A New World: Asian Theatre in the West Today

Abstract

The I am referring to is not, I hasten to say, the American world-north, central, or south. The advent of a in our relations to the theatres of the East is not a matter of geography. It is a matter of attitude, of intention, and, in the end, of values. I believe that within the past decade the influence of Asian performing arts on Western cultures has indeed changed so greatly, and for the better, that we can speak of a new This is not a scholarly review of all that has been written on this topic, but rather my thoughts and reactions presented on a rather personal level.1 For perspective, let me reminisce for a moment about the of EastWest when I was a college undergraduate in the mid-I940s. In brief, there was no such world. No university in the country offered even a single course devoted to the of non-Western cultures. Indeed, I don't remember seeing the words kathakali, kabuki, or wayang in any book that was a part of the university curriculum. When the terms world or world theatre occasionally were used, they meant European plus American drama or theatre. The situation was certainly no different in other Western countries. World War II changed our international scene as drastically as it changed so many other aspects of our lives. If World War I expanded American cultural horizons to include Europe, World War II and the years following saw more than a million Americans temporarily living in Asia. World War II, the Occupation of Japan, the Korean War, and the Vietnamese War (1941-73) constitute a third of a century of continuous large-scale American involvement in Asia, something that was unique in our national history. In addition, Fulbright exchanges, teaching exchanges, and jet-age tourism had the effect of opening Asian cultures and arts to a varied group of Westerners. Among them, theatre-trained professionals saw performances of n6 in Kyoto, Chinese opera in Beijing and Taipei, khon dance drama in Bangkok, kathakali in India, barong and topeng in Bali. On one level, these Western-Asian contacts provided an impetus for commercial theatre, musicals, and films-South Pacific, The King and I, and others-in which the East was an exotic background. In doing this, a long tradition of orientalism in Western art was being continued, to which I will return in a moment.