Brief Encounters with Traditional Theatre Forms: In Critical Dialogue with the Contemporary

Abstract

Engaging with Asian traditional performance forms in Singapore’s globalised, urban and multicultural society entails rethinking the boundaries of culture and identity for learners exposed to primarily modern and Western forms of culture. It prods an acknowledgement that the contemporary condition is simultaneously modern and traditional, challenging these allegedly binary oppositions. It also points to the need for enlarged spaces to learn and understand tradition, in the face of intense modernization and complex global flows. That traditions of performance are largely seen as fixed, yet are in reality constantly adapting to change, suggests potent parallels with established notions of culture and identity that have to grapple with issues of reinvention and flux.Nonetheless questions about how to effectively manage the task of cultivating interest and then generating meaningful learning processes for learners who are little exposed to traditional performance, emerge in my experience of conducting a compulsory module entitled Asian Traditional Theatre Forms for all Year 2 theatre students at the National Institute of Education. Issues of what is realistic as an introduction and contextualization of these complex and intricate forms having only 36 hours over 12 weeks to work with, and concerns about what is resonant to young adults who tend to consume primarily Western popular culture as their daily thoroughfare of art forms, inform the primary basis for my reflections in this chapter.In the autoethnographic process of interrogating the choices made, I examine the work of dealing with traditional forms as an intertwining of ‘arborescent’ and ‘rhizomatic’ (Deleuze & Guattari) approaches to knowledge and culture. This frames my pedagogical process as a contextually based attempt to draw links and forge connections between the immediacy of everyday life and the seemingly remote realms of tradition. It is my argument that this engenders a critical curiosity about how the present is in many respects a ‘multiplicity’ (Deleuze & Guattari) that allows for tradition to enrich and enliven the contemporary. I also draw on responses from students to question whether and how this empowers a capacity for broader choices in a globalizing world.KeywordsCultural IdentityTraditional FormTraditional TheatreWorkshop PerformanceTraditional PerformanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.