The Value(s) of Intercultural Performance
Janelle Reinelt
"Intercultural” performance has most often been understood to refer to significant distance and differences between the cultures involved – to East/West theatrical experiments or North/South encounters. But the term also applies to cultural behaviours and artistic representations that negotiate much closer relationships between neighbouring countries, distinct ethnicities living in close proximity, or shared languages or histories across geographical differences. Thus "intercultural” is a complex and shifting signifier, especially in today’s cosmopolitan surround.
"Intercultural” performance has either a long or a short history, depending on one’s view. A dynamic flow of cultures across borders can be seen in discrete instances of cultural production that is rooted in ancient times and has existed at any crossroads where "foreign” and "native” peoples have communicated. From indigenous peoples in North America to Pacific Islanders, Africans and Japanese, people negotiated cultural differences in performative forms from the moment of their first encounters. This is the long view, and it visualises an ontological structure of human interaction.
The short view comes into focus only relatively recently as an academic concept in the West. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a "new” theoretical debate appeared in theatre and performance studies. Widely acclaimed productions by Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson sparked a lively, angry discussion about the value of this so-called "intercultural” theatre – its politics, its ethics and its aesthetics. By the beginning of the 1990s, there was a kind of détente among many European and North American theatre scholars – an agreement to disagree – and the arguments waned. However, the world did not stop spinning, and the emergence of the Internet, globalisation and unprecedented human mobility have contributed to making these "old” questions about the value(s) of intercultural practice relevant again.
A fundamental re-thinking of the concept has recently appeared in Theatre Journal’s "Rethinking Intercultural Performance” (2011), Ric Knowles short study Theatre & Interculturalism (2010) and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s attempt to replace the concept with "Interweaving Performance Cultures” (2014). My intervention will analyse these new ideas and propose a fundamental difference between theories of description which try to remain neutral or value-free and theories of evaluation – of the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific performances. Mindful of the occasion of our conference, examples will include some drawn from the Slovenian context.
Janelle Reinelt, emeritus professor of theatre and performance at University of Warwick, was president of the International Federation for Theatre Research (2004–2007). She has published widely on politics and performance, receiving the Distinguished Scholar Award for lifetime achievement from the American Society for Theatre Research (2010) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2014. Recent books include The Political Theatre of David Edgar: Negotiation and Retrieval with Gerald Hewitt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Grammar of Politics and Performance with Shirin Rai (Routledge, 2014). She also has a volume of collected essays in Slovenian: Javno uprizarjanje. Eseji o gledališču našega časa [Public Performances: Essays on the Theatre of Our Time] (trans. Katarina Jerin and Krištof Jacek Kozak, MGL Library, 2006).