Is Genuine Inter-Cultural Performance Possible?

In the Post-Modern society, ‘culture’ is a buzzword. It has replaced ‘community’ as the modern obsession. In the West we are fixated with anxieties concerning our identity. Traditional spiritual beliefs are waning, we are held together less and less by a common moral code, and our lives and sense of self are becoming increasingly fragmented. Therefore we turn to the ‘other’ in the hope that we will find out who we are by identifying who we are not. However, with cultural pluralism, things are not so black-and-white (sic). Western countries are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan. Mixed-race families are on the increase, and if one walks down the high street of many European cities one is as likely to hear Bhangra house as Western pop music. Cultures are becoming blended, and with the globalisation of the economy this will only be magnified. Shops all over the world stock Mars bars, and McDonalds proudly claims that its aim is to have an outlet in every town in the world. In reaction to this, there is a counter-culture. New-Ageism has brought about an increasing interest in things East

It is, in short, one of our ways to strive for a better world.

…exemplifies one of the most blatant (and accomplished) appropriations of Indian culture in recent years…suggest[ing] the bad old days of the British Raj…through the very enterprise of the work itself; its appropriation and recording of non-western material within an orientalist framework of thought and action, which has been specifically designed for the international market (ibid.).

Western study of non-Western peoples was based not in a desire to know those people as distinct and unique human peoples, but rather as a means to subjugate them and to gain access to and control over the resources of their lands (ibid.).

In the most common form of barter, a group performs for the local community and in return some members of the community perform their dances and songs for them. During one part of the barter, the actors are performers and the local people are their audience, following which roles are reversed and the actors are audience to the performers from the community. In the most successful barters, this temporary division of roles often dissipates during the latter part of the exchange as the actors are invited to join the local people in their dances and songs, or vice versa (ibid.). As Watson writes:

Some topics in this essay:
T’ai Chi, Brook’s Mahabharata, Schechner1979 Barucha1990, Barba’s Kaosmos, , Rite” Preparatory, Japanese Indian, Schechner1990 Hence, Theatre Anthropology, World Colonialism…does, intercultural theatre, intercultural performance, schechner writes, becoming increasingly, borrowing re-makes native, borrowing re-makes, type theatre, kershaw 1999, cultures ibid, understanding culture, brook’s mahabharata, re-makes native culture’,