The Intercultural Performance Reader (Edited by Patrice Pavis, 1996)

Introduction: Towards a theory of interculturalism in Theatre (P.1-21)

The Possibilities and Limitations of intercultural theatre

• P.1 In short, not only has intercultural theatre still not been constituted as a recognized territory, but we are even unsure as to whether or not its future already lies behind it. Consequently, it might be more productive to speak of intercultural exchanges within theatre practice rather than of the constitution of a new genre emerging from the synthesis (綜合) of heterogeneous (由不同成分形成的) traditions.
• Erika Fishcher-Lichte is perhaps ultimately right when she affirms that it is still too soon to propose a global theory of intercultural theatre (Fischer-Lichte et al., 1990:284)
  
• P.2 In fact , one should avoid turning intercultural theatre into a vague terrain for comparing themes or cultural identities, as in China Dream, for example (see pp.188-195), or for contrasting ways of thinking. Instead, one should locate it as a crucible (熔化鍋) in which performance techniques are tested against and amalgamated with (合併) the techniques that receive and fashion them. All things considered, the generic form of "intercultural theatre" is perhaps more legitimate than "intercultural mise en scene".

We will make use of some more precise definitions of culture, in general inspired by the excellent formulation of Camille Camilleri (1982).

Definition 1 (P.3)

• "Culture is a kind of shaping, of specific 'inflections' which mark our representations, feelings, activity - in short, and in a general manner, every aspect of our mental life and even of our biological organism under the influence of the group" (1982:16)


• On a theatre stage, every element of the production, animate and inanimate, is affected by such inflections.

Definition 2

• "The cultural order is 'artifical' in the proper sense of the word; that is, it is created by human art. It is distinct from the natural order" (Camilleri, 1982:16)


• Culture is opposed to nature, the acquired to the innate, artistic creation to natural expressivity.

Definition 3 (P.4)

• "Culture is transmitted by what has been called 'social heredity (遺傳)', that is, by a certain number of techniques through which each generation interiorizes for the next the communal inflexion of the psyche and the organism which culture comprises" (Camilleri, 1982:16-17)


• In the theatre, this inflection is especially noticeable in certain traditions of performance for which actors and dancers have embodied a style and technique that is both corporeal and vocal.


• In the West, as in the East, actor-dancers have interiorized an ensemble of rules of behaviour, habits of acting according to unwritten laws which order all and are longlasting.


• "What lasts for only a short time", as Eugenio Barba notes, "is not theatre, but spectacle. Theatre is made up of traditions, conventions, institutions, and habits that have permanence in time" (1988:26)

Definition 4

• Schechner has stated (1982, 1985), that there is no "pure" culture not influenced by others.


• The intraculural is the correlative of the intercultural. (P.5)


• The transculural, indeed, transcends (優於) particular cultures on behalf of a universality of the human condition. Transcultural directors are concerned with particularities and traditions only in order to grasp more effectively what they have in common and what is not reducible to a specific culture. (P.6)


• The ultracultural in fact involves an often mythic quest for the originsand the supposed lost purity of the theatre. (P.6)


• The precultural should be distinguished form the ultracultural in so far as it does not seek the common origins of cultures and theatrical forms but points out what is common today to Eastern and Western theatre practitioners before they become individualized or "acculturated" in particular traditions or techniques of performance. (P. 7)


• The postcultural, in so far as it is possible to imagine such a thing, is particularly appropriate to postmodern though, which sees within any cultural or artistic art a recapitulation of elements already known or expressed.


• The metacultural would be a postculturalism which recognized that its nature and strategy is not that of coming "after" (and thus too late), but "above", in a superimposed position in relation to other cultural givens. As soon as one culture comments upon another, to explain or justify it, this develops a critical commentary on a meta-textual level and becomes an interpretive meta-language.


• P.8 All of the prefixes added to the Cultural radically modify its significance, as well as limiting the meaning of hte intercultural.

P. 8 Six varieties (of theatrical interculturalism) may be distinguished.

1. Intercultural theatre
2. Multicultural theatre
3. Cultural collage
4. Syncretic theatre
5. Post-colonial theatre - This takes up elements of the home culture (that of ex- or neo-colonization) and employs them from its indigenous perspective, thereby giving rise to a mixture of languages, dramaturgies and performance processes.
6. The "Theatre of the Fourth World"

Identification of foreign thematic and formal elements (P.16)

• Whatever our distance from the culture to be reconstituted may be, a few traces of it can always be recovered, often metonymic and elliptic: a narrative mode, a dramatic structure, the presence of themes or metaphors, indexes on the reality of stereotypes, a "structure of feeling" (Raymond Williams).

Goals of the adaptors (P.16)

• Every relationship with a foreign culture is determined by the purpose of the artists and cultural mediators who undertake its adaptation and its transmission. This purpose is as much aesthetic as ideological and, in both cases, often remains implicit or unconscious.
• In this sense, every intercultural project obeys the constraints and the needs tied specifically to the target culture that produces it. It seems idealistic to look for a universal, transcultural and transpolitical function for intercultural theatre.

Preparatory work (P.17)

• Foreign material cannot be completely comprehended or mastered unless one knows how it has been prepared, especially with regard to the training of actors. This process of preparation, which often extends to years spent in acquiring basic techniques, is indispensable to the assimilation (同化) of forms.

The choice of a form (P.17-18)

• From the point of view of Western directors, the recourse (依賴) to exotic (異國情調的), and especially Asian, forms is often experienced as a means of renewing the realistic tendency of their own tradition, of creating a distance and an effect of strangeness in opposition to the naturalist perception. The result is sometimes a formalism that fashions theatrical materials for their intrinsic beauty, for a precision in gesture or voice which justifies reference to Eastern theatre (With all the imprecision of that term).

Theatrical representation of a culture (P.18-19)

• In the first case, therefore, to represent is to display conventions, to grasp the codification of a culture, charting its rhetorical (修辭學的) and stylistic figures, its narrative strategies, everything that gives a semiotic model to reality by means of a cultural or artistic artefact.
• At the end of the process, when spectators feel themselves being buried alive under the sand of signs and symbols, they have no other salvation than to give up and turn the hourglass upside down. Then the perspective inverts, and one must reverse and relativize the sediments accumulated in the receiving culture and judge them from the point of view of alterity and relativity.

Pavis, Patrice (1996). ‘Towards a theory of interculturalism in Theatre ’ in The Intercultural Performance Reader. Pavis Patrice (ed.). London and New York: Routledge. 1-21.