Theatre and Modernization in the First Age of Globalization: The Cairo Opera House

Abstract

My countiy [Egypt] is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions.- Khedive Isma'il Pasha, 1879SEEN from THE present, it is astounding to many that theatre, an 'old' medium that has been repeatedly pronounced moribund with the arrival of each successive wave of technological media, has in fact continued to flourish and expand. Today, theatre is a global artistic practice, a crucial cultural institution in many countries, and a central part of transnational networks of artistic exchange. Often defying exact definition, its manifestations range from improvised street theatre in backyard slums to multimillion-dollar edifices purveying the latest performances of nineteenth-century opera to twenty-first-century cultural elites. Despite its bewildering number of forms, which include puppet theatre, stand-up comedy, and abstract performance art, theatre-makers and audiences are connected across cultures by mutual recognition of commonality in what they do. Investigation of this artistic and cultural diversity has been a hallmark of theatre and performance studies over the past two decades. The still rapidly expanding disciplines of theatre and performance studies have devoted themselves primarily to understanding the semantic, ideological, and aesthetic specificity of performances on the basis of a number of shared theoretical and methodological tools (in the main semiotics, and, more recently, phenomenology and critical performance theory). What theatre studies has not yet attempted to do is to explain how this global phenomenon came to be. What were the factors that led to a particular, often Western-influenced, artistic practice being exported to and established in markedly diverse cultural environments? How did these processes of transposition affect the new host cultures and how did they in turn change the practices being exported? My interest, therefore, is in sketching very briefly the lineaments of this process and illustrating some of the issues by discussing the establishment of the Cairo Opera House under Khedive Isma'il Pasha in 1869. My discussion is situated in the context of a new research project, Global Theatre Histories, recently established at the University of Munich under the auspices of the Reinhart Koselleck programme of the German Research Society.1Global Theatre HistoryIn the one hundred and thirty years stretching roughly between i860 and 1990, the nature of theatre was transformed radically throughout the world as it changed from being a predominantly locally defined, practised, and experienced cultural form to one that had global reach. In the wake of colonialism, imperialism, and modernization, processes that provided the political, economic, and cultural foundations of contemporary globalization debates, Western concepts, practices, and above all institutions of theatre were exported to most territories around the globe. In the eyes of most theatre historians, however, theatre remains a resolutely local, even parochial phenomenon in which the local perspective enjoys unconditional priority over other research paradigms, as some historians have begun to critically note.2 Important exceptions that signal a possible departure from existing practice include Joseph Roach's study Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), which, navigating between eighteenth-century London and twentieth-century New Orleans, focuses on just one trajectory, while J. Ellen Gainor's work is less focused on the early period than the title of her collection, Imperialism and Theatre (1995), suggests. The recent multi-authored Theatre Histories makes a decisive break with traditional nation-based, eurocentric approaches, but does not deal extensively with the period here/'Over the last ten to fifteen years, a vigorous debate has emerged among historians on the question of whether it is possible to speak of 'global' or 'world' history. …