Staging Worlds — A Relational History of Drama: 1 The Proto-Stage — Ritual, Gesture, and the Birth of Performance

Before theatre existed as a codified form, human communities enacted worlds through ritual, chant, and embodied gesture. These proto-performances were not representations of experience; they were participatory enactments within relational fields. The movements, sounds, and alignments of bodies, voices, and objects constituted semiotic events, where meaning and action unfolded inseparably. The relational field encompassed all participants: humans, environment, animal, and ancestral presences were co-actualised in shared semiotic alignment.

In these early performative acts, temporality was a structuring principle. Cycles of chant, rhythm, and repetition organised communal attention and coordinated collective action. Participants experienced past, present, and projected futures simultaneously, enacting patterns that both stabilised social cohesion and prepared individuals to anticipate and inhabit emergent possibilities. Ritual movement and vocalisation were thus technologies for modulating relational alignment, shaping cognition, and extending the semiotic field across bodies and time.

The emergence of symbolic characterisation required a new semiotic fold. Proto-performance already exhibited the distinction between expression and enactment, but meaning was not yet stratified; gestures, chants, and movements conveyed intent, affect, and relational pattern without a recursive system of meaning standing for meaning. As language developed its stratified content plane, the potential arose for junctional metaphor: an act could be simultaneously congruent in its immediate effect and metaphorical, standing for broader relational types. This fold enabled proto-performances to prefigure characters, actions, and narrative patterns that were not reducible to immediate outcomes.

Early masks, costumes, and performative conventions exemplify this extension of relational semiotics. Embodiment allowed individuals to inhabit relational roles, displacing the self into archetypal or symbolic positions within the ritual field. Through repeated enactment, communities learned to recognise patterns of action and affect, to anticipate consequences, and to engage imaginatively with possibilities beyond immediate perception. The proto-stage thus functioned as both medium and laboratory for relational cognition, training participants in the co-individuation of worlds.

Importantly, these performances were co-temporal and co-spatial. The presence of the community modulated meaning, attention, and alignment; the relational field was sustained by mutual enactment. Audience and performer were inseparable in this early semiotic ecology; perception and action were distributed, recursive, and participatory. Semiotic potency resided not in isolated tokens but in the emergent field itself, in the resonance of bodies, voices, and objects acting in synchrony.

Through the proto-stage, humans developed capacities that would become foundational for later drama: the modulation of temporal experience, the inhabitation of roles, and the capacity to construct, navigate, and negotiate relational worlds symbolically. These early performances demonstrate that theatre is rooted not in textual or representational invention, but in embodied relational semiotics — in the co-creation of patterned, temporal, and symbolic worlds that extend cognition, perception, and social alignment.