長久以來，不論是亞里斯多德的理論，亦即劇場是由神話祭典發展而來的，還是亞陶的假設：直指祭祀儀式就是劇場原型。或是果陀夫斯基的「類劇場」實驗。還或是謝喜納藉「表演理論」以擴張傳統的概念，這些有關劇場源起的「儀式說」，都讓劇場研究擺脫不了和儀式的糾纏關係。筆者曾於2000年時逢尼采死後百年撰文辯證，藉由《悲劇的誕生》新美學觀所產生的「儀式劇」乃是科際整合中的迷思。於此篇進一步由藝術史之人文層面論證儀式劇迷思，目的於確保劇場藝術學門獨立且是整體研究之主體性，並同時由此肯定人類經由理性所成就的文明進展。
Despite Aristotle's theory, which claimed theatre emerged from rituals of mythology, Antonin Artaud's speculation directly indicated that ritual was in fact the archetype of theatre, or the "Para-Theatrical Experiments" of Jerzy Grotowski; or even Richard Schechner's "Performance Theory," which extended the traditional concept of theatre. These assertions, in the long term, made theatre studies not free from the tangled relation with ritual. In the new millennium, the hundredth anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche's death, my essay "On the Myth in the Interdisciplinary" pointed out that the new aesthetic version emerging from the Birth of Tragedy concluded in ritual theatre and was in fact a myth of the interdisciplinary. To ensure the autonomy of the discipline as an integrative and independent one, and meanwhile, to approve the development of civilization achieved by rationality, the essay here investigates - in the context of humanist respect of art history - to critique further on the so-called 'Performance Studies' in the name of an interdisciplinary combination of anthropology and sociology as per the above assertions.
