Panel 1:
Brian Singleton (Trinity College, Dublin), ‘Migrant representation and participation in diasporic European performance contexts’
When theories of interculturalism first began to emerge and gain traction within Performance Studies in the early 1980s it was within a positivist outlook on cultural otherness and a stretching of the boundaries of disciplinary enquiry that occluded the political ramifications of the ‘pursuit of otherness for the investigation of self’ (Singleton, 1997). The users of the new term sought to distance it from its predecessor, Orientalism, and from the latter’s scenography of otherness on the surface of cultures, and emphasize instead an anthropological turn in the roots of ritual, in its quest to drive the performative avant garde in new directions. More than three decades later, in a post-global world of supermodernity, interculturalism as a term and a performative practice seemed to be confined to history and its neo-orientalist practices of the 1980s and 90s, and while a new term came to light, courtesy of Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘interweaving’, that at first appeared apolitical, a new interest in the original term emerged. What interests me still with the term now twenty years on from writing about the practice in terms of an East/West axis of hegemonic intercultural theatre (Lei, 2011), is in migrant representation and participation in diasporic European performance contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the elites of colonized cultures who brought to the heart of the European empires religions and cultures that would both collude with and contest colonial representation, to the non-elite economic and other migrants of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries whose very presence in performance challenges political narratives of European states and their rhetoric of intercultural inclusion versus their ‘exceptional’ practices of segregation.
Emine Fişek (Boğaziçi University), ‘Interculturalism, Humanitarianism, Intervention: Théâtre du Soleil in Kabul’
Where interculturalism in European theatre and performance is concerned, the Théâtre du Soleil occupies a central position. The leading theatre company in France, Théâtre du Soleil is best known for opulent productions that stage the Western classics using a blend of international performance traditions. Over the years, the practitioners of these traditions have been absorbed into the fabric of the company, resulting in a troupe whose mix of nationalities and performance cultures are often celebrated for realizing the oft-referenced ideal of politically progressive theatre: a practice of hospitality that exceeds theatre’s content to influence its form.
In this paper, I focus on a somewhat tangential Théâtre du Soleil product. Directed by company members and affiliates, Un Soleil à Kaboul…ou plutôt deux (2007) is a documentary that chronicles a series of theatre workshops that the company held in Kabul in 2005. Invited to the war-torn Afghani landscape by a local non-governmental organization, members traveled to the city for several weeks and established an atelier where they introduced participants to the Soleil’s international performance vocabulary. Whereas this short film is a remarkable chronicle of the quotidian frustrations, challenges and rewards that characterize intercultural communication and experimentation, it is equally revelatory of how intercultural practice absorbs the broader political contexts in which it takes place. Here, the relevant context is French humanitarianism and the cultural dimensions of international aid and intervention. The documentary illustrates moral configurations specific to the world of aid, even as it posits theatre as the groundwork through which humanitarianism can express a moral truth. In doing so, Un Soleil à Kaboul moves beyond the paradigms of appropriation or contestation, pushing us to reconsider both humanitarianism and interculturalism.
Panel 2:
Julie Holledge (University of Oslo) and Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland), ‘Rethinking Interculturalism using Digital Tools’
Our work on Women’s Intercultural Performance in the 1990s was shaped by political and aesthetic forces that no longer operate in the same ways. Australia has moved from state multiculturalism to an implicit national policy of cultural assimilation with draconian border protection practices. This joint presentation tracks our research through this changing cultural context. We begin by briefly revisiting Women’s Intercultural Performance, part of which dealt with the narrative trajectories of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in China, Japan, and Iran. We show how this has developed into a new research project that tackles the global distribution of the play, with reference to over 3000 productions. In this new project, while some of the questions regarding the intercultural aspects of relocation and adaptation have remained the same, the methodology has not: we are now applying techniques of quantitative analysis, and as a result our qualitative interpretations have significantly changed. The presentation will introduce the use of digital humanities methodology to gender-inflected intercultural studies of global transmission, with particular reference to maps and networks.
Having used this methodology to deal with a discrete database of A Doll’s House productions, we are now in a position to apply it to the much larger dataset of AusStage, the Australian database for the performing arts. We are currently interrogating our data to analyse cultural transmission across the national borders of Australia. These borders appear to be controlled by transnational and national forces, but network analyses are giving us a glimpse of how intercultural encounters by artists can operate in far more random and chaotic ways. Today, our major questions are: what are the forces of border protection operating in our cultural sphere that attempt to limit the movement of artists, and how are they being subverted?
Panel 3:
Ric Knowles (University of Guelph), ‘New Modernist Mediations and the Intercultural Theatre of Modern Times Stage Company’
In theatre, as in the world, intercultural encounters often require mediation. Patrice Pavis’s model of theatrical interculturalism—which presumes a one-way flow between source cultures, usually “eastern” or othered, and target (western) cultures—positions cultural mediation at the narrow point of a process shaped like an hourglass. This narrow point is where cultural texts are distilled to their presumed essences and subsequently expanded using the decoding semioses of the target culture, like adding water to concentrated orange juice. In this mediating process the cultural and artistic “modelling” of the source culture is adapted through the artistic and cultural modelling of the target culture in order to achieve “readability” at the point of reception in the west. Pavis’s hourglass assumed, moreover, the cultural homogeneity of each of the (two) participating cultures, including the targeted audience. This paper examines the work of a culture-crossing theatre company in Toronto that explores more balanced ways of mediating between cultural formations and at the same time resists constituting either themselves or their audiences as culturally coherent units.
It may seem odd to consider modernism—a movement that was not friendly to the world’s “othered” peoples—as a mediating element, especially a balanced one, in intercultural performance, but perhaps that’s one of its unfinished projects. And as new modernist studies have begun to suggest, modernism has not been the same the whole world over or for all of its peoples. In this paper I suggest that the work of Iranian Canadian Soheil Parsa at Modern Times Stage Company in Toronto constitutes a reconsideration of modernist formalisms and an exploration of multiply culturally inflected modernist forms as mediating elements that can facilitate negotiation between theatrical cultures in a newly global modernity, or across multiple modernities. Through his heterogeneously cast intercultural productions of high modernist classics, his Persian-inflected productions of Western classics, his adaptations of modernist Persian/Iranian plays, and his productions of new work, Parsa has for twenty-five years been remediating the problem of modernism itself and working towards fulfilling the broken promises of modernization and of a transnational modernity.
This paper will provide a brief account of the company itself, and focus on one production in each of the categories I’ve listed: Macbeth (Toronto 1995, 2005; Montreal 1997; Tehran 2003), deeply indebted on a structural level to the Persian ta’ziyeh-khani; bloom (Toronto 2006), by Argentinian Canadian Guillermo Verdecchia, “inspired by” T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and most interesting for its intercultural appropriations of modernism itself; Aurash (Toronto 1998, 2010; Tehran 2002; Mostar 2009; Bogata 2010; Sarajevo 2010), a stripped-down modernist version of a traditional Persian fable by contemporary Iranian playwright Bayram Beyza’ie; and Hallaj (Toronto 2009, 2011), by Parsa himself with the company’s Artistic Associate Peter Farbridge, notable for its engagement with earth, with bodies, and with movement, asserting not only the embodied nature of the theatre’s engagement with modernism, but also a contemporary performative engagement with the Sufi arts.
Lizzie Stewart (University of St. Andrews), ‘“The Future Market and the Current Reality”: Zaimoglu/Senkel’s Black Virgins and Interculturalism in the German Context’
In 2006, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s Black Virgins, a controversial semi-documentary play about Muslim women, became the first play by a Turkish-German playwright to be featured on the front cover of Germany’s influential theatre magazine Theater heute (Theatre Today). Following the successful premiere, the play has appeared in 10 further professional productions in Germany, signalling a desire for ‘postmigrant’ perspectives previously absent from the theatrical sphere there. While the majority of studies of the play thus far have focused almost exclusively on the influential premiere, this paper will draw on video-recordings, images, and interviews with theatre practitioners to explore the proliferation of subsequent productions. In particular it will situate these productions against a broader background of a shift towards ‘interculturalism’ in cultural policies within Germany.
The discourse of ‘interculturalism’ has a long history in the German context and is frequently associated with a sociological approach which characterises cultures as homogeneous, closed constructs. Literary work by Turkish-German authors, including Zaimoglu, has long been considered under the umbrella of ‘intercultural literature’ rather than ‘German literature’ in German universities, for example. This is a circumstance which has been heavily criticized from other quarters as ‘reduc[ing] the work in an ethnocentric manner to its value for cultural communication’ and functioning to anchor literature by authors of non-German ethnicity firmly in their ‘otherness’ (Karin Lornsen; my translation). As the tide was turning away from this approach in literary studies, ‘interculturalism’ appears to have re-emerged to haunt the Turkish-German artist as a key term in theatre funding.
Just as the ‘play’ transforms significantly when moving from page to stage, however, ‘interculuralism’ as a concept is in the process of morphing further. Migration researcher and journalist Mark Terkessidis has provided a Deleuzean redefinition of interculture which has been highly influential in Germany’s theatrical sphere in recent years, for example: interculture as a means of understanding culture in general as ‘in emergence [...] as a structure in the process of transformation, as something which is not whole, or not yet’ (Terkessidis; my translation). My own paper will provide an insight into current thinking on interculturalism and performance in the German context, drawing especially on work by Terkessidis. It will then focus on tracing the way in which intercultural policies have both enabled and demanded the production of new forms of engagement with postmigrant theatre, taking the example of the multiple productions of Black Virgins as a case study. The quotation in the title of this paper, taken from the play-text, suggests an awareness of the uneasy positioning of the success of the play between market demands and a more rights-based approach to inclusion and recognition in contemporary Germany. I will use a focus on the dynamics of interculturalism as a means to unpack this positioning further, and will explore what the production histories of Black Virgins have to tell us about ‘interculturalism and performance now’.
Panel 4:
Prarthana Purkayastha (Plymouth University), ‘What’s with the Red Dot on the Forehead? Intercultural Marking in Hetain Patel’s TEN’
The intercultural theatre of the 1980s and 90s were instrumental in opening up critical dialogues around notions of selfhood and otherness. However, the Other was often assumed to be a unified concept in such cultural exchanges. What happens when the body of the Other in present day intercultural theatre can no longer uphold that unity of cultural experience, and instead signals a continuous fracturing of identities owing to displacement, migration and transnational citizenship? What new possibilities and meanings emerge when such fragmented and hyphenated bodies speak back and re-negotiate relations with dominant cultural practices in the act of performance?
Following Ric Knowles’ interest in how ‘new, hybrid and diasporic subjectivities are performatively forged’ in the intercultural theatre of global cities today (2010:79), this paper focuses on the work of the British Asian artist Hetain Patel, which offers a constant questioning of the assumed universalism of ethnic identities. As case study, this paper examines the 2010 production TEN, which featured Patel himself, Mark Evans (a Scottish drummer) and Dave ‘Stickman’ Higgins (a drummer of West Indian, Irish and British-Lancastrian heritage). The piece involved devised text, scored and choreographed movement sequences in which the bodies of three men negotiate race, complex rhythmic cycles and red vermilion powder to mark their skin. Part physical theatre, part choreography and part live art, TEN revolves around the autobiographical narratives of three men who ‘cannot quite put a finger’ on who they really are (TEN, 2010).
Through Hetain Patel, the paper locates the ways in which strategies of blockage and deliberate disappointment enable postmodern British Asian works such as TEN to reveal not only inherent assumptions about ethnicity, race and cultural products, but also expose the audience’s voyeuristic tendencies to consume fetishised skin and bodies in intercultural encounters. In the performance works of artists such as Patel’s, corporeal experience is placed at the centre of discourses on cultural identity to open new discussions on the heterogeneity and multiplicity of verbal and embodied languages.
Victor Ramirez Ladron De Guevara (Plymouth University), ‘Traduttore, Traditore: The “Thorny” Issue of Translation in the Creation of Autoethnographic Intercultural Performances’
This paper will question the role played by translation in the process of devising a number of autoethnographic performances which situate themselves within an intercultural framework. Parting from the premise that all intercultural performances depend on a process of translation, this paper will examine the models of cross-cultural exchange proposed by Pavis (the hourglass), Bharucha (the pendulum), and Lo and Gilbert (the spinning disc held by an elastic string). It will be the assertion of this paper that, in all three models, the issue of translation has remained largely unchallenged, often reduced to a mere linguistic process and closely attached to issues related to colonisation and appropriation.
As such, translation in this context will be treated as a vector in which socio-semiotic and phenomenological content converge, and which can actively be used to emphasise notions of cultural difference. The paper will then discuss the creation of three practice-as-research projects in which the author has explored autoethnographic content in an intercultural medium: All Scars are Nice and Clean (2006); Time Zone(s) (2011); and The Citizenship Test (forthcoming). All three performances attempt to discover a culturally specific node from which a complex matrix of cross-cultural communication can emerge. Drawing from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the translational process is therefore treated as both arboreal and rhizomatic, an activity that simultaneously challenges and re-affirms the (im)possibility of communicating across cultures.
Panel 5:
Yvette Hutchison (University of Warwick), ‘Accessing the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” – South African engagement with colonialism and ethnography in the intercultural/ postcolonial/ global context’
Rhustom Bharucha has asserted that, “the interpretation and use of cultures have to be confronted within the particularities of a specific historic condition. It is naïve, if not irresponsible, to assume that a meaningful confrontation of any culture to transcend the immediacies of its history.” (Theatre and the World, 2005:1) I want to analyse the implications of specific historic and cultural contexts for contemporary intercultural practice, given that “the immediacies of ... history” are increasingly challenged by mobility in an increasingly globalised world, which is also increasingly haunted by colonial legacies.
I will analyse South African performances that have overtly critiqued histories of colonialism in Africa and toured both in South Africa (as a complex intra-cultural context) and in Europe. Examples of this work include Handspring Puppet Company (Woycek on the Highveld, 1992, Faustus in Africa, 1995, Ubu and the Truth Commission,1998), Magnet Theatre (Cargo, 2007, Every Day, Every year, I am Walking, performed in 19 countries since 2008), Brett Bailey’s controversial Exhibit A& B (toured 2010-2014, in 14 cities in Europe), and Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind, which toured Europe in 2011 and was performed at the National Arts Festival, South Africa, in July 2012.
I want to consider how a performance lens can “open the space between analysis and action, and [...] pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice” (Conquergood, 2002, 145) to facilitate critical, active engagement with issues of the colonial past in the present. I am particularly interested in how theatre/ performance can facilitate inter-subjective dialogues in an intercultural context. By intersubjectivity I am not referring to that which occurs within a person, as in Lacan and Foucault, but with the mechanisms that work between people; the location for the negotiation of representations, narratives, meanings, affected by various hegemonies, on our subjectivity (Holloway, 1989, Passerini, 2007).
I will consider how cultural assumptions around universal responses to trauma, for example, shame or guilt impact in intercultural staging of sensitive histories. Also, I am interested in the role aesthetics can play in deconstructing an approach to a linear engagement with time. Also, how an artist can make a performer’s embodied gesture or image dialogical, “a play of open-ended possibilities interacting between two fixed poles which exist in some form of dialogue with each other” (Fleishman, 1997:205), and thereby facilitate an spectator’s recognition of different poles (values, cultural positions), and how we negotiate between them. All the while analysing the genesis and limitations of our knowledges, what informs our subjectivities, and how we can highlight the multiplicity of other potential perspectives on colonial histories.
Daphne Lei (University of California, Irvine), ‘Can You See Yellow?: Rescuing Interculturalism in Post-racial Orientalism’
Playing Oriental has been a stable Western fascination in performance history, from stage to screen, and, in the 21st century, online. The Orientalist performance trope has not waned as such performances have multiplied and "authenticated" with better technology; however, I argue that the perception of such performances has changed dramatically in recent years. Along with institutionalized multiculturalism, post-racial colorblind casting, and global Asian wealth and technology, yellow has been "elevated" to a status of non-color and non-race, and in the American context, non-diversity. And yet, yellow is not white: it is off white, beige, a perfect non-descriptive background. Yellow occupies a space that is cognitively unseen and unheard, peripheral and powerless, a space of post-racial Orientalism.
If yellow is deliberately not recognized, how can intercultural Asian performance even be possible? Between the meticulous mimicking of the decorative Oriental race in performance and the ontological and epistemological denial of race in audienceship is a new space where interculturalism wrestles with post-racial Orientalism. By investigating a number of contemporary theatrical and online performances involving "Oriental" performances, I propose to reexamine the old East vs. West intercultural paradigm in the context of post-racial discourse and techno-globalism.
Panel 6:
Rustom Bharucha (Jawaharlal Nehru University), ‘Interculturalism and Its Discontents: New Directions in Rethinking Intercultural Performance Practice Today’
Through an inventory of my intercultural search in the theatre since 1977, this talk will attempt a self-reflexive articulation of some of the primary tropes, gaps, fissures, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities in the early discourse of interculturalism in Euro-American academic culture of the 1970s. Eschewing the traps of nostalgia and a fixed teleology, it will make a case that, contrary to rumors of its redundancy or imminent demise, the discourse of interculturalism continues to throw out creative and political challenges that work against the grain of its imbrication in the larger narratives of nationalism and globalization. With the proliferation of nation-states and intensification of sectarian hatred, supplemented by Islamophobia and the xenophobic backlash against refugees and non-citizens reduced to ‘bare life’, the intercultural needs to be affirmed rather than abandoned, but not without un-learning the blind spots and prejudices of earlier histories and practices.
Problematizing the increasingly rash dismissal of ‘culture’ as an a priori essentialism, in addition to the anti-aesthetic proclivities of academic postcolonialism, the talk will argue for a politics of aesthetics in which the discontents surrounding interculturalism can be negotiated through new socio-political content which has been excluded from its dominant practices. Can intercultural performance today be extended beyond its innate liberal privileges and unacknowledged moral hegemony? Can it open itself to a dialogue with non-liberal constituencies and modes of cultural practice, which could challenge its naïve celebration of diversities without an acknowledgement of differences? More critically, can it engage with those political and historical formations that do not conform to the laws of liberal individualism and private ownership? Or will the ethos of intercultural performance continue to make a virtue out of ‘creative theft’ and the ‘right to offend’? Are they any limits to its unconditional autonomy?
By calling attention to a few examples of contemporary performance practice relating to Aboriginal, ‘folk’, and subaltern communities, the talk will tease out the myriad contradictions by which the new manifestations of intercultural practice are increasingly in sync with global performing circuits alongside more tense negotiations of intra-cultural differences within seemingly homogenized communities. While capitulations to neo-Orientalist stereotypes and spectacles continue through processes of self-Orientalization, there are also more bold intercultural collaborations around dehumanized forms of labor in which the common concerns of precarity and ecocide find a common platform across North and South. Calling attention to the rich ambiguities of both intercultural production and spectatorship, the talk will end by suggesting that the future of interculturalism is most likely to resonate through a critical consciousness of shared affinities embedded in a matrix of differences, tuned to both the flows and disjunctions of the global creative economy.
Leo Cabranes-Grant (University of California, Santa Barbara), ‘Towards a New Historiography of the Intercultural Experience’
Intercultural encounters are frequently described as intersectional events, sites of hybridity, métissage, and syncretic negotiation. This emphasis on mixtures and borrowings is usually emphasized at the expense of recognizing that intercultural events are also sites of emergence in which all the materials involved are both transformed and interrogated. But intercultural performances in which Eastern and Western practices are conjoined are neither Eastern not Western: they actually enable a new standard of identity for the cultures involved. This emerging quality is, more often than not, overlooked. While a tendency to rely on analogical comparisons and morphological models stresses the representational aspects of intercultural performances, it also occludes the reproductive forces involved in the actualization of those events. This paper proposes to re-localize our critical attention on the labors that make intercultural relations possible in order to re-trace how identities are challenged, interrogated, and altered. Instead of re-mobilizing the categories of hybridity or mimicry (categories that solidify socio-biological or highly derivative modes of understanding) I suggest that we look at the intercultural as a process of networking in which economic, aesthetic, and affective forces are constantly shaping and re-shaping our sense of self. This complex array of forces is not only at work when explicit intercultural encounters take place; on the contrary, these forces support and nurture the continuous heterogeneity of everyday life. Interculturality starts at home, not only when an external Other arrives. Using as an example the song-dances of the Aztecs in colonial Mexico, I will unpack how a particular indigenous practice (the mitote) provided a series of templates for the reproduction of cultural entanglements that included objects, schools, rituals, and several forms of affective entrainments through which the Mexica deliberately re-casted their own history. The Mexica were already reproducing and monitoring their cultural differences before the Spaniards conquered them, and the challenge for us today is to find critical discourses that recognize the fact that intercultural relations acquire their profile within cultures as much as between them.
Brian Singleton (Trinity College, Dublin), ‘Migrant representation and participation in diasporic European performance contexts’
When theories of interculturalism first began to emerge and gain traction within Performance Studies in the early 1980s it was within a positivist outlook on cultural otherness and a stretching of the boundaries of disciplinary enquiry that occluded the political ramifications of the ‘pursuit of otherness for the investigation of self’ (Singleton, 1997). The users of the new term sought to distance it from its predecessor, Orientalism, and from the latter’s scenography of otherness on the surface of cultures, and emphasize instead an anthropological turn in the roots of ritual, in its quest to drive the performative avant garde in new directions. More than three decades later, in a post-global world of supermodernity, interculturalism as a term and a performative practice seemed to be confined to history and its neo-orientalist practices of the 1980s and 90s, and while a new term came to light, courtesy of Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘interweaving’, that at first appeared apolitical, a new interest in the original term emerged. What interests me still with the term now twenty years on from writing about the practice in terms of an East/West axis of hegemonic intercultural theatre (Lei, 2011), is in migrant representation and participation in diasporic European performance contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the elites of colonized cultures who brought to the heart of the European empires religions and cultures that would both collude with and contest colonial representation, to the non-elite economic and other migrants of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries whose very presence in performance challenges political narratives of European states and their rhetoric of intercultural inclusion versus their ‘exceptional’ practices of segregation.
Emine Fişek (Boğaziçi University), ‘Interculturalism, Humanitarianism, Intervention: Théâtre du Soleil in Kabul’
Where interculturalism in European theatre and performance is concerned, the Théâtre du Soleil occupies a central position. The leading theatre company in France, Théâtre du Soleil is best known for opulent productions that stage the Western classics using a blend of international performance traditions. Over the years, the practitioners of these traditions have been absorbed into the fabric of the company, resulting in a troupe whose mix of nationalities and performance cultures are often celebrated for realizing the oft-referenced ideal of politically progressive theatre: a practice of hospitality that exceeds theatre’s content to influence its form.
In this paper, I focus on a somewhat tangential Théâtre du Soleil product. Directed by company members and affiliates, Un Soleil à Kaboul…ou plutôt deux (2007) is a documentary that chronicles a series of theatre workshops that the company held in Kabul in 2005. Invited to the war-torn Afghani landscape by a local non-governmental organization, members traveled to the city for several weeks and established an atelier where they introduced participants to the Soleil’s international performance vocabulary. Whereas this short film is a remarkable chronicle of the quotidian frustrations, challenges and rewards that characterize intercultural communication and experimentation, it is equally revelatory of how intercultural practice absorbs the broader political contexts in which it takes place. Here, the relevant context is French humanitarianism and the cultural dimensions of international aid and intervention. The documentary illustrates moral configurations specific to the world of aid, even as it posits theatre as the groundwork through which humanitarianism can express a moral truth. In doing so, Un Soleil à Kaboul moves beyond the paradigms of appropriation or contestation, pushing us to reconsider both humanitarianism and interculturalism.
Panel 2:
Julie Holledge (University of Oslo) and Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland), ‘Rethinking Interculturalism using Digital Tools’
Our work on Women’s Intercultural Performance in the 1990s was shaped by political and aesthetic forces that no longer operate in the same ways. Australia has moved from state multiculturalism to an implicit national policy of cultural assimilation with draconian border protection practices. This joint presentation tracks our research through this changing cultural context. We begin by briefly revisiting Women’s Intercultural Performance, part of which dealt with the narrative trajectories of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in China, Japan, and Iran. We show how this has developed into a new research project that tackles the global distribution of the play, with reference to over 3000 productions. In this new project, while some of the questions regarding the intercultural aspects of relocation and adaptation have remained the same, the methodology has not: we are now applying techniques of quantitative analysis, and as a result our qualitative interpretations have significantly changed. The presentation will introduce the use of digital humanities methodology to gender-inflected intercultural studies of global transmission, with particular reference to maps and networks.
Having used this methodology to deal with a discrete database of A Doll’s House productions, we are now in a position to apply it to the much larger dataset of AusStage, the Australian database for the performing arts. We are currently interrogating our data to analyse cultural transmission across the national borders of Australia. These borders appear to be controlled by transnational and national forces, but network analyses are giving us a glimpse of how intercultural encounters by artists can operate in far more random and chaotic ways. Today, our major questions are: what are the forces of border protection operating in our cultural sphere that attempt to limit the movement of artists, and how are they being subverted?
Panel 3:
Ric Knowles (University of Guelph), ‘New Modernist Mediations and the Intercultural Theatre of Modern Times Stage Company’
In theatre, as in the world, intercultural encounters often require mediation. Patrice Pavis’s model of theatrical interculturalism—which presumes a one-way flow between source cultures, usually “eastern” or othered, and target (western) cultures—positions cultural mediation at the narrow point of a process shaped like an hourglass. This narrow point is where cultural texts are distilled to their presumed essences and subsequently expanded using the decoding semioses of the target culture, like adding water to concentrated orange juice. In this mediating process the cultural and artistic “modelling” of the source culture is adapted through the artistic and cultural modelling of the target culture in order to achieve “readability” at the point of reception in the west. Pavis’s hourglass assumed, moreover, the cultural homogeneity of each of the (two) participating cultures, including the targeted audience. This paper examines the work of a culture-crossing theatre company in Toronto that explores more balanced ways of mediating between cultural formations and at the same time resists constituting either themselves or their audiences as culturally coherent units.
It may seem odd to consider modernism—a movement that was not friendly to the world’s “othered” peoples—as a mediating element, especially a balanced one, in intercultural performance, but perhaps that’s one of its unfinished projects. And as new modernist studies have begun to suggest, modernism has not been the same the whole world over or for all of its peoples. In this paper I suggest that the work of Iranian Canadian Soheil Parsa at Modern Times Stage Company in Toronto constitutes a reconsideration of modernist formalisms and an exploration of multiply culturally inflected modernist forms as mediating elements that can facilitate negotiation between theatrical cultures in a newly global modernity, or across multiple modernities. Through his heterogeneously cast intercultural productions of high modernist classics, his Persian-inflected productions of Western classics, his adaptations of modernist Persian/Iranian plays, and his productions of new work, Parsa has for twenty-five years been remediating the problem of modernism itself and working towards fulfilling the broken promises of modernization and of a transnational modernity.
This paper will provide a brief account of the company itself, and focus on one production in each of the categories I’ve listed: Macbeth (Toronto 1995, 2005; Montreal 1997; Tehran 2003), deeply indebted on a structural level to the Persian ta’ziyeh-khani; bloom (Toronto 2006), by Argentinian Canadian Guillermo Verdecchia, “inspired by” T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and most interesting for its intercultural appropriations of modernism itself; Aurash (Toronto 1998, 2010; Tehran 2002; Mostar 2009; Bogata 2010; Sarajevo 2010), a stripped-down modernist version of a traditional Persian fable by contemporary Iranian playwright Bayram Beyza’ie; and Hallaj (Toronto 2009, 2011), by Parsa himself with the company’s Artistic Associate Peter Farbridge, notable for its engagement with earth, with bodies, and with movement, asserting not only the embodied nature of the theatre’s engagement with modernism, but also a contemporary performative engagement with the Sufi arts.
Lizzie Stewart (University of St. Andrews), ‘“The Future Market and the Current Reality”: Zaimoglu/Senkel’s Black Virgins and Interculturalism in the German Context’
In 2006, Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s Black Virgins, a controversial semi-documentary play about Muslim women, became the first play by a Turkish-German playwright to be featured on the front cover of Germany’s influential theatre magazine Theater heute (Theatre Today). Following the successful premiere, the play has appeared in 10 further professional productions in Germany, signalling a desire for ‘postmigrant’ perspectives previously absent from the theatrical sphere there. While the majority of studies of the play thus far have focused almost exclusively on the influential premiere, this paper will draw on video-recordings, images, and interviews with theatre practitioners to explore the proliferation of subsequent productions. In particular it will situate these productions against a broader background of a shift towards ‘interculturalism’ in cultural policies within Germany.
The discourse of ‘interculturalism’ has a long history in the German context and is frequently associated with a sociological approach which characterises cultures as homogeneous, closed constructs. Literary work by Turkish-German authors, including Zaimoglu, has long been considered under the umbrella of ‘intercultural literature’ rather than ‘German literature’ in German universities, for example. This is a circumstance which has been heavily criticized from other quarters as ‘reduc[ing] the work in an ethnocentric manner to its value for cultural communication’ and functioning to anchor literature by authors of non-German ethnicity firmly in their ‘otherness’ (Karin Lornsen; my translation). As the tide was turning away from this approach in literary studies, ‘interculturalism’ appears to have re-emerged to haunt the Turkish-German artist as a key term in theatre funding.
Just as the ‘play’ transforms significantly when moving from page to stage, however, ‘interculuralism’ as a concept is in the process of morphing further. Migration researcher and journalist Mark Terkessidis has provided a Deleuzean redefinition of interculture which has been highly influential in Germany’s theatrical sphere in recent years, for example: interculture as a means of understanding culture in general as ‘in emergence [...] as a structure in the process of transformation, as something which is not whole, or not yet’ (Terkessidis; my translation). My own paper will provide an insight into current thinking on interculturalism and performance in the German context, drawing especially on work by Terkessidis. It will then focus on tracing the way in which intercultural policies have both enabled and demanded the production of new forms of engagement with postmigrant theatre, taking the example of the multiple productions of Black Virgins as a case study. The quotation in the title of this paper, taken from the play-text, suggests an awareness of the uneasy positioning of the success of the play between market demands and a more rights-based approach to inclusion and recognition in contemporary Germany. I will use a focus on the dynamics of interculturalism as a means to unpack this positioning further, and will explore what the production histories of Black Virgins have to tell us about ‘interculturalism and performance now’.
Panel 4:
Prarthana Purkayastha (Plymouth University), ‘What’s with the Red Dot on the Forehead? Intercultural Marking in Hetain Patel’s TEN’
The intercultural theatre of the 1980s and 90s were instrumental in opening up critical dialogues around notions of selfhood and otherness. However, the Other was often assumed to be a unified concept in such cultural exchanges. What happens when the body of the Other in present day intercultural theatre can no longer uphold that unity of cultural experience, and instead signals a continuous fracturing of identities owing to displacement, migration and transnational citizenship? What new possibilities and meanings emerge when such fragmented and hyphenated bodies speak back and re-negotiate relations with dominant cultural practices in the act of performance?
Following Ric Knowles’ interest in how ‘new, hybrid and diasporic subjectivities are performatively forged’ in the intercultural theatre of global cities today (2010:79), this paper focuses on the work of the British Asian artist Hetain Patel, which offers a constant questioning of the assumed universalism of ethnic identities. As case study, this paper examines the 2010 production TEN, which featured Patel himself, Mark Evans (a Scottish drummer) and Dave ‘Stickman’ Higgins (a drummer of West Indian, Irish and British-Lancastrian heritage). The piece involved devised text, scored and choreographed movement sequences in which the bodies of three men negotiate race, complex rhythmic cycles and red vermilion powder to mark their skin. Part physical theatre, part choreography and part live art, TEN revolves around the autobiographical narratives of three men who ‘cannot quite put a finger’ on who they really are (TEN, 2010).
Through Hetain Patel, the paper locates the ways in which strategies of blockage and deliberate disappointment enable postmodern British Asian works such as TEN to reveal not only inherent assumptions about ethnicity, race and cultural products, but also expose the audience’s voyeuristic tendencies to consume fetishised skin and bodies in intercultural encounters. In the performance works of artists such as Patel’s, corporeal experience is placed at the centre of discourses on cultural identity to open new discussions on the heterogeneity and multiplicity of verbal and embodied languages.
Victor Ramirez Ladron De Guevara (Plymouth University), ‘Traduttore, Traditore: The “Thorny” Issue of Translation in the Creation of Autoethnographic Intercultural Performances’
This paper will question the role played by translation in the process of devising a number of autoethnographic performances which situate themselves within an intercultural framework. Parting from the premise that all intercultural performances depend on a process of translation, this paper will examine the models of cross-cultural exchange proposed by Pavis (the hourglass), Bharucha (the pendulum), and Lo and Gilbert (the spinning disc held by an elastic string). It will be the assertion of this paper that, in all three models, the issue of translation has remained largely unchallenged, often reduced to a mere linguistic process and closely attached to issues related to colonisation and appropriation.
As such, translation in this context will be treated as a vector in which socio-semiotic and phenomenological content converge, and which can actively be used to emphasise notions of cultural difference. The paper will then discuss the creation of three practice-as-research projects in which the author has explored autoethnographic content in an intercultural medium: All Scars are Nice and Clean (2006); Time Zone(s) (2011); and The Citizenship Test (forthcoming). All three performances attempt to discover a culturally specific node from which a complex matrix of cross-cultural communication can emerge. Drawing from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the translational process is therefore treated as both arboreal and rhizomatic, an activity that simultaneously challenges and re-affirms the (im)possibility of communicating across cultures.
Panel 5:
Yvette Hutchison (University of Warwick), ‘Accessing the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” – South African engagement with colonialism and ethnography in the intercultural/ postcolonial/ global context’
Rhustom Bharucha has asserted that, “the interpretation and use of cultures have to be confronted within the particularities of a specific historic condition. It is naïve, if not irresponsible, to assume that a meaningful confrontation of any culture to transcend the immediacies of its history.” (Theatre and the World, 2005:1) I want to analyse the implications of specific historic and cultural contexts for contemporary intercultural practice, given that “the immediacies of ... history” are increasingly challenged by mobility in an increasingly globalised world, which is also increasingly haunted by colonial legacies.
I will analyse South African performances that have overtly critiqued histories of colonialism in Africa and toured both in South Africa (as a complex intra-cultural context) and in Europe. Examples of this work include Handspring Puppet Company (Woycek on the Highveld, 1992, Faustus in Africa, 1995, Ubu and the Truth Commission,1998), Magnet Theatre (Cargo, 2007, Every Day, Every year, I am Walking, performed in 19 countries since 2008), Brett Bailey’s controversial Exhibit A& B (toured 2010-2014, in 14 cities in Europe), and Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind, which toured Europe in 2011 and was performed at the National Arts Festival, South Africa, in July 2012.
I want to consider how a performance lens can “open the space between analysis and action, and [...] pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice” (Conquergood, 2002, 145) to facilitate critical, active engagement with issues of the colonial past in the present. I am particularly interested in how theatre/ performance can facilitate inter-subjective dialogues in an intercultural context. By intersubjectivity I am not referring to that which occurs within a person, as in Lacan and Foucault, but with the mechanisms that work between people; the location for the negotiation of representations, narratives, meanings, affected by various hegemonies, on our subjectivity (Holloway, 1989, Passerini, 2007).
I will consider how cultural assumptions around universal responses to trauma, for example, shame or guilt impact in intercultural staging of sensitive histories. Also, I am interested in the role aesthetics can play in deconstructing an approach to a linear engagement with time. Also, how an artist can make a performer’s embodied gesture or image dialogical, “a play of open-ended possibilities interacting between two fixed poles which exist in some form of dialogue with each other” (Fleishman, 1997:205), and thereby facilitate an spectator’s recognition of different poles (values, cultural positions), and how we negotiate between them. All the while analysing the genesis and limitations of our knowledges, what informs our subjectivities, and how we can highlight the multiplicity of other potential perspectives on colonial histories.
Daphne Lei (University of California, Irvine), ‘Can You See Yellow?: Rescuing Interculturalism in Post-racial Orientalism’
Playing Oriental has been a stable Western fascination in performance history, from stage to screen, and, in the 21st century, online. The Orientalist performance trope has not waned as such performances have multiplied and "authenticated" with better technology; however, I argue that the perception of such performances has changed dramatically in recent years. Along with institutionalized multiculturalism, post-racial colorblind casting, and global Asian wealth and technology, yellow has been "elevated" to a status of non-color and non-race, and in the American context, non-diversity. And yet, yellow is not white: it is off white, beige, a perfect non-descriptive background. Yellow occupies a space that is cognitively unseen and unheard, peripheral and powerless, a space of post-racial Orientalism.
If yellow is deliberately not recognized, how can intercultural Asian performance even be possible? Between the meticulous mimicking of the decorative Oriental race in performance and the ontological and epistemological denial of race in audienceship is a new space where interculturalism wrestles with post-racial Orientalism. By investigating a number of contemporary theatrical and online performances involving "Oriental" performances, I propose to reexamine the old East vs. West intercultural paradigm in the context of post-racial discourse and techno-globalism.
Panel 6:
Rustom Bharucha (Jawaharlal Nehru University), ‘Interculturalism and Its Discontents: New Directions in Rethinking Intercultural Performance Practice Today’
Through an inventory of my intercultural search in the theatre since 1977, this talk will attempt a self-reflexive articulation of some of the primary tropes, gaps, fissures, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities in the early discourse of interculturalism in Euro-American academic culture of the 1970s. Eschewing the traps of nostalgia and a fixed teleology, it will make a case that, contrary to rumors of its redundancy or imminent demise, the discourse of interculturalism continues to throw out creative and political challenges that work against the grain of its imbrication in the larger narratives of nationalism and globalization. With the proliferation of nation-states and intensification of sectarian hatred, supplemented by Islamophobia and the xenophobic backlash against refugees and non-citizens reduced to ‘bare life’, the intercultural needs to be affirmed rather than abandoned, but not without un-learning the blind spots and prejudices of earlier histories and practices.
Problematizing the increasingly rash dismissal of ‘culture’ as an a priori essentialism, in addition to the anti-aesthetic proclivities of academic postcolonialism, the talk will argue for a politics of aesthetics in which the discontents surrounding interculturalism can be negotiated through new socio-political content which has been excluded from its dominant practices. Can intercultural performance today be extended beyond its innate liberal privileges and unacknowledged moral hegemony? Can it open itself to a dialogue with non-liberal constituencies and modes of cultural practice, which could challenge its naïve celebration of diversities without an acknowledgement of differences? More critically, can it engage with those political and historical formations that do not conform to the laws of liberal individualism and private ownership? Or will the ethos of intercultural performance continue to make a virtue out of ‘creative theft’ and the ‘right to offend’? Are they any limits to its unconditional autonomy?
By calling attention to a few examples of contemporary performance practice relating to Aboriginal, ‘folk’, and subaltern communities, the talk will tease out the myriad contradictions by which the new manifestations of intercultural practice are increasingly in sync with global performing circuits alongside more tense negotiations of intra-cultural differences within seemingly homogenized communities. While capitulations to neo-Orientalist stereotypes and spectacles continue through processes of self-Orientalization, there are also more bold intercultural collaborations around dehumanized forms of labor in which the common concerns of precarity and ecocide find a common platform across North and South. Calling attention to the rich ambiguities of both intercultural production and spectatorship, the talk will end by suggesting that the future of interculturalism is most likely to resonate through a critical consciousness of shared affinities embedded in a matrix of differences, tuned to both the flows and disjunctions of the global creative economy.
Leo Cabranes-Grant (University of California, Santa Barbara), ‘Towards a New Historiography of the Intercultural Experience’
Intercultural encounters are frequently described as intersectional events, sites of hybridity, métissage, and syncretic negotiation. This emphasis on mixtures and borrowings is usually emphasized at the expense of recognizing that intercultural events are also sites of emergence in which all the materials involved are both transformed and interrogated. But intercultural performances in which Eastern and Western practices are conjoined are neither Eastern not Western: they actually enable a new standard of identity for the cultures involved. This emerging quality is, more often than not, overlooked. While a tendency to rely on analogical comparisons and morphological models stresses the representational aspects of intercultural performances, it also occludes the reproductive forces involved in the actualization of those events. This paper proposes to re-localize our critical attention on the labors that make intercultural relations possible in order to re-trace how identities are challenged, interrogated, and altered. Instead of re-mobilizing the categories of hybridity or mimicry (categories that solidify socio-biological or highly derivative modes of understanding) I suggest that we look at the intercultural as a process of networking in which economic, aesthetic, and affective forces are constantly shaping and re-shaping our sense of self. This complex array of forces is not only at work when explicit intercultural encounters take place; on the contrary, these forces support and nurture the continuous heterogeneity of everyday life. Interculturality starts at home, not only when an external Other arrives. Using as an example the song-dances of the Aztecs in colonial Mexico, I will unpack how a particular indigenous practice (the mitote) provided a series of templates for the reproduction of cultural entanglements that included objects, schools, rituals, and several forms of affective entrainments through which the Mexica deliberately re-casted their own history. The Mexica were already reproducing and monitoring their cultural differences before the Spaniards conquered them, and the challenge for us today is to find critical discourses that recognize the fact that intercultural relations acquire their profile within cultures as much as between them.