Intercultural ThemesAuthor(s): Richard SchechnerReviewed work(s):Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 11/12, Vol. 11, no. 3 - Vol. 12, no. 1, TheInterculturalism Issue (1989), pp. 151-162Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245433 .Accessed: 08/08/2012 23:53

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Intercultural Themes

Richard Schechner

1989

INTERCULTURAL THEMES ARE PRESENT in my directing, my writings, and my hopes for the future of the world. Like many other postmoderns, I've traveled a lot. Not because I've been a refugee, a starving person in search of food, a prisoner of this or that Gulag, or someone op- pressed or victimized who must, as the police say, "Move on!" My jour- nies as scholar, tourist, and artist have been privileged goings made by my own choice. In Asia, Micronesia, Australia, native America, Latin America, and Europe, I have exchanged information, ideas, techniques, feelings with people I've met. Some of these exchanges have been carried out in a more or less formal manner-lecturing, directing plays, par- ticipating in and leading workshops, talking to the press, arranging for the translation of my writings. Although I have not consciously on the in- dividual level been a colonizer or exploiter, I have been enriched (yes, I know the metaphor) by my trips.

No culture is "pure' '--that is, no culture is "''itself."'' Overlays, borrow- ings, and mutual influencings have always made every culture a con- glomerate, a hybrid, a palimpsest. So much so that we probably should not speak of "culture" but of "cultures." Racism is basically a myth of desired cultural purity played out against "others" who are perceived as being not only different but inferior.

The notion of "culture" though questionable is useful. Every apparently whole culture examined historically can be cut up into smaller and larger

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pieces, each with its own sustainable claims to "integrity." Some "stable" cultures-for example, the British (or are they English? Scots? Welsh? Irish? Anglos? Saxons? Celts?)-are not homogenous, even today: for the influx of former "colonials" from India, Pakistan, the West Indies, southern Africa, and elsewhere is changing the cultures of the British islands as drastically as the invasion of the Normans did nearly 1000 years ago. Is this influx reducible to the collision of cultures, or does it mark the creation of new cultures: Anglo-Indian, Indo-Yoruban, and so on? Just how many hyphens does it take to specify what culture one is talking about? Can not the existence of distinct cultures be located down to the neighborhood, the family grouping, and possibly the individual?

But for all its problems, the notion of culture' is useful. The slipperiness of " culture" as a definite term is due to the extreme dynamism, lability, and volatility of any given culture. Every culture is always changing, even Japan during its period of so-called isolation that ended with the Meiji restoration of 1868. What is meant by "culture" is actually a snapshot, a stop-frame of an ongoing historical action. This ongoing action is a function of both en- dogenous and exogenous influences often so tightly intertwined as to make distinctions between en- and ex- impossible.

Attempting to fix cultures or stop them from changing is like trying to end or annihilate history.

Efficient communications and information networks, affecting not only the well-off but everyone, will make cultures increasingly less a matter of birth and more a matter of choice.

Performing arts-because they express behaviors and emotion through symbolic action, narrative of both the made-up and collective mythic kinds-are wide avenues of intercultural exchange.

Rituals and sports as well as arts, beliefs and agreed-upon modes of com- petition as well as styles, are being exchanged.

Not all of the exchanging is welcome. Certain cultures, under great pressure, are threatened with extinction. But cultures are not "natural species," and care must be taken before applying ecological models to cultures using the same methods employed to save gorillas or rain forests. These attitudes barely conceal a kind of primitivism whereby threatened cultures (the Tagalogs of the Phillipines, for example) are perceived as "liv- ing museums" of the way humans "used to be." Also, interventions based on "saving" or "protecting" cultures, although high-sounding, often are late twentieth-century versions of the racist patronization or imperialist am- bitions that glossed, and glosses, the work of missionaries whose avowed purpose was, and is, to "save" and "civilize" people who were, and are, thought to be savages/heathens (ripe for exploitation). The alternative of

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SCHECHNER'S PRODUCTION OF THE CHERRY ORCHARD IN INDIA

allowing "market forces" or other kinds of social darwinism to prevail is equally unsatisfactory. Some kind of rule-governed exchange among cultures is the best course. These rules would guarantee to cultures autonomy parallel to the sovereignty guaranteed to nations, and prevent the more populous and geographically larger cultures from encroaching on and eliminating the smaller. It is easy enough to state this as an ideal, but as the experience of relations among nations has shown, there's lots of distance between cup and lip. Who is to set the rules of contact and exchange and, once set, enforce them? The best hope for such an arrangement is the grow- ing awareness that cultural diversity is healthy for the human species.

The subjugation of one people, or peoples, by another does not necessari- ly lead to the extinction of their cultures. In the Americas, African cultures have flourished, deeply affecting the European cultures whose members are still dominant economically and politically. In Indonesia, the conversion of the population to Islam did not eliminate Hindu cultures anymore than hundreds of years of European colonization eliminated Islam. In India itself, Moghuls ruled for centuries, succeeded by the Christian English, but through all this, the Hindus of India effectively maintained their cultures. This is not to say that contact, and all the various forms of interaction which follow, do not change the cultures of both the conqueror and the conquered.

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My argument is, of course, that cultures are always changing-even if we do not (yet) know how to predict what changes will occur.

1974

Surely the tourist trade has influenced so-called "genuine" performances in Bali and elsewhere. I have no contempt for these changes. Changes in conventions, themes, methods, and styles occur because of opportunism, audience pressures, professionalism (itself often a new concept), and new technology. Tourism has been really important and worldwide only since the advent of cheap air-travel. Theatre historians will regard tourism as of as much importance to twentieth-century theatre as the exchange between England and the Continent was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theatre people imitate popular imported modes, and the locals respond to the demands of rich visitors-or local audiences demand changes because they've absorbed the tastes of alien cultures. From one point of view these changes are corruptions-a clamor is raised to establish cultural zoos in which the original versions of age-old rituals can be preserved. But even traditional performances vary greatly from generation to generation-an oral tradition is flexible, able to absorb many personal variations within set parameters. And the cultural-zoo approach is itself the most pernicious aspect of tourism.

I hate the genocide that has eradicated [...] cultures. [...] But I see nothing wrong with what's happening in Bali and New Guinea, where two systems of theatre exist. The relationship between these is not a simple divi- sion betwen tourist and authentic. More studies are needed on the exchange between what's left of traditional performances and emerging tourist shows. And at what moment does a tourist show become itself an authentic theatrical art?

Tourism is a two-way street: traveler's bring back experiences, expecta- tions, and-if the tourists are practitioners-techniques, scenes, and even entire forms. The birth ritual of Dionysus in 69 was adapted from the Asmat of West Irian; several sequences in the Living Theatre's Mysteries and Paradise Now were taken from yoga and Indian theatre; Philip Glass' music draws on gamelan and Indian raga; Imamu Baraka's writing is deeply influenced by African modes of story-telling and drama. The list could be extended, and to all the arts. Many innovators since World War II (a great war for travel) have been decisively influenced by work from cultures other than their own; this means, for Western artists: Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

The impact of communal-collective forms on contemporary Western theatre is like that of classical forms on the Renaissance. The differences, however, are also important: in the Renaissance all that remained of

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classical culture were architectural ruins, old texts, and relics of the plastic arts. This material was frequently fragmented and corrupt. Also, Renaissance scholars looked with universal respect, even awe, at what they found of classical Greece and Rome. Today's cross-cultural feed is mainly in the area of performances; the shows have been seen intact, the originators of the performances are former colonial peoples, or peoples who were con- sidered inferior by populations around the north Atlantic basin. In other words, it is logical that today's influences should be felt first in the avant- garde.

-' 'From Ritual to Theatre and Back" Educational Theatre Journal 26, 4: 475-76

1979

[. . .] Cross-cultural feeding is very traditional. What is "traditional" is finally what's remembered and repeated over the years. There is no culture uninfluenced by foreigners-invaders, evangelists (Muslim, Christian, Buddhist), traders, colonizers. I enjoy the way a Madras musician handles a European violin as much as a thrill to Glass' Tibetan sounds. And what's more Italian than (Chinese) spaghetti?

-"' 'Introduction: Towards a Field Theory of Performance," TDR 23, 2:2

1981

Interculturalism is replacing-ever so tenderly, but not so slowly-inter- nationalism. The nation is the force of modernism; and the cultures-I em- phasize the plural-are the force (what word can replace force?) of postmodernism. As a world information order comes into being, human ac- tion can be mapped as a relationship among three levels:

PAN-HUMAN, EVEN SUPRA-HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS information from/to anywhere, anyone

CULTURES, CULTURES OF CHOICE ethnic, individualistic, local behaviors people selecting cultures of choice

people performing various subjunctive actualities

PAN-HUMAN BODY BEHAVIORS/DREAM-ARCHETYPE NETWORKS unconscious and ethological basis

of behaviors and cultures

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This map may scare you as it sometimes does me. It can be of a totalitarian society, an Orwellian world. But it can also-depending on what people "predict" from it-liberate. It depicts three spheres, or levels, or ac- tualities; but the dotted lines say that a lot of sponging up and down-transfers, transformations, links, leaks-joins these realms, making of them one very complicated system. Yes, that's what's most interesting to me: the whole thing is one system. I mean, without the overarching and the underpinning universals there is little chance for the middle-the multiplicity of cultures-ever achieving harmony, ever combining stability with continuously shifting relations among and in the midst of many dif- ferent items.

Maybe the most exciting aspect of this map is the possibility for people to have "cultures of choice."

-"The Crash of Performative Circumstances," Triquarterly 52 (Fall): 100

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SCHECHNER'S PRODUCTION OF MOTHER COURAGE IN INDIA

156

1982

Peoples are going to have to learn to be intercultural if our species, and many of our sister species, are to survive. Clearly nationalism and its rivalries, armaments, boundaries-culminating in the nuclear catastrophe of mass extinction-is something we humans are going to have to learn to get rid of.

Learn to be intercultural? More like: unlearn what is blocking us from returning to the intercultural. For as far back as we can look in human history peoples have been deeply, continuously, unashamedly intercultural. Borrowing is natural to our species. The swift adoption of Western technology by non-Western peoples is only a recent example of very ancient patterns of acculturation. What is borrowed is swiftly transformed into native material-at the very same time as the borrowing re-makes native culture. So human cultures-the most traditional even-when viewed holistically, are something like the earth viewed from near space: a whirling mass of constantly changing patterns, incorporating what is introduced, sending out feelers into the surround: very active, yet very well organized. Syncretism and the making of new cultural stuff is the norm of human ac- tivity.

Only with the advent of a particularly virulent form of Western European-American exploitative nationalism, and its ideological outgrowths (including Soviet Marxism), was interculturalism foreclosed. We must work to make this foreclosure temporary. Thus, I am arguing both for an experiment and a return to traditional, even ancient values. This argument has been implicit in experimental art for a long time: it is the root of that art's "primitivism." Interculturalism is a predictable, even in- evitable, outcome of the avant-garde, its natural heir. [...]

I'm not Pollyana about all this. Some very sinister forces are present in interculturalism. [...] First off, it is people from the economically advantaged places that are able to travel and import. Areas are culturally advantaged because of extensive and long-term exploitation of other areas. Many tourists, as well as some impresarios importing performances, are philistines, or worse. Also, multinational corporations who seem to be suc- ceeding the nations as the Princes of the Earth are not any better equipped morally or ethically than their predecessors in government. I trust not Mobil. The multinational network has only one advantage: it is not in these conglomerates' self-interest to promote global war. It wasn't always that way. And "small wars," as well as the "arms industry," are still very good, and very evil, business. Good if you want to make a buck.

I am opposed to these trends toward one world under the aegis of state

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capitalism, corporatism, or international socialism. But I am opposed, too, to the national and ideological fervor that has brought us to the edge of nuclear annihilation-that has pushed us over the edge of squandering energy, wealth, and resources on the death industries.

So where does that leave me? The more contact among peoples the better. The more we, and everyone

else too, can perform our own and other people's cultures the better. To perform someone else's culture takes a knowledge, a "translation," that is different, more viscerally experiential, than translating a book. Intercultural exchange takes a teacher: someone who knows the body of performance of the culture being translated. The translator of culture is not a mere agent, as a translator of words might be, but an actual culture-bearer. This is why performing other cultures becomes so important. Not just reading them, not just visiting them, or importing them-but actually doing them. So that "them" and "us" is elided, or laid experientially side-by-side.

-"Intercultural Performance: An Introduction," TDR 26, 2:3

1983

Of course hundreds of non-Westerners have come to Europe and America to study theatre. At first these people mostly worked in the mainstream-brought back to their own countries versions of modern Western theatre. But more recently many non-Westerners, in America at least, have participated in experimental performance. This has led to the development of intercultural companies and a very complicated feeding back-and-forth of techniques and concepts that can no longer be easily located as belonging to one culture or another.

-''Points of Contact Between Anthropological and Theatrical Thought," South Asian Anthropologist 4, 1:24

1985

There will be more "in-between" performative genres. In-between is becoming the norm: between literature and recitation; between religion and entertainment; between ritual and theatre. Also, the in-between of cultures: events that can't easily be said to originate in, or belong to, this or that culture but that extend into several cultures. [. . .]

-"News, Sex, and Performance Theory" in Between Theatre and Anthropology, 322

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THE CHERRY ORCHARD

1986

May I suggest to you that we are living in a convergence of epochs: one which we thought we had collectively escaped from-pre-industrial theocracies and city-states forever at war with each other, wholly caste- bound societies-and one coming at us from the nuclear and ecological tomorrow: a crowded, uncomfortable, dangerous world that can only be controlled by arousing and exploiting humanity's deepest fears.

-"Uprooting the Garden," New Theatre Quarterly 5 (February): 8

1988

The future I see is neither apocalyptic nor beatific. Approaching is a long period of human history where privileged individuals, sectors, regions, and continents protect their own interests while slowly adjusting their policies of greed to ones of conservation based fundamentally on not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. The elites will do just enough to keep the world alive and their own privileges intact.

The underprivileged will boil with unrest and hatred but not have enough

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power to do more than annoy the powerful with terrorism, local wars, and other fitful expressions of desperation. Various media will ventilate all this as debate, rhetorical flourish, and entertainment.

A kind of postmodern medievalism, highly theatrical and stunningly elaborate, will emerge and prevail. Religious authority-both of the tradi- tional kind and of new faiths-will be engines of inventing and vessels of transmitting "comfort" and beauty to masses unable to actually change in any substantial way the material circumstances of their existence.

What could change all this is contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or the ability to terraform and populate the moon or Mars.

Don't hold your breath. Having said so much, what makes me feel optimistic? It is not irra-

tionalism, religious faith, or confidence in the ET connection. There is alive in the world an inquisitive, urgent, strong, and hopeful in-

terculturalism. That is, the development of the world information order-with all its problems regarding hegemony, imperialism, exploita- tion, and so on-is not crushing local cultures but stimulating them. These local cultures once appeared to their own members as supreme and univer- sal. When local people (French, Han, Yoruba, Javanese, Yaqui-you name them, there are many hundreds) came into contact with others, the illusion persisted that the others were inferior or superior, dominable or worthy of obedience. This illusion results in wars of conquest, conversion, exploita- tion, and extermination.

With the emergent world information order, a workable kind of relativism is beginning to glimmer and brighten. At some levels-the genetic, the informational, the shared responsibility for the decency of life on the planet (and beyond, if we ever get there)-all the individuals and all cultures are at least theoretically equal, even identical. At another level-that of individual, local, regional, and cultural expression, there is an abundance of diversity.

We have not yet learned how to balance these two levels of social ex- istence.

But we are learning-as a world culture, as a world of many cultures-to respect these levels of existence. Even to the degree of recognizing the rights of other species and their cultures, of the planet as a unified ecosystem and its culture.

Perhaps in my lifetime, or in my children's, the rage of nationalism and appetite-driven ideologies will subside, giving way to celebrations of cultures within the framework of planetary systems. [. . .]

I have experienced an approximate model of this kind of living while reflecting on the terraced landscapes and systematic pageantry of Bali. Be-

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tween the much worshiped high volcano Agung and the low fearful abode of the demons, the ocean-both largely out of human control and therefore still wild, from the Balinese viewpoint-exists a middle earth where the force of Agung and the sea meet and interact with human beings and the other animals and life forms of the island. All is not peace and plenty on Bali. The usual human forms of avarice, jealousy, rivalry, and the other belly-lusts are robustly exercised. But there is also-how shall I say it-a sense of manners, a certain courtesy owed to gods, nature, family, friends, strangers, even enemies. This decorum establishes limits, allows for tragedy and farce, framing life on the island. From time to time, one, some, or many Balinese run amok, unleashing violence, wholesale murder, and destruction on each other. So the Balinese system, too, has its bugs.

There is no perfection on this earth or any other (even of the imagination).

But the human species appears to be able to co-create the worlds it lives in. In other words, we will keep trying.

-"Letter Response," ICIS Forum 18, 3:3-5

161

1989: From Another

I was in Taipei, Taiwan, for five days last November. I had a hard time ad- justing to being surrounded by people who looked more or less like me. There were other shocks as well-of a social kind. I find I no longer know how to behave appropriately in Chinese society, which is embarrassing for a person of my venerable age.

-From a letter written to me by a well-known Chinese- American scholar who for many years has lived and worked in

the USA. This person wishes to remain anonymous.

NOTES

'Culture, these days, rarely means "excellence in the arts or scholarship" or "people with good manners and taste' '-as in the cultivated rather than fallow or wild (field or forest), and therefore the civilized (those who cultivate) as opposed to the savage (those who hunt or scrounge). These days culture signifies the determinable behavior, artifacts, architecture, customs, rituals, arts, and language that define a particular group of people. Formerly, there was a single standard of "culture" to which all people might aspire; today there are "cultures" not one of which is best. For what happened read Raymond Williams, Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976): 76-82.

Richard Schechner is the author of several works on the theme of inter- culturalism, the latest Between Theatre and Anthropology and a revised and expanded edition of Essays on Performance Theory.

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