More Tools for Analyzing "Intercultural" Performance

To continue to set a foundation for our work this semester and give us more ways of approaching some of the performance we'll be examining, we read some chapters from a 1996 collection of essays called The Intercultural Performance Reader. The essays are dense and difficult, and as I read I kept reminding myself that cross-cultural exchange and globalization are very different than they were almost 15 years ago. Still, this collection identifies some interesting problems with regard to defining, understanding and evaluating performance that crosses cultural boundaries; and it offers some useful histories to scholarship about this kind of theater.

The first essay was the introduction to the collection by Patrice Pavis entitled "Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre." One thing he points out that I find particularly important to keep in mind is that all intercultural exchange is based on an ethics of "Otherness" or "alterity," which we discussed at the beginning of the semester. He also writes, at one point, that "the foreign is only the familiar lying in wait," which I find to be a useful and interesting concept. It raises the question for me, though: if I'm always trying to make things familiar, doesn't that mean I am denying difference or trying to ignore it? Is there a way to accept difference without making everything "like me" or "my own"? I'd like to think that there is, but maybe we can discuss it over the course of the semester ...

Pavis, and others in the collection, use Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, both European theatre artists, as examples of directors who have Intercultural exchange as a goal in their work. In addition to this work, he identifies a number of different categories that seem to fall under the umbrella of "intercultural exchanges in theatre practice" (1), but first emphasizes the importance of defining "culture." It can involve, he writes, a number of different things:

• semiotics: a system of symbols through which people make meaning
• the specific 'inflections' that mark a group's representations, feelings, and behavior, which can be seen on the bodies of actors or performers
• that which is "artificial" or clearly formal as opposed to "natural"
• a system of techniques, conventions or traditions that are passed down through tradition
• exchanges of power, as in colonial and post-colonial uses of culture to conquer or resist

Pavis then moves on to look at things with which intercultural theatre is often associated:

• gatherings of artists at international festivals (which, he suggests, run the risk of reinforcing superficial understandings of the cultures represented);
• intracultural theatre, which often involves reclaiming and using "old" or lost national performance traditions to understand changes in one's own nation
  
• transcultural, which looks for similarities to discover a kind of universal language of theatre
• ultracultural, which looks to a mythic origin for all theatre, usually attempting some combination of theatrical forms to do so;
• pre- and post- cultural, which seems to mean reaching for a form that happens before people become acculturated, or looking for a de-colonized new form that moves beyond the power struggles implied by culture (he also identifies the term metacultural, which is somehow related to these two, although I find it particularly difficult to understand).

He then identifies a number of different forms this kind of theatre takes:

• a voluntary hybrid of forms that can be traced back to separate regions,
  
• "multicultural" theatre that uses several different languages and performance styles in one piece for the sake of a language of many different cultural backgrounds,
  
• "cultural collage," which uses de-historicized fragments of cultures in an expressedly apolitical, aestheticized way,
• "syncretic" theatre, which reinterprets differing cultural material creating new forms
• post-colonial theatre, which examines a mixture of cultural elements with an indigenous or formerly colonized perspective
• and theatre by pre-colonial cultures who have become "minority" cultures after colonization (such as the Maori in New Zealand).

There are also a number of kinds of interaction between cultures: seduction, misinterpretation, appropriation, etc.

Finally, Pavis suggests that an important series of questions can be asked to assess this kind of work, and these are the things I find most useful in his article.

• First, what are the "foreign" elements? (stories, storytelling styles, dramatic structure, metaphors, etc.?)
• How has the work been prepared? Have the actors trained to do this, for example?
• What form has been chosen for the work? How has culture been represented?

I've summarized this essay in bullet points, here, because I feel like simplifying it may help students think of ways to write here on the blog about what we're doing in class: again, the essay becomes another tool for assessing and creating "world" theatre.

We also read an essay in this collection by Erika Fischer-Lichte, "Interculturalism in Contemporary Theatre," which I will mention more extensively in a future post, but one thing I want to point out about that chapter here: before she talks about Intercultural theatre in the late 20th Century, she points out that drawing on "non-European" forms has a long history for European and American theatre artists seeking to revive their work or to resist the aesthetic or political principles of more popular work of the time: Brecht, for example, drew on Chinese theatre; Artaud was influenced by Balinese theatre; etc. At the same time, Japanese theatre drew on "Western" forms, especially in attempts to modernize. And in both cases there were developments well beyond those earlier encounters with "interculturalism" throughout the twentieth century. I think one of the differences now ... and it's a big one ... is the development of global capitalism and a "world" culture.

Finally, we're moving through a unit on Nigerian, and more specifically Yoruba, theatre and performance. But before we began this, we read an essay by Biodun Jeyifo, who begins the section in this collection about intercultural theatre from a non-European perspective with an essay called "The Reinvention of Theatrical Tradition: Critical Discourses on Interculturalism in the African Theatre." This is another tough one, but very useful in a number of ways. I'm going to outline the discourses he explains in bullet points, as well, again in an attempt to make use of it more easily.

Beginning with a reference to Peter Brook's visit to Africa and pointing out that Brook had in mind when he went preconceptions about the continent, he first discourse Jeyifo identifies is that there is no native dramatic tradition in Africa, or that any traditions are of a "proto-dramatic" or "quasi-theatrical" sort, or that any development of drama in Africa is because of "Western" influence. The gist of this discourse is, essentially, the lack of theatrical tradition in pre-colonial Africa.

The second discourse, which Jeyifo positions as a reaction against this Eurocentric image of Africa, is the "Afrocentric" celebration of African theatre tradition. This conversation includes the introduction of a new set of criteria for defining and assessing theatre, one that is not based on European assumptions. This includes the celebration of orality over written texts as means of transmission, for example. The idea behind this Afrocentric discourse is that the criteria of, say, England when deciding what is and is not dramatic or theatrical is not criteria appropriate to Africa at all. Jeyifo refers to this as a sort of reinvention of theatrical tradition.

The third discourse attempts to get beyond the duality that lies behind the "Western/African" dichotomy and focuses on hybrid expressions. In this conversation, scholars ask questions like "Which African and European sources do we find operative and combined in any given African theatrical expression? What motivates the interaction of the 'foreign' and 'indigenous,' for instance, an escapist nostalgic retreat into neo-traditionalism or a liberating and genuine exploration of the range and diversity of styles?" etc.

I know that these first articles we read were tough, but I hope that they will give us some good questions to ask as we move ahead looking for our own theatrical tools. I think we've already done some productive exploration of the rituals and plays we've examined thus far.