The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures

Beyond Postcolonialism

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, Saskya Iris Jain, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, Saskya Iris Jain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317935834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they are dependent upon each other.

While the term 'intercultural theatre' as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot adequately be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy 'the West and the rest' – where Western cultures are 'universal' and non-Western cultures are 'particular' – as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership.

This volume uses international case studies to explore the politics of globalization, looking at new paternalistic forms of exchange and the new inequalities emerging from it. These case studies are guided by the principle that processes of interweaving performance cultures are, in fact, political processes. The authors explore the inextricability of the aesthetic and the political, whereby aesthetics cannot be perceived as opposite to the political; rather, the aesthetic is the political.

Helen Gilbert's essay 'Let the Games Begin: Pageants, Protests, Indigeneity (1968–2010)'won the 2015 Marlis Thiersch Prize for best essay from the Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association.

Part I

Strategies and Dynamics

1 Postcolonial Modernity

Theatre in Morocco and the Interweaving Loop

Khalid Amine

The Occident is a part of me, a part that I can only deny insofar as I resist all the Occidents and all the Orients that oppress and disillusion me.

—Abdelkebir Khatibi¹

The recent debate on the politics of intercultural theatre has not only critiqued artistic negotiations of different dimensions of alterity but developed a new lexicon that reveals a paradigm shift in international theatre research. As Brian Singleton puts it, “[t]he new terminology signifies a revision of a cartographic location of all cultures, seen through a kaleidoscope of exchange, borrowing, bartering, and appropriation, dependent on the subject position of the borrower.”² By exposing the Eurocentric underpinnings of various theatrical journeys East, the grip of ontotheology or the metaphysics of ‘the unique model’ has been persistently worn out. Erika Fischer-Lichte’s work epitomizes the critique of intercultural performance elements that lurk in various Western theatrical enterprises that went East and South. “The starting point for intercultural staging,” Fischer-Lichte rightly argues, “is thus not primarily an interest in the foreign—the foreign theatre or the foreign culture from which it is taken—but rather a situation completely specific within its own culture or a completely specific problem having its origin within its own theatre.”³ This means that contributions from non-Western cultures would no longer be systematically overlooked and the age-old processes of interweaving between Europe and its various Others no longer denied.

Such debates imply the achievability of a democratic interweaving between performance cultures worldwide.⁴ International theatre studies, as manifested in the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) or Performance Studies international (PSi), has long studied the world before undergoing its revolution from the inside. Should the world study back or, rather, perform back? Our task as subaltern scholars is further complicated while revisiting the existing body of world-theatre histories; we are hardly visible, and if mentioned at all, then often on the borderlines between absence and presence. Europe has always been the “silent referent”⁵ in theatre history. Obviously, “third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate. … We cannot even afford an equality or symmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘outdated.’”⁶ Also, the subaltern theatre scholar becomes the translator of a body of writings that were “formed elsewhere and whose archeological questions, most of the time, he hardly doubts. Frightened by the intellectual production of the West and by a process of accelerated accumulation, the researcher is satisfied with constructing, in the shadow of the Western episteme, a second knowledge that is residual and that satisfies no one.”⁷ The task of the subaltern scholar is thus rendered more difficult and risky.

Can we speak of a postcolonial modernity? It has been argued that European modernity would not have been possible without colonialism. Our modernity, too, would not have been possible without European colonialism, insofar as ours is a postcolonial modernity that grew in relation to the European Other ever since the French campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801). Napoleon Bonaparte brought with him the three basic constituents of European modernity: power, competition, and knowledge. And if we try to situate these three aspects in relation to our modernity, we find the following: colonial intervention, competition between European powers (mainly England and France), and the emergence of modern thought in the Arab world. The Napoleonic military expedition marked the beginning of a conflicting interplay between modernity and colonialism. The Arabs’ appropriation of Western models of theatre production was one result of this interplay. Soon after Cairo was captured on 21 July 1798, “French bands played, concerts were organized, and Tivoli, near Esbekeih, was opened with dancing, gaming, reading and refreshment rooms.”⁸ As he was preparing to leave Egypt on 22 August 1799, Napoleon wrote a significant note to his successor, General Kléber, explaining the imperatives of theatre activity: “I have already asked several times for a troupe of comedians. I will make a special point of sending you one. This item is of great importance for the army and as the means of beginning to change the customs of the country.”⁹ The establishment of theatre through Napoleon was meant to serve two main objectives: (1) as a means of entertainment for the soldiers, and (2) as an agency aimed at changing people’s traditions and implementing the French civilizing mission. These Napoleonic aspirations echo Karl Marx’s thesis on British colonialism and its double mission in a supposedly backward India: “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”¹⁰ The destructive task led to the breaking up of the native communities and the uprooting of the local industry, whereas the regenerative undertaking pursued the path of modernizing India. The impact on India was so deep that Indians found themselves between two doors: that of the East that refuses to close totally and that of the West that refuses to open fully. The Moroccan sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi provides an important reading of Marx’s terrifying statement: “[T]he murder of the traditions of the Other and the liquidation of its past are necessary so that the West, while seizing the world, can expand beyond its limits while remaining unchanged in the end. The East must be shaken up in order to come back to the West.”¹¹ The introduction of European theatrical traditions was utilized as a means to bring the East back to the West.¹²

The Franco-Spanish colonial adventure in Morocco followed the same procedure but in a different way. The first resident-general of French Morocco from 1912 to 1925, Louis Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934), seemed to have established a set of imperatives for French colonial policy following a ‘protectorate’ rather than a ‘settler’s colony’ format: “[V]ex not tradition, leave custom be. Never forget that in every society there is a class to be governed, and a natural-born ruling class upon whom all depends. Link their interests to ours.”¹³ The gradual secularization of education was achieved by the introduction of technical modernity. In fact, modernity “appeared to generate wealth and commodities that the Islamic world lacked and desired.”¹⁴ However, since its inception in the Arabo-Islamic world, it has been subject to various concessions. With increasing European penetration of Morocco, Islamic jurisdiction was little by little marginalized by the interference of a subsidiary modern administration located in these new cities. The Ulama of the Qaraouiyin steadily lost their exclusive control over education, as the French built new, modern schools.¹⁵ The erection of theatre buildings in Morocco was a part of the colonial policy of extending European traditions beyond Europe; they were conceived as modernizing ideological apparatuses and entertaining sites for European troops and settlers, remaining inaccessible to the majority of Moroccans before the 1920s.¹⁶

From the start, theatre in Morocco was deterritorialized, or rather, trapped in an ambiguous compromise and confronted with the necessity to oscillate between different approaches to performance and schools of thought. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “deterritorialization”¹⁷ at its heart is effected by a movement away from a given system, say the proscenium tradition in theatre, and the construction of a new energy out of it, which is still removed from the original system. This, for example, is the case with al-halqa theatre as practiced by Tayeb Saddiki, among others. Following Deleuze and Guattari, “deterritorialization” can thus be seen as a movement in a new direction out of an established system. The deployment of al-halqa techniques and modes of artistic production in contemporary Moroccan theatre exemplifies the inventive and intensive utilization of language that resists the lure of hegemony. Even the fixity of the inherently European theatre edifice becomes deterritorialized in the process of transposing al-halqa’s free play to a stage building. The openness and free play of the city square Jemaa-el-Fna are forced upon the rigidity and closure of the Western theatre building. The result is not a return to pre-theatre, but rather the creation of an aporetic space within the fixity and closure of the Italian theatrical building. The same aporia affected postcolonial Moroccan dramatic scripts, which have become hybrid combinations of orature and literature.

In 1950, the colonial administration decided to meddle in the work of an emerging theatre of resistance with the intention of reproducing a Moroccan version of the Théâtre National Populaire. Theatre became an important concern in protectorate policies. Professional experts were called in from France to adapt Moroccan theatre in line with the original agenda of the colonial administration. André Voisin, Charles Nugue, and Pierre Richie, among others, supervised a series of theatrical training sessions in the Mamoura Center near the capital city of Rabat between 1952 and 1956. Among them, André Voisin was considered the visionary, spiritual father, and founder of the first professional Moroccan company, firqat at-tamthil al-maghrebi or the Moroccan Theatre Company (literally, the National Company). A disciple of Antonin Artaud and Charles Dullin, Voisin came to Morocc...