Here, however, we are concerned with the intercultural aspect of this imaginary, idealistic and almost illusionist theatrical togetherness which – theoretically – should be much “wider” and much more complex than Barba’a Euro-Asian theatrical idea.
To my students, I explain interculturalism (applied to a concrete theatre/theatrical practice) as it has been upheld by Artaud, Brecht, Barba himself, Brook, Grotowski or Schechner and other people of the theatre and researchers, as something that is ‘vertical’, ‘abstract’ or ‘utopian.’ Directed towards ‘the core of the darkness’, as Artaud puts it, it works only with archetypes. It painstakingly looks only for sameness in the differences with which it seemingly deals and for those primeval subconscious and conceptual motives which, as Jung says, are common to all humankind and all cultures (Jung, 1974).
Can such an ‘abstract’ (psychoanalytical?) interculturalism, which is obviously understood from an Artaudian point of view and which, I believe, can be better defined as transculturalism, pass – intact and undamaged – through the process of theatralization and to what extent can this be done?
It is undoubted that it can, although, in most cases, this effort results in performances of a quite specific experimental (transcultural?) type, let us say, like Peter Brook’s legendary production The Ik, whose live performance, probably, none of us has seen. I did happen to see a similar performance staged by Barba himself – though long ago and quite by chance. On the fringes of one of the Italian ISTA seminars, his ensemble, which consisted of seven or eight obviously international actors (including an authentic dancer from Bali!) offered to the citizens of a small Italian town a most intercultural sort of exchange. Although during the performance that was given one evening in August the bewildered audience occasionally clapped their hands and even managed to sing some local song, I still remain unconvinced of the aesthetic and communicative aspects of this event.
Naturally, when we speak of a concrete theatrical practice (meaning a production intended for regular repertory exploitation!) interculturalism can/must be achieved in a less complicated and less demanding manner. This means that it can/must be less Artaudian (and esoteric) and more pragmatic (and recognizable). When I explain to my students the fundamental difference between the exclusive Artaudian interculturalism and such a pragmatic ‘interculturalism of a general type,’ I usually define the latter as ‘horizontal’, ‘concrete’, ‘obvious’ and ‘dystopian.’
What kind of interculturalism are we referring to?
Clearly, the kind of interculturalism that can be identified ‘with the naked eye’ and ‘at first sight’ because it treats cultural difference/otherness a) through an impressive, carefully chosen and ‘well tailored’ story, and b) through a basic sign given or chosen beforehand and, as a rule, tense/dramatic. The ‘story’ of Shakespeare’s Othello is one of those ‘well tailored stories,’ and its protagonist is one of those signs given and evidently chosen beforehand in a most drastic manner; hence, it is also one of the most powerful.
After all, rarely in its long history and at few of its longitudes and latitudes has the European theatre expressed itself as ‘monocultural.’ Moreover, had its best and most famous dramatic narratives (thanks to which it has survived for the past twenty-five centuries) been primarily monocultural (ethnocentric), they would hardly have experienced the kind of reception they still encounter. All national dramatic discourses that we know are populated with all kinds of strangers, newcomers, infidels, heterodox characters and such others.
Argyrians, Trojans, Thebans and Persians march through ancient Greek tragedies…
Moors, Jews, the quarreling Veronesi (the Montagues and the Capulets and others…), Roman generals and Egyptian queens, Neapolitans and Milanesi wander through Shakespeare’s plays…
Characters of all kinds constantly quarrel in the merry soggetti of the commedia del’ arte – and they do that in their colourful and different dialects/languages!
In the fantastic fasili of the Karagyoz shadow theatre not only do the ‘local’ Turks outwit each other, but also dozens of puppets of evidently ‘international’ provenance: elegant Frenchmen, mellifluous Greeks, distressed Jews, impulsive Albanians, exotic blacks, extravagant Arabs and Persians…
All kinds of Marin Držić’s ‘local faces’ preponderantly loiter in the spacious and somewhat ambiguous Rome (strange-but-familiar): Dundo Maroje, Pomet, Petrunjela, Laura… In order to ‘check’ their (uncertain) status in the seemingly open (cosmopolitan) Mediterranean world, the lucid comediographer Marino Darsa Raguseo introduces into the game/play an ‘authentic’ foreigner, the German Ugo Tudesco…
The cursed status of a genuine stranger (the ethnically, linguistically and culturally other) is the key motif of on of the greatest of Balkan comedies, Kir Janja by Jovan Popović, who we all call Sterija… … and so forth.
And yet, the intercultural tension emanated by these and other texts that we have not referred to, as well as the specific and exceptionally well branched but subtle net of intercultural relations that has been woven through their theatralization, has little in common with the exclusive Artaudian concept of alchemic/archetypal theatre interculturalism (transculturalism?) understood as a system of spiritual/metaphysical signs of sameness in differences. As Barba would put it, the principle is the same, only the performances are different.
On the other hand, I believe that the kind of interculturalism known to the theatrical practice of the general/’mass’ type and the kind it can bear does not strive towards such exclusive and almost laboratory-like goals. Hence, I dare conclude that, by using, on a daily basis, the syntagm intercultural theatre we commonly have in mind that something which we do not utter. We have in mind the kind of theatre which should not only be better, but different from the kind of theatre that we practice.
It seems that we (still!) have to go back to the beginning of this text and repeat the initial question:
What do we, in fact, talk about when we talk about interculturalism?
That this question should not be understood as some kind of rhetorical figure becomes clear if, for instance, we decide to test its validity in what is today the most popular and the fastest way: with the help of any Internet search engine. By opening recently the “all-powerful” Google I came to the conclusion that, if I want to study the problem I am writing about now (in a Cartesian, i.e., classical/traditional “European” style), I will have to browse through millions of web pages that have references to some of the important aspects of this question. In my attempt to see what and how much has been written on as few as three basic concepts/categories that, as I assume, should theoretically (and seriously?) “concern” the question of theatre interculturalism (see: intercultural theatre, cross-cultural theatre, postcolonial theatre) I realized that they appear in some 1,600,000 virtual combinations of all kinds. How does one enter such a jungle at all? Should the well known story about the unhappiest and clumsiest of all princes, Hamlet, who honestly believes that there should be some method in madness, be applied to these endless webs as well?
Of course, we learned long ago that today we should live (and write, too) according to some other rules. Much as we may be nostalgic for the “former harmonious and unchangeable world”, today we (still) know that “this world can no longer be ours” (Eco, 1962). Hence, we have got used to the fact that, after all, we should think, research, conclude and write “on the basis of some other categories: ambiguity, uncertainty, possibility, probability” (ibid).
This is especially true if we think and write about some specific phenomena that are quite “uncertain” and undoubtedly ambiguous. And such is the intercultural theatre!
As my brief research carried out with the support of the tools offered by Google demonstrated, the virtual variations on the theme of “theatre interculturalism and its complementary phenomena” point to the following inevitable conclusion:
In our inconstant, aporic and fairly ambiguous time, a time whose character is defined/determined by the incredibly speedy rise of two or three planetary phenomena -media domination, individual mobility and the unstoppable coca-colizaton of the Universe (in brief, the globalization processes that are permanently on the rise) – theatre interculturalism can be also treated as just one more of those convenient and practical trends. To be intercultural is, without doubt, to be trendy.
the art is inside
