The Challenge of World Theatre History

Steve Tillis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030483425
• eBook ISBN: 9783030483432
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The future of theatre history studies requires consideration of theatre as a global phenomenon. The Challenge of World Theatre History offers the first full-scale argument for abandoning an obsolete and parochial Eurocentric approach to theatre history in favor of a more global perspective. This book exposes the fallacies that reinforce the conventional approach and defends the global perspective against possible objections. It moves beyond the conventional nation-based geography of theatre in favor of a regional geography and develops a new way to demarcate the periods of theatre history. Finally, the book outlines a history that recognizes the often-connected developments in theatre across Eurasia and around the world. It makes the case that world theatre history is necessary not only for itself, but for the powerful comparative and contextual insights it offers to all theatre scholars and students, whatever their special areas of interest.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. TillisThe Challenge of World Theatre History https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Steve Tillis¹

(1)

Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga, CA, USA

Steve Tillis

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The Parochial Perspective of Theatre Studies

The Standard Western Approach

In the last years of the sixteenth century, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci undertook an extraordinary mission to China, bringing with him a global map that incorporated the most recent “discoveries” in the Americas. The Chinese, though curious about the Americas, were appalled by the map because it placed Europe in the middle of the world, thereby relegating China to its right-hand margin. But as the map’s viewers knew, China was the “Middle Kingdom.” Father Ricci, diplomat that he was, quickly drew up a new map that was an equally accurate representation of the world, but that placed China very near the middle. According to Father Ricci, the new map gave the Chinese “a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction”: this was the way the world looked to them (Boorstin 57).

It is easy to be amused by the Sinocentrism of the Chinese. Why, after all, must China be placed in the middle of the world map? But let us go back a step to Father Ricci’s original map, which had placed Europe in the middle, as do most world maps we see to this very day.¹ Do Europeans (along with the people of its former settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia) also find amusement in this Eurocentrism, or have they grown so accustomed to it that they take for granted that world maps will center themselves on Europe—and not only on the East–West axis, but on the North–South axis as well, thanks to the misleading magic of the Mercator projection?²

More than four hundred years after Father Ricci’s expedition, we in the field of theatre studies are still heirs to the Eurocentric perspective of his original map, particularly in regard to our pedagogy. Centuries of explorations, immigrations, and all manner of inter-societal relations have still not led us to act upon the simple fact that Europe is not necessarily in the middle of the theatrical world. Indeed, the pedagogy of theatre studies has arguably taken a step backwards from Father Ricci, for our intellectual “maps” of theatre history are, on the whole, not just Eurocentric, but parochial in nature—“parochial,” that is, in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “relating or confined to a narrow area or region, as if within the borders of one’s own parish; limited or provincial in outlook or scope.” For whereas Father Ricci took pains to draw fair representations of the entire known world, the field of theatre studies still often acts as if vast portions of the world scarcely existed.

Historical thinking, like map-making, necessarily requires adopting some perspective or another; it involves focus, selection, and emphasis and will therefore always be to some measure biased and incomplete. But it nonetheless maintains the goal of being at least “convergent on the truth,” as the historian Michael Stanford suggests (131). Philosophers and theorists of history can (and do) justifiably debate what it means to say that something is “true,” but for most practicing historians, convergence on the truth begins, above all, by avoiding demonstrable falsehoods (131). It is inexcusable to maintain a perspective that is known to contradict uncontested facts, but such has been the case in theatre studies. Once upon a time, Europeans might have been oblivious to the theatre of the wider world and might therefore be excused for adopting a perspective that placed everything but their own theatre beyond the margins of their theatre histories. Such narrow-mindedness cannot be justified today, when at least some information about the theatrical traditions of most of the world is readily available. And yet what I call the “Standard Western Approach” still dominates theatre studies. For about a century, this perspective has provided an overarching way to teach and study theatre history, and theatre historians have become deeply habituated to it, to the point that is still often taken as a “given,” however much it has come to diverge from the known facts of theatre history.

Classical theatre, Medieval theatre, Renaissance theatre, and so on: The Standard Western Approach lines them up as a child might line up the wooden cars of a toy train. Give a pull on the “engine” of the ritual origins of theatre in Greece, and each car follows along, until the shiny red caboose of contemporary spoken theatre rolls merrily into sight.³ The approach will likely seem familiar even to people not conversant with theatre history, because it mirrors the approach taken by the “Western Civ” history courses that were popular in the United States through much of the twentieth century and can still be found to this day. According to the historians Edmund Burke III and Ross E. Dunn, Western Civ courses are “wholly teleological” in that their examination of the past is dominated by their goal of seeking out “an actual chain of cause and effect” that explains the current state of the Westernized world. “This view of history,” they argue, “is a well-ordered ideological construct, but it is no longer convincing or sufficient as a way to explain how the world, or even Europe, has changed over the centuries and millennia. Indeed, it can be seen as an effort to … endow the West with a uniquely privileged status, rather than to situate it alongside its sister civilizations” (523). The same is precisely the case with theatre’s Standard Western Approach, which privileges European theatre (especially its spoken theatre) above all else, thereby glorifying Europe and its theatrical past.

The “ideological construct” of the Standard Western Approach is built upon a set of historiographic fallacies, three of which are of special importance. The first is a deep (if sometimes unintentional) ethnocentrism, which assumes that the history (and theatre history) of Europe and its descendants is the only history that matters. Second is a dichotomy assumed to exist between “East” and “West,” which allows for the examination of our history and theatre in opposition to the history and theatre of an undifferentiated Eastern Other, which can then be dismissed from further consideration. The third fallacy can be called “progressivism”; it is the belief (made possible through a highly selective use of historical evidence) that theatre history demonstrates an inevitable rise from “ritual to realism.” I will analyze these fallacies at greater length in Chap. 3. For now, it is enough to recognize that the Standard Western Approach, based on these fallacies, has effectively centralized a particular strand of European theatre while marginalizing (or even erasing) the rich and varied history of theatre in other regions of the world. It is an intellectually indefensible habit that, however innocently it might be held, yields a parochial and misleading view of the world—a view, in other words, that has no particular interest in being “convergent on the truth.”

Now, a few decades into the twenty-first century, it should not be controversial to call for a theatre history that extends beyond Europe and its former settler colonies. And I am happy to report that over the past generation, there has been at least some movement toward the consideration of non-European theatre. Most of this movement, however, has taken place in the realm of specialized studies and the occasional elective course, even as studies and classes on theatre history, per se, have largely maintained the Standard Western Approach.

At the same time as this first, halting, movement away from an exclusive focus on Europe and its colonial descendants, there has been a second movement—this one away from theatre history itself. In this movement, theatre history is treated as little more than a compendium of plays, performance practices, discrete historical moments, and interesting themes, among which one might pick and choose. Some years back, for example, a theatre department with which I am familiar had maintained a three-part historical survey that was divided along rather typical lines into courses on Classical, Medieval–Renaissance–Romantic, and Modern theatre. Although labeled a “world theatre history” sequence, it actually ventured out of Europe only for a short visit to the United States, to the complete exclusion of all other non-European lands: so much for the “world.” In the wake of the “canon wars” of the 1980s, and as one of the many (if occasionally dubious) accomplishments thereof, this survey was overthrown. One might say a blow was rightly struck against the Standard Western Approach, but no integrated treatment of world theatre history was put in its place. Instead, the department offered “Topics in Theatre,” with the specific topic for each class to be determined by the professor. Many of these “topics” classes proved quite successful, but it should come as no surprise that the only time the topics moved outside of Europe was to consider European-style spoken theatre in the Americas and (far less frequently) Africa. In effect, the program implicitly continued to promulgate the view that this form of theatre alone was worthy of study; now, however, this uniquely privileged theatre was taught ahistorically. It is difficult to see that much has been gained here, or at any of the many other institutions that have cast aside their outdated history courses but maintained the Eurocentrism on which they were predicated.

Why was this department’s three-part history survey not replaced by a history of world theatre? A professor’s comment is instructive: “We know how to teach Western theatre history—but don’t even know how to think about world theatre history.” This comment can apply to both of the movements I have noted, one of which struggles, with limited success, to improve upon the deeply entrenched Standard Western Approach, the other of which abandons history itself, while still being imbued with precisely the perspective it has tried to leave behind.

Survey Classes, Textbooks, and Anthologies

Erika Fischer-Lichte suggests that “totalising and teleologically oriented constructions of history have long been overcome” (73). It is unclear if she is referring to “constructions” of general history (in which case she would largely be correct) or of theatre history. If she is indeed referring to theatre history, she might be correct about her native Germany, but she is demonstrably wrong in regard to the United States, where the Standard Western Approach still retains its grip on the way that theatre history is taught.

We can see this through an examination of college survey courses in theatre history, as well as of the textbooks and play anthologies that are these classes’ prime supports. But I should note, by way of preface, that I am focusing here on academia because it is the primary place where one finds overviews of theatre history on anything larger than a national scale.⁴ This is not to dismiss national theatre histories or, indeed, histories of theatre on even more local scales. I am merely suggesting that if one wants to see how theatre history as a whole has been construed, one must perforce turn to survey courses, textbooks, and anthologies.

This is the third time I have conducted this sort of examination, the first two having been published in 2003 and 2007 (Tillis , “East” and “Remapping”). Direct comparisons between these three studies are not always possible, owing to some differences in methodology, but essential points are reasonably clear.

In my most recent look at survey courses, I examined the course catalogues of one hundred of the top five hundred colleges and universities in the United States, as listed in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2018.⁵ Of these hundred schools, seventy-two offered a major in theatre. This number is roughly the same as before, when 73% (in 2003) and 68% (in 2007) of the schools I looked at offered a theatre major. It seems then, that theatre is holding relatively steady as a discipline. The same cannot be said, however, about the scholarly requirements for fulfilling the major. Of the seventy-two schools offering a major, 61% required that their majors take a two-or-three semester survey of theatre history. Back in 2007, 87% required such a sequence. Unfortunately, I do not have a comparable percentage for 2003, but it seems clear that there has been a retreat from requiring a sequence of theatre-history classes. I should note that an additional 8% of schools with majors offer a full theatre history survey but do not require that their majors take all two or three semesters. Even overlooking this lack of requirement, that means that only 69% have a full sequence on the books.

And yet there is mildly encouraging news concerning the content of the theatre history surveys. My most recent look at survey courses shows that 39% include some content from Asia and/or Africa; in 2003 and 2007, by contrast, I found about 25% and 28% of such classes having such content. Three major caveats are necessary at this point. First, course descriptions can be quite laconic, and their failure to mention Asian or African theatre does not necessarily signal a strictly Euro-American focus. Second, what actually happens in a course can differ from what appears in its catalogue description. Third (and most importantly), the amount of attention devoted to Asian and African theatre in the course descriptions is quite variable. Sometimes the impression is that this content might be fully integrated into the survey (“examines theatre around the globe”), while at other times it seems merely to be tacked on (“non-We...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Case Against World Theatre History
• 3. The Fallacies of the Standard Western Approach
• 4. Theatrical Events and Theatre Forms
• 5. The Geography of World Theatre History
• 6. The Long View of World Theatre History
• 7. Continuity and Change in World Theatre History
• 8. Periodicity in World Theatre History
• Back Matter