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South African Theatre Journal
ISSN: 1013-7548 (Print) 2163-7660 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rthj20
The politics of interweaving performance cultures:
beyond postcolonialism
Anton Krueger
To cite this article: Anton Krueger (2015) The politics of interweaving performance cultures: beyond postcolonialism, South African Theatre Journal, 28:1, 94-99, DOI:
10.1080/10137548.2015.1014170
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2015.1014170
Published online: 23 Feb 2015.
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The politics of interweaving performance cultures: beyond postcolonialism, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost and Saskya Iris Jain, New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, 308 pp., £75.27 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-41572-268-1
According to the former president of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR), Brian Singleton, the study of‘[i]nterculturalism as a practice and a theory gained currency with Richard Schechner’s anthropologically-inspired new discipline of perform- ance studies’ (p. 79). Schechner’s new discipline led to the formation of the annual Performance Studies International (PSI) conferences, and earlier this year I attended the twentieth instalment in Shanghai, which was held under the rubric of‘Tradition and the Avant-Garde’. One of the things which struck me was the extent to which the (relatively) newly economically empowered Chinese theatre makers were creating grand productions based on Western theatre traditions. For example, many of the presentations for delegates were based on Western texts (such as Hamlet, Miss Julie and even a play by Woody Allen). And yet these productions were performed in Mandarin, using purist Chinese forms, such as Beijing Opera. During the discussions there seemed to be an awkward defensiveness from some of the Chinese hosts who insisted they were not ‘copying’ Western theatre, but that they were using it to express a pure Chinese aesthetic. There were also other performances at the conference, such as a series of parables called Confucius Disciples, which told didactic tales with content very foreign to a Western audience. A visiting troupe from Bulgaria presented their own version of some of these parables, using a strongly East European aesthetic to convey a Chinese message. In this way, experiments with cultural forms and content were clearly foregrounded by the conference presentations.
Closer to home, cross-cultural theatrical interventions have been perhaps the single common denominator of almost all English canonical South African texts and productions, which have in the past been described variously as hybrid, syncretic or
‘cross-over’. Given this South African legacy, this is a particularly interesting collection of essays, even though none of them refer to sub-Saharan Africa.
Instead, from the Arab world to Australia, from Canada to the Caribbean, from France to China and Japan, the essays assess how performance practices have encountered, inspired, unsettled and (in some cases) repelled each other. The compilation sets out to rethink‘scholarly assessment of how diverse performance cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they are dependent on each other’(p. iv). A rich glossary at the end introduces one to words from Yoruba, Moroccan, Italian, French and many other languages. The focus is not only on how Westerners have engaged with foreign cultures, but also how a Japanese dancer dealt with American bodies; how Australian dancers worked with Japanese dancers; and how Navajo women encountered Maoris at a world fair in 1915. Its scope is global.
The first part of the book‘Strategies and Dynamics’looks specifically at defining the term‘interweaving’, deciding what’s at stake in the academic discourse and providing an overview of different histories of intercultural practice. There are examples from the Arab World, with Khalid Amine writing on Morocco and its attempts to revolutionize its theatre, referring to the search for third spaces which ‘elude the politics of polarity’
(p. 37). Also in this section, Christopher Balme writes of Derek Walcott’s interventions in the Caribbean, returning to questions of power and knowledge, but also offering insights into the actual works themselves, giving one a sense of–and appreciation for–particular productions.
The second section, ‘Rituals and Festivals’ is largely concerned with issues of indigeneity and the representation of colonized peoples. It looks at sports, pageants and international games as meeting places of cultures. And in part three, ‘Failures and Resistances’, the essays explore places where the interweaving hasn’t worked, where conflict has upset the aims of the weavers.
There should be something of interest here to many scholars. Erika Fischer-Lichte, an icon in the field of inter-cultural studies, initiated and co-edited this collection. Fischer- Lichte specifically founded the international research centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ at the Freie Universität, Berlin, as a means of investigating ways in which performance cultures have intersected, and she’s been able to gather a remarkable group of scholars for this book. The contents list read like a Who’s Who of contemporary theatre studies with almost every luminary who’s ever written a seminal book on intercultural performance present and accounted for: Helen Gilbert, Marvin Carlson, Christopher Balme, Brian Singleton, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Rustom Bharacha and–the superstar performer, the lead singer of the trope of the ‘Third Space’ – Homi Bhabha himself.
Along with the formation of her research centre, Erika Fischer-Lichte defined the term verflechtung (interweaving) as a preferred substitute for ‘intercultural’. Part of her dissatisfaction with ‘intercultural’ was that it assumes an equal power relationship between cultures which have come into contact with each other, whereas this has hardly ever been the case. ‘Intercultural’ has usually implied a Western theatre maker incorporating, borrowing, or being inspired by works from other countries as a way of revitalizing a Western theatre tradition. (The concept of defining a ‘Western’theatre is also problematized and not seen as self-evident.) Too often the West has hosted these intersections, while the ‘other’ culture has been an unequal partner, which may explain some of the defensiveness of Chinese hosts at PSI 20 about their having presented works based on Western texts. Fischer Lichte states that:
[N]umerous contemporary performances that interweave cultures fail because they reiterate and reaffirm forms of representation and/or configurations of power that can only be described as neo-colonial, imperialistic, and/or racist. (p. 14)
This is a theme which is picked up by many of the essays in the book. For example, Margaret Werry bemoans the‘ethics and economics’(p. 97) behind cross-cultural experiments; and as Jacqueline Lo puts it: intercultural theatre‘has a long history of both artistic innovation and cultural exploitation’(p. 119). Similarly, for Brian Singleton, the term‘intercultural’has been denigrated for its ‘unequal binarizing of source and target cultures’ (p. 85). In Rustom Barucha’s essay, he asks:
What are the ownership rights over what is being woven?…Once you insert identity and conditions of work into a collective action, agency gets contextualized and the metaphorical thinking that attempts to elude history or to transcend or suspend it will inevitably be troubled. (p. 184)
These are issues of power which keep surfacing again and again. While many of the essays deal with fruitful encounters outside of the realm of politics, they also cite failed attempts to sanction uses of power. As Homi Bhabha reminds us in his succinct Epilogue to the book, the key question in these exchanges should be about authority, not identity.
When a multicultural policy is too narrowly based on the question of identity, we really miss the point. It is not the representation of one’s ethnic identity that is important in a multicultural global world. What is crucial is the possession of authority.…Attend to the question of authority, not the question of identity. Identity politics becomes a trap for its own subjects; it leads to separatism and sectarianisms for those who most need to be embraced by solidarity and community. (p. 266)
It is interesting how all-pervasive the contemporary academic sense is that power is by definition something negative which needs to be undermined. Suspicions about power tend to dominate assessments of its uses and there is, for example, rarely any distinction made between power with beneficial results and power which results in detrimental suffering. Power is described as almost self-evidently exploitative (i.e.‘power corrupts’), which may arise from a contemporary suspicion of politics and from re-evaluations of the colonial era. And yet cases where, for example, a positive use of power was undermined by a revolutionary movement which then created enormous harm for the peoples it supposedly ‘liberated’ are rarely discussed. Take, for example, the case of Mayotte, an island whose people decided not to decolonize, and which today remains the furthest reach of the European Union. Decolonized neighbouring islanders annually sacrifice their lives trying to reach Mayotte in order to participate in the benefits it receives as a French territory.
It seems too simple to attack every existing power relation, and I wonder if there is a means by which one could provide a more careful analysis of power, without making the assumption that power should per se be derided, ridiculed, scorned and attacked (often in cynical, embittered tones) by those with less of it.
The book repeatedly makes the point that the interaction of performance cultures is a political process, and yet it also provides solid empirical research and essays practically exploring specific productions. In this way it avoids obscuring experiences by crunching abstract data, and is able to provide a fascinating perspective on other countries and cultures via the study of performance.
The modern arena of intercultural performance is most often linked with seminal productions by Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, who began to explore cross-cultural collaborations in the 1970s and 1980s (even though it is acknowledged that intercultural performance work has been created for much longer than the existence of the institutions created by these seminal figures.) The brief history of modern intercultural theatre with reference to Brook and Mnouchkine is repeated in the introductions to a few of these essays, with Brian Singleton’s account of the genealogy of intercultural performance being the most comprehensive. It’s understandable that there will be some overlap, and it’s probably more likely that people will seek out individual essays from this book than read all of them together.
One of Brook’s central aims with his International Centre for Theatre Research (according to Marvin Carlson) was ‘bringing together actors from different cultural traditions, with different training and speaking different languages, to work together in a creative process’ (p. 224). However, Brook wasn’t looking for polyphony, but ‘on the contrary, [seeking] to find a deeper, precultural common voice’. In Brook’s own words:
‘each one’s culture slightly eroded the other’s until something more natural and human appeared’(in Carlson, p. 224). Brook has been criticized for his search for essence, as well as for cultural misinterpretations in his Mahabharata. On the other hand, Ariane Mnouchkine’s intercultural productions have been criticized for not going below the surface of technique, for exoticism and orientalism. Brian Singleton explores claims that
Mnouchkine mined other cultures for her productions only ‘as a source of inspiration’
(p. 85) and that she did not sufficiently immerse herself or her performers in the foreign culture. And yet, in her introduction, Erika Fischer-Lichte asks whether those who resort to mere imitation, or appropriation of foreign styles and techniques, training methods should necessarily be criticized for doing so. Fischer-Lichte explains in her introduction that‘[t]he concept of“intercultural theatre”implies a sharp division between“our”and the“other”cultures, assuming that cultures are hermetically sealed, homogenous entities’
(p. 7) owned by specific peoples. She asks whether the people of a certain nation are really ‘more competent to interpret and understand [their] texts, making them the only ones with access to the true meanings of [a] play’(p. 7). Arguments such as these move the book, as its subtitle indicates,‘beyond postcolonialism’, providing a welcome space for the sorts of discussions on power relations referred to earlier.
Fischer-Lichte lists some of the other challenging questions approached by this collection of essays in the following summation, bracketing authors who deal with each question in the collection:
How can aesthetics be complicated through the creative dynamics of intercultural misunderstanding (Bharacha)? Why do particular artists, ensembles, or even entire performance cultures periodically abstain from, resist, or oppose recognizable processes of interweaving (Sorgenfrei, Carlson, Balme)? What cultural, aesthetic, and per se politically charged forms of criticism, resistance, or even hostility might planned or ongoing processes of interweaving face (Sorgenfrei, Balme)? (p. 18)
Fischer-Lichte calls interweaving of performance practises‘a new kind of transformative aesthetics’ (p. 12), which she sees as notably different from, for example, the aesthetic schemas proposed by Aristotle, Lessing and Schiller. For her, a major difference is that interweaving ‘does not strive for one particular result’(p. 12). The aims of these works
‘are not cleansing, or cathartic or in order to return the viewer to tradition, or to make them more compassionate’. Instead, the only aims shared by these practitioners are attempts to generate ‘the greatest possible openness’, and these transformations, which might occur during or after a performance,‘can neither be planned nor predicted’(p. 12).
In a sense, the enemy of interweaving is‘ethnocentrism or essentialist thinking’(p. 12).
This is also an interesting point, that there is no ethical scheme beyond‘openness’, and one is reminded of E.M. Forster’s endorsement to‘only connect’. Increasing networks of exchanges provide this opportunity.
Brian Singleton’s essay, ‘Performing Orientalist, Intercultural, and Globalized Modernities’, to which I have already referred, is arguably one of the best in the collection. He provides many succinct pithy statements, such as:‘the roots of culture are superseded by the routes of culture’ (p. 82) and ‘[w]hile once the cosmopolitan was concerned with assimilating local knowledge, the new cosmopolitan focuses more on simulating local knowledge’ (p. 84). For Singleton it is more about understanding the structure of meaning than the meanings themselves, since ‘To remain at home does not now mean to stop being a cosmopolitan’, since ‘social media strengthen the cosmopolitan’s ability to simulate knowledge’ (p. 84). In this way, Singleton argues persuasively for a new cosmopolitanism.
Then, in an extremely interesting essay on the Worlds’Fair of 1915, Margaret Werry looks at ways in which indigenous people have been used‘as living synecdoches of their
“culture”’(p. 98). For example, the World Fair dressed up indigenous people to portray their ethnicity, but when they were short of Navajo women, they used Maoris to stand in
for them. Hopelessly inauthentic, yes; and yet the actual experiences of the performers themselves were very positive, in that they shared weaving techniques with each other which lead to a bond between the Navajo and Maori women. Even though the creation of the exhibit was premised on a fundamental ignorance and arrogance, the effect of embodying the interweaving of cultures and exchange of ideas and beliefs created a viable and valuable interaction, to the extent that the Navajo women, years later, travelled to meet the Maoris in their homeland:
Moonlighting in each other’s exhibits, the women were crafting –literally –the past and future foundations for trade, alliance, fellowship; examining each other’s work, they were recognizing an entwined history. They were fabricating race consciousness. (p. 112)
And while something good can come out of something bad, it also works the other way around. Rustom Bharucha gives the example of a Vietnamese dancer who ruined a show by choreographer Cheryl Stock, while trying to improve it with his cultural interpretation, showing that ‘it is painful to recognise that we can misunderstand each other in our attempt to share and create something beautiful for the other’(p. 187).
In her essay on the opening ceremony of various Olympic Games, Helen Gilbert demonstrates how indigeneity has been mobilized as a ‘valorised marker of the host nation’s distinctiveness’ (p. 159). She recounts a series of different ways (some more embarrassing than others), in which indigenous cultures have been usurped by capitalist industrialized needs in selling the Olympics or making them more festive, detailing conflicts with local peoples coerced into enacting themselves as invoking
‘aboriginality as a national brand,’for example, at the Sydney Olympics. And at the Salt Lake City Olympics, held soon after 9/11,‘indigeneity was tasked to wash the nation’s wounds in a redemptive spirituality that gave suffering a sense of purpose’(p. 169).
Rustom Bharucha reiterates Derrida’s definition of‘Hauntology’(also referenced by a number of other writers in the collection), calling it‘that hoary category from the late 1970s in Euro-American performance theory’(p. 179). Bharucha bemoans the fact that for so long one has had to see the third world through the screen of the first (p. 182).
Challenging the idea of the sovereign liberal individual, he questions whether we have a right to assume that we can interpret all cultures for creative purposes (p. 191), going on to contrast the old-fashioned sense of‘duty’with the contemporary demand of‘rights’
(p. 194).
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s essay‘Strategic Unweaving’considers the interesting case of Ito Michio and the diasporic dancing body. Michio was famous in Japan before he left for America and he was then sent back during the Second World War. She looks at how he inscribed Japaneseness on the bodies of others whom he choreographed, and also how he sought to ‘unweave’ it from his own body. Challenging universalizing values and aesthetics, Michio then had to adapt back again to his native Japan when he was deported. Still, for many Japanese, Sorgenfrei notes, being Japanese does remain a matter of essence.
Then, finally, Homi Bhabha’s epilogue speaks of points of intersection between various histories and cultures, collaborations and conflicts, arguing for an ‘inclusive cosmopolitanism’(p. 261). He writes that while the 1980s and 1990s were dominated by French theory, ‘the Germans have captured the dawning consciousness of the new century’(p. 262). I had noticed how often there had been references throughout the book to German philosophers such as Weber, Habermas and Benjamin rather than French
poststructuralists. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given that Fischer-Lichte’s centre is in Berlin. On the other hand, Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur, which encourages an international and interdisciplinary art and foregrounds the necessity of working with foreignness (p. 263), does seem an admirable complement to interweaving performance practices. Bhabha cites John Pizer as saying that ‘For Goethe, identity and alterity are intertwined through history, making an autochthonous partition of culture into … the polarities of Self and foreign Other inconceivable’(p. 262).
To return to the Shanghai PSI conference theme of‘Tradition and the Avant Garde,’
Brian Singleton points out in his essay that the uses of interculturalism in the avant-garde has become mainstream (p. 81). Having to do with other cultures is no longer an option– certainly not for South Africans, but also not in a global context – which makes the themes of this collection more pertinent than ever. As Marvin Carlson puts it:
‘heteroglossia and cultural interweaving with highly different cultures is the inevitable path of the future … [and] traditional Anglo-Saxon isolation is no longer an option’, while adding that‘the process is both inevitable and challenging’(p. 236).Whether we see this as a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of perspective, but it is inescapable. As Flemish writer Tom Lanoye says: ‘We live in a speech aquarium. which seems, depending on how you view it, extremely rich and varied or extremely polluted’(p. 225).
Anton Krueger Rhodes University [email protected]
© 2015, Anton Krueger http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2015.1014170
Refugee performance: practical encounters, edited by Michael Balfour, Bristol, Intellect, 2013, xxv + 316 pp., £45.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-84150-637-1
This book is the first comprehensive collection of essays on the practices and criticism of refugee performance. It presents a much needed wide range of reflections and analyses on refugee performance and procedural experiences from diverse approaches and regions.
Through the lenses it provides, the book examines the aesthetics of contextualized performances, creative tensions and the dynamics of theatre as a healing space. The exploration of memories and theatrical performances, especially in the essays by Niz Jabour, Okello Kelo Sam et al., Dwight Conquergood, Laura Edmondson, Rand T.
Hazou, Guglielmo Schinina, Tom Burvill and Rea Dennis answer critical questions about linear realism and playback theatre as modes of performance on displacement/refugee conditions. The essays invite readers to engage critically with the confluence of creativity/performativity, inquiry and activism as they bring into focus discursive and practical concerns. The essays in this collection grapple with how these concerns shape modes of representation with a view of creating performance events that reflect the experiences of the target communities/audiences. This confluence – between the discursive and the practical – informs not only the methodologies that the various authors in the collection have employed but it also highlights how different political and socio-cultural contexts produce new theatrical experiments that attempt to respond to local conditions. The various essays under review reveal that variations in processes
