Theater

Intercultural Performance

Rising to prominence in the latter half of the 20th century, interculturalism explores what is shared between people from diverse parts of the world, as directors merge foreign theatrical traditions with their own. Most frequently, the result blends “Western” and “non-Western” elements such as stories, performance and ritual practices, music, and visual effects, often presented by multinational casts of actors. Praised for reinvigorating their own theatrical traditions, many projects of Euro-American origin also have been criticized for Orientalist and neo-imperialist tendencies. They are viewed by some as distorting local practices in pursuit of a “universalism” based in Eurocentric [Page 1643]ideals, while repeating exploitative patterns in the process.

Particularly controversial is director Peter Brook's The Mahabharata, which dramatized a Sanskrit epic for European audiences. Although praised by reviewers for beauty and transcendence, the 1985 production was excoriated by scholars such as Rustom Bharucha for perpetuating East-West inequities. Rather than fostering a mutual exchange, Bharucha argued, Brook imposed a narrow vision for his own profit, reducing the complexities of the source material to display a sensually exciting, premodern “India,” while failing to fairly compensate or acknowledge the Indians who assisted his work. This controversy highlights the wider political implications of representations onstage as well as of the relationships underlying a play's creation.

In a variation of interculturalism, French director Ariane Mnouchkine has applied techniques from Japanese kabuki to her productions of European plays. Rather than claiming to open communication between cultures, she uses these elements as aesthetic devices to invigorate classic texts. Perhaps because it does not aspire to represent another culture authentically, this type of work has incurred less censure than Brook's but still receives criticism for decontextualizing performance styles for “exotic” effects.

Although the term intercultural performance is most frequently used to categorize the practices of contemporary Western directors who bring foreign elements to their home audiences, the practice is not limited to Europe and North America. Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa reverses Mnouchkine's experiments, for example, using translations of European texts to expand traditional performance techniques. However, the impulse to create theater out of multiple traditions has many other manifestations, reflecting diverse responses to the circulations of the contemporary globalized world.

Postcolonial Performance

A primary characteristic of theater in the wake of colonialism is a syncretism or hybridity of influences. Artists from the colonized cultures combine elements from the colonial culture (story, dramatic structure, etc.) with elements from indigenous traditions (rituals, history, dances, songs, languages) as an assertion of both agency and resistance. These projects are typically aimed at both sides of the encounter: While the Western components provide a point of access for “outsider” audiences, the indigenous elements disrupt the comfort and assumptions of a dominant perspective and build communities based on marginalized knowledge.

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