausted from stress, economic hardship, and health problems but also from conflicting stories about what their community had become. And, you know, innovation is wearing. It starts as exhilarating. You’re working with a dilated consciousness and all. It’s just that you can’t sustain intense creativity without adequate support. The irony of the Stories Project is that it sprang up response to crisis. The three-year phase that followed—touring the prints, lecturing, writing, performing, not to mention documenting everything—saw us shifting gears and getting awfully pragmatic. So goes the routinization of charisma.

RG: Sounds bleak: the Lab’s folded, and the barn’s empty. Maybe some momentary celebration will wake them up or set another round of spiritual creativity in motion, but it will all just die down again.

SS: Sure, but isn’t that as it should be? Our work is tied to organic cycles, to focus and diffusion. Don’t you say somewhere that ritual is episodic? You can’t be in a state of hyper-productivity all the time. So for now, we rest. We read, and write, we ruminate. Who knows what will arouse us next—what precipitating moment lies just around the bend?

Ω

After petitions by graduate students at Radboud University in the Netherlands the Ritual Studies Lab came to life again. As a result, The Velvet Carnival in Prague and the Walk of Wisdom in Nijmegen began. Both public rituals continue today.

The Walkerton Water Stories Project is documented in The New Quarterly no. 87 (Summer 2003), and in archives at the Bruce County Museum and Cultural Centre. The Water Stories Prints, after touring, became a permanent installation at the provincially built and maintained Walkerton Clean Water Centre (WCWC).