Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor's Work

Foreign Bodies of Knowledge

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415988872
• eBook ISBN: 9781135858421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

A sophisticated analysis of how the intersection of technique, memory, and imagination inform performance, this book redirects the intercultural debate by focusing exclusively on the actor at work. Alongside the perspectives of other prominent intercultural actors, this study draws from original interviews with Ang Gey Pin (formerly with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) and Roberta Carreri (Odin Teatret). By illuminating the hidden creative processes usually unavailable to outsiders--the actor's apprenticeship, training, character development, and rehearsals--Nascimento both reveals how assumptions based on race or ethnicity are misguiding, trouble definitions of intra- and intercultural practices, and details how performance analyses and claims of appropriation fail to consider the permanent transformation of the actor's identity that cultural transmission and embodiment represent.

1
The Cultural Temperature of the Twentieth Century

Drastic political transformations, large waves of immigration, and technology’s rapid development marked the twentieth century as a time of intense cultural exchange and a growing awareness of the Other. Although, as scholar and editor Khachig Tölölyan states in the very first issue of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnationalism, “some of the phenomena characteristic of our transnational moment are as old as history” (4), the twentieth century’s postcolonial experience dismantled previous assumptions of nation-states founded on cultural and ethnic homogeneity: “their ostensible homogeneity [is] a multicultural homogeneity” (5). Tölölyan explains that the

[…] vision of a homogeneous nation is now being replaced by a vision of the world as a ‘space’ continually reshaped by forces—cultural, political, technological, demographic, and above all economic—whose varying intersections in real estate constitute every ‘place’ as heterogenous and disequilibriated site of production, appropriation, and consumption, of negotiated identity and effect. (6)

If events during the first half of the century profoundly disturbed previously established sociopolitical boundaries, the second half hosted passionate discussions in the arena of identity politics in an attempt to give shape to our abilities and inabilities in dealing with difference. Grappling with a long history of silencing, rejecting, or exoticizing what is not familiar to us, we devise and revise ways of negotiating difference in daily life; and in the process, we often are confused by the fact that borders considered legitimate by one group are in no time rejected by another. Without a clear central reference, new emerging identities and the boundaries circumscribing them are inevitably unstable, and thus demand a constant reassessment of what either is desirable or forbidden, ethical or unethical in cultural relations. Because a group’s identity is defined not only through commonality but greatly by contrast to its outsiders, difference—as much as familiarity—becomes crucial in defining one’s own cultural location. In our daily lives, it is irrefutable that difference is now a major part of the social actor’s script.

In the course of the twentieth century, a significant number of artists left their homelands in response to troubling sociopolitical changes in their countries. In discussing German dancers and musicians who found exile in Latin America, Marion Kant remarks that the twentieth century was a

century of artists in exile: Armenians fleeing from the genocide, Russians leaving Russia after the revolution in 1917, Germans and Jews fleeing Nazism, Italians and Spanish fleeing Fascism under Mussolini and Franco; artists fled from every part of Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia and from every kind of regime. (32)

One of the outcomes of this international transit of artists is that spectators gained greater access to performances from other cultures. Additionally, traveling abroad became more accessible. The increased contact and subsequent exchanges between artists from various performative traditions allowed for a more prompt inclusion of difference in theatre-making, particularly in the West. In theatre, one of the most notable cases is Antonin Artaud’s discovery of Balinese dance, as noted in his “On the Balinese Theatre” (The Theatre and Its Double 53–67) and “Oriental and Occidental Theatre” (68–73). In “Our Hybrid Tradition,” dance and theatre historian Sally Banes elaborates on the matter, reminding us that

The kaleidoscope of world dance and music in Paris 1900, inspiring to a number of artists, both European and North American, who visited the Exhibition (and undoubtedly to the performers at the colonial pavilions themselves, although this has not been documented) was a small-scale model of a Western world that had fully become, in the height of the colonial era, a cultural mosaic. (24)

Looking at the development of the Western stage since then, it is undeniable that this curiosity about the Other was transformed into a powerful driving force for many branches of the performing arts throughout the twentieth century.¹ Difference played a confusing yet seductive role on the stage, as it placed before the spectator’s eyes a rather curious play: the shared thread among many dance, music, and theatre intercultural pieces was and surely continues to be the strife to forge a delicate balance between their own and foreign performative elements. Sally Banes underscores such fact in twentieth century avant-garde dance’s own creative call:

As a result of the modernist imperative to ‘make it new,’ avant-garde choreographers in the twentieth century have always looked to non-Western cultures (as well as to folk forms of Western nations) to find a different way of moving than what they have been taught (even if what they were taught was once itself a hybrid form, now institutionalized and therefore naturalized as always already Western). (22)

The development of culturally hybrid forms grew out of a balance between the desire to “make it new” and the need to keep familiar (and thus recognizable) elements for the viewer. Unsurprisingly, this fascination for the Other balanced with a reaffirmation of familiar elements became a marked trend in all branches of the performing arts.

The popularity of World Music as a new genre during the second half of the twentieth century also illustrates how the hybridization of foreign and familiar sources fed artistic creation. In his article “World Music, Nation, and Postcolonialism,” James Barrett describes how World Music as a category “is in such a constant flux that it refuses totalizing classification. [World Music] proliferates through so many new musical hybrids that traverse geographical spaces that it denies comprehensive surveillance” (245). As an inherently hybrid genre, World Music evokes so many “authentic” sources that it cannot be a faithful representation of any single one of them; its key to finding a target audience rests on the fact that World Music provides listeners with a sampling of foreign music within familiar formats. World Music producers initially banked on the genre’s potential to play up a pervasive desire to see the world as a global community. Many years later, the resulting fusion of foreign musical styles with familiar ones promoted a different kind of listener connection, turning World Music from a “feel good” genre to a more political one. In his essay “Globalization and the Politics of World Music,” Martin Stokes gives one of many examples of how, by the end of the twentieth century, listeners turned to World Music because the genre allowed them to personally identify with the feelings of marginalization and social oppression put forth by musicians living in other parts of the globe:

A world in which ideas, cultures, and senses of identity were woven snugly and securely into place by the nation-state was unraveling. […] Antipathy to American popular culture runs high among the European intelligentsia, while for many immigrants and other marginalized people in cities such as London, Berlin, and Paris, the link between African-American ghetto experience and their own is powerful and compelling. A younger generation, reared on migrant-oriented genres such as Bhangra, Rai and Arabesk in the 1980s, turned to rap and hip-hop in the 1990s. (297–98)

World Music’s hybrid nature can promote not just a desire to incorporate exotic foreign elements into one’s music library, but at times it also draws from select listeners’ identification with the experiences of those living in a different country. Broadly speaking, the intercultural performing arts have always had to strike a balance between the desire to “make it new” (foreign) and the need to use recognizable elements (familiar) for the spectator in a manner that creates an empathetic link among practitioners and spectators coming from various backgrounds. These practices lead to the emergence of hybrid forms that in time become “new traditions” founded on changing social contexts and intercultural contact.

Intercultural theatre, one of the most polemic and intriguing branches of last century’s theatrical avant-garde, emerged from these new realities and their ongoing negotiations. Although the Other had been dramaturgically represented since the beginnings of theatre history in works as early as Aeschylus’ Persians or Euripides’ Medea, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented change in the ways Otherness was brought to the stage. The remarkable presence of foreigners in urban centers, followed by the way difference began to be viewed and represented, increased the presence of intercultural theatre on stages worldwide. As different avant-garde movements in theatre arts sought to contest dominating ideologies and the status quo, from its early years intercultural theatre’s aesthetics reflected the world’s changing makeup and openly drew from the overlapping, juxtaposition, and hybridization of performative elements from various cultures. This approach is visible in the work of director Ariane Mnouchkine with the Théâtre du Soleil, who investigated different Asian performative traditions to later incorporate some of their elements in productions of Shakespeare and Greek plays. In The Art of Stillness, Paul Allain explains that “Interculturalism grew out of the ideological, social, and racial aspirations of multiculturalism in the 1970s which filtered into artistic practices” (9). Some intercultural theatre practitioners began to incorporate the feeling of estrangement provoked by foreign performative elements towards, as the title of Brian Singleton’s article suggests, “The Pursuit of Otherness for the Investigation of Self.” Singleton argues that more than serving “a shift in reading strategy of dominant first-world Euro-American theatre practices,” the term “interculturalism” represents a “revision of a cartographic location of all cultures, seen through the kaleidoscope of exchange, borrowing, bartering, and appropriation, dependent on the subject position of the borrower” (93). Allain also considers that “Interculturalism has been useful for several reasons: for encouraging and exposing such [economic, social, and artistic] gaps and inconsistencies; for informing theoretical debates on the ethics of practical engagements; and for elucidating a heritage of borrowing and cross-cultural inspiration” (9). The longstanding debate on the ethics of intercultural performance in great part stems from the varied sociopolitical location of practitioners, spectators, and critics: those situated either on the production or reception end of the intercultural stage often have diverging agendas. Their disagreements find as a prime battleground the criterion each group uses to define what constitutes cultural appropriation on the stage.

It is not surprising that this new genre brought with it heated debates fueled by different understandings of identity politics and definitions of ethical cultural border crossing. To complicate the matter, the number of ways in which one can engage in cultural border crossing continues to increase as quickly as identity categories multiply. In this ever-shifting context, how can one establish when the crossing of cultural borders is justified or who is allowed to transgress categories? Even more importantly: who is entitled to determine that?

During the 1960s and 1970s, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, and Ariane Mnouchkine emerged as polemical avant-garde directors. In his introduction to The Intercultural Performance Reader, Patrice Pavis states that intercultural performance can be seen almost as a separate genre and one closely associated with the works of Barba, Brook, and Mnouchkine. These directors consistently worked with actors from various countries; their work ethics demanded the environment of long-term group theatre and placed a strong focus on actor training. Moreover, the groups led by Grotowski, Barba, Brook, and Mnouchkine functioned as laboratory theatres, spaces for systematic experimentation. As a result, their companies became professional subcultures with very particular identities, expressed both in their artistic work and in the ways these groups established their own organizational and interpersonal structures. In creating such alternative communities and centering their identities on their professional lives, these directors and actors had the freedom to recreate the scope of their own cultural practices.

As mentioned above, throughout their careers Grotowski, Barba, Brook, and Mnouchkine consistently worked with groups of actors from a wide variety of nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. Although Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory was formed essentially of Polish actors,² he welcomed foreign collaborators from his Theatre of Participation to Art as vehicle.³ Since the Odin Teatret’s inception in 1964, Eugenio Barba has always worked long-term with a multinational ensemble, and for several years no two actors had the same nationality. Since moving to Paris in 1970, Peter Brook has developed theatrical productions with actors from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe at his Centre International de Recherches Théâtrales (International Center of Theatre Research). The presence of actors from various nationalities is also a marking characteristic of Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, founded in 1964 as well. The work of actors from many nations, coupled with the collaborative nature of these groups’ work, made cultural border crossing a desirable, constant, essential, and unavoidable day-to-day practice for the actors in these ensembles.

Two other striking characteristics make cultural border crossing an integral part of these directors’ work: first, the constant travels to foreign countries, whether to perform at international festivals or engage in exchange with local communities, such as the Odin Teatret’s famous “performance barters,”⁴ and second, the frequency in which they have collaborated with guest artists from various theatre traditions. For example, Brook’s group spent several months in Africa preparing for the production Conference of the Birds, and Barba’s close collaboration with performers from other cultures is at the core of his International School Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) conferences. Although the international artists collaborating with these directors have seldom received pointed attention, it is unquestionable that they have played a decisive role in how intercultural exchange has affected these ensembles’ training and performances. In this sense, foreignness becomes more than a circumstantial factor: these actors’ varied cultural profiles directly inform and transform their directors’ works.

Foreignness was and continues to be a constant factor in the professional lives of these four intercultural directors. More so, except in the case of Mnouchkine, foreignness is extended to their personal experiences as well. Due to the martial law imposed on Poland in 1980, Grotowski left his home country to teach in the United States. Grotowski then moved to Italy in 1986, where he founded the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and developed the last phase of his research, Art as vehicle. The Polish master remained in that country until his death in 1999. Barba, an Italian, began his theatre career in Poland as Grotowski’s apprentice; after a couple of years he moved to Norway, where he founded the Odin Teatret. Shortly after, the Odin received a subsidy from the Danish government to make its permanent residence in that country. Brook, who is English, established his Centre in France. Their personal experiences as foreigners, as much as their close contact with actors of multiple nationalities, transformed their performance practices into a “theatre of emigrants,” as Indian scholar Rustom Bharucha called the Odin Teatret in his book Theatre and the World.

In Contro il mal occhio: polemiche teatrale 1977–1997, Italian scholar and longtime Odin Teatret collaborator Ferdinando Taviani takes Bharucha’s concept a step further. Taviani considers the Odin to be a “theatre of migrants,” since each actor comes from a different country. Thus, the company itself has migrated across several national borders en route to its destination in Denmark. Nonetheless, in that new home country the Odin does not create “Danish theatre” per se. Taviani’s view—of the Odin’s original culture as multiple and the group’s traveling through other cultures as its essential work condition—can be extended in various degrees to other performance groups’ creation of intercultural theatre. The understanding of intercultural theatre’s legitimacy in presenting foreignness and crossing cultural borders on- and offstage finds support in Taviani’s point that these ensembles’ cultural identities are inceptively multiple.

As I discuss in later chapters, it is also important to keep in mind that even in the most traditional, realist theatre, the actor’s work is by definition that of embodying on the stage experiences foreign to her—this is equal...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Cultural Temperature of the Twentieth Century
• 2 Race, Culture, and the Myth of the Authentic
• 3 Tenuous Boundaries
• 4 Peep Show
• 5 Fictive Realities
• Afterword
• Appendix A Forgotten Memories in Action: An Interview with Ang Gey Pin
• Appendix B Playing the Invisible: An Interview with Roberta Carreri
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index