The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre: The Displaced Mirror by Min Tian

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre: The Displaced Mirror by Min Tian John K. Gillespie THE USE OF ASIAN THEATRE FOR MODERN WESTERN THEATRE: THE DISPLACED MIRROR. By Min Tian. London: Palgrave, 2018. 313 pp. Hardcover, $89.99; paperback, $59.99. With this well researched book, Min Tian adds to the continuing discussion of theatre manifesting other-culture aspects. Such efforts have been termed fusion, cross-cultural, intercultural, transcultural, transnational, and Eurasian, among others. Tian eschews them all, pronouncing the idea of intercultural theatre as rejected for what he calls "'new' interculturalisms" (p. 1) that nonetheless remain, he declares, "theoretically Eurocentric … and the historical divide remains between the East and the West" (p. 1). He maintains that Asian theatre's appeal, though "shared by the founding fathers of modern Western theatre" (p. 2)—he includes Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe, Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, William Butler Yeats, Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing, Charles Dullin, Antonin Artaud, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Bertolt Brecht—ultimately became what he calls "displacements," uprooted from the original Asian context and tossed into their thoroughly Western, ethnocentric concepts. Tian's notion, borrowed from Freud's "Entstellung" ("distortion") and filtered through Jacques Derrida, is key: "The … productive and destructive displacement of a performance text makes impossible the dialectical reassemblage of the totality … into … any particular saturated theory or model" (p. 7). It's a provocative approach and bears consideration. Within that frame, Tian probably reaches his objective. He discusses how and why each of the Western figures discovered Asian theatre, citing their overt disaffection with the era's torpid naturalism, the affinity they perceived between symbolism, and certain Asian performance aspects, the various Asian troupes then performing in Europe, and the appearance of milestone translations—for example, Noël Peri's Cinq nô; drames lyriques japonais and Arthur Waley's The Nō Plays of Japan, both in 1921. Tian sleuths through breathtakingly abundant essays, letters, notes, meetings, confirming what the Europeans knew, saw, or heard, plus the related exchanges among them. That information alone makes for compelling reading. Concluding every chapter, whatever the European figure borrows, Tian reiterates that it constituted not influence but displacement, distortion—cf. his title's "displaced mirror"—unmoored from its tradition. For example, he writes that Yeats's nō plays, though popular in Japan, "must be put in their proper historical place as a displacement of the Japanese model" (p. 91). And Tian's chapter on [End Page 334] Meyerhold, carries the tagline, "Welding the Unweldable," concluding that Meyerhold's approach, "necessitates the refraction, and thereby the displacement, of the original essence of those popular traditions out of their historical-social as well as their aesthetic contexts" (p. 204). Tian deems the process his selected Europeans followed as displacing something from its rightful context and claims, in an oddly self-fulfilling prophecy, that the aspect in question would have happened anyway, even without Asian contact! For example, he opines that Artaud, had he never "witnessed the performance of the Balinese dancers, would have seen the same 'effigy' or 'double' of his Artaudian Occidental self in any other non-Western primitive tradition" (p. 263) and concludes that "in the hyphenation of differences and traditions, there is no escaping the law of displacement" (p. 271). Is this "Tian's law," I wonder? Furthermore, his tone throughout regards displacement as not merely caused by Western ethnocentrism; it is also inauthentic, even unethical. I read Tian's book with great interest, though at some point it struck me that his assessment carried limitations; there was nowhere to go with it. I mean, what of the most asked questions about a play: What do you think? Good drama? Effective performance? There's very little insight in that regard, beyond his displacement notion, or even about theatre in general. Therefore, I would like to offer several rejoinders to Tian's fundamental point. For example, in a concrete sense, any truth about Asian aspects adapted to Western performances could be as likely about inauthentic Asian theatre as about displacement. Several such troupes were performing in Europe in the early 20th century. To cite one, Kawakami Otojirō, a shinpa performer, and by nature...