Staging Worlds — A Relational History of Drama: 2 From Myth to Mask — Enacting Worlds Symbolically

The transition from proto-performance to theatre proper is marked by the emergence of symbolic characterisation: the ability to inhabit roles, enact archetypes, and convey relational patterns beyond immediate gesture or ritual. Early drama did not arise in isolation; it unfolded within the semiotic and social fields established by ritual and myth, inheriting their temporal, spatial, and participatory structures while introducing new capacities for symbolic displacement and narrative complexity.

Masking, costuming, and role-playing allowed performers to differentiate themselves from their immediate identities, creating the relational conditions for a symbolic fold. The performer could stand as a type — hero, trickster, or ancestral figure — simultaneously enacting and representing. Halliday’s stratified content plane illuminates this capacity: as language allows meanings to stand for meanings, so too does performance allow acts to stand for relational types. Junctional metaphor operates here as well: a gesture or line of speech can be congruent within the enacted scene while simultaneously signalling broader relational significance across time and community.

Myth served as the narrative scaffolding for these symbolic enactments. Stories, recurring motifs, and archetypal conflicts provided stable patterns for performers and audiences to recognise and inhabit. Through repeated enactment, communities co-individuated worlds in which ethical, social, and temporal relations were negotiated and reinforced. The symbolic act transformed the relational field: participants could experience themselves and others as inhabiting positions within a structured semiotic space, attending not only to immediate action but to its symbolic resonance.

Spatial and temporal organisation became critical. The proto-stage’s cyclical rhythms and communal alignment evolved into defined performance spaces, orchestrated movements, and choreographed vocalisation. The stage itself emerged as a relational node: a locus where temporal projection, spatial arrangement, and symbolic enactment intersected. The audience, no longer merely co-present in ritual, became a relational participant in structured co-temporality, their attention and response integrated into the field of enactment.

Symbolic performance also introduced a new form of semiotic recursion. By embodying archetypes and enacting mythic scenarios, performers could create layered meanings that echoed across performances, locations, and generations. The symbolic fold permitted reflection upon action within the performance: what was done, what it meant, and how it resonated with broader relational patterns. Drama, thus, became a technology for collective imagination, aligning perception, cognition, and social expectation in a dynamically co-individuated field.

Ultimately, the shift from myth to mask exemplifies the power of symbolic mediation. Drama extends the semiotic capacities of language and ritual into embodied action, allowing communities to experience relational worlds reflexively, symbolically, and temporally. The performer mediates between immediate enactment and enduring pattern; the audience engages not only with what is done but with what it signifies within broader relational and cultural systems. Through this fold, drama enacts worlds while modelling the very semiotic processes by which worlds are construed, shared, and transformed.