Performing with the Dead

A methodology for incorporating concepts drawn from ancestor trance in Afrolatinx ritual into Western theatrical training. In this book, Kit Danowski constructs a methodology called kanga (from the Bantu for tying and untying), using three methods based on aspects of the Afrolatinx ritual and modified for performance contexts: spell, charm, and trance. This methodology enacts and complicates distinctions between performance and ritual, serving as a contribution to respectful and responsible intercultural performance practices. The methodology is bricoleur, drawing from ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, and phenomenology. Kanga in practice leads to a state of consciousness that Danowski calls hauntological. This borrows from Derrida but is redefined to refer to the study of haunted states of consciousness, where reality is coconstituted by the living and the dead and ancestral spirits are invoked to do the work once reserved for characters.