Introduction: the Topography of an Acoustic Interculturalism

Abstract

Intercultural theatre of the late twentieth century, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, advanced a performance philosophy of an active adoption and adaptation of Other performance traditions. In addition, the narratives of these traditions, often Eastern in origin, are extracted and revised to create an attempted ‘fusion’ with Western theatrical principles or modes that yield new postmodern hybrid products. As Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins observe, such interculturalisms on the stage ‘have been complicit with a postmodern licence to borrow theatrical techniques from different cultures within a Western defined global and theatre practice’ (2). Exemplified by Western directors such as Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook, most notably among others such as Eugenio Barba and Robert Wilson, this borrowing and exchange of cultural forms, aesthetic styles, and performance techniques from the East, for the West, was motivated by a genuine attempt at a celebration and comprehension of cultural syncretism that in turn could harvest new performance possibilities based on ‘universals’ and effected by an amalgamation of form and principle. Such was the explanation provided by Richard Schechner in The Drama Review (1986), in which he first introduced the term ‘interculturalism’ as a positivistic and optimistic privileging of traditional performance styles and their integration with modern Western modes.