Interculturalism and Iconophilia in the New Theatre

It seems that for the first time in human history we have the chance for global cultural understanding. Air travel and the media-created impression that we all are inhabitants of a global village enforce such a conviction. Is this conviction correct as far as theatre is concerned? Or, to speak in the terminology of Victor Turner, are we witnessing a “new transcultural communicative synthesis through performance?”
Contemporary presentational aesthetics are changing the proportions be­tween theatre and performance. The development is moving in the direction of less theatre, more performance. This strengthening of the performative element occurs at the cost of diminishing mimetic, dramatic, and narrative elements. Literary theatre (generated from a verbal text) and live performance (on the “scripted” stage as dance, song, sculpture, etc.) do exist presently as a mixed form. To answer the general question about the role of transcultural communication in the new theatre it might be best to proceed analytically, limiting ourselves to a few pertinent paradigms. Those paradigms I have chosen are Robert Wilson, and as points of comparative reference Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba, and the Polish theatre group (now in exile), Teatr Osmego Dnia.
The interculturalism of Robert Wilson can be discussed on many levels, such as the aesthetics of production and re-production, performance aesthetics and theatre reception. This would apply not only to such obvious examples as the unique multi-national project of CIVIL WarS (from 1982 on), but applies equally on different levels to the majority of his works from the beginning. (Black performer Sheryl Sutton; Freud, Stalin as stage figures; Shiraz as location for (The KA Mountain and GUARDenia Terrace project, etc.—the period of 1969-1972).
Wilson’s interculturalism in terms of its production process has to be seen in the context of the geographical dissemination of his projects. An American, he works with the same ease in New York, Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Washington, Los Angeles, as in Amsterdam, Shiraz, Paris, Avignon, Lyon, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Milan, Rome, Tokyo.
Since 1979 West Germany with its opulently subsidised state and city theatres has become an operating base for Wilson. He didn’t become a German director, but he is surely one of the most outstanding directors working in German theatre in the last decade. Indeed, he has established a new intercultural model in theatre work. Unlike Peter Brook, an Englishman who works in Paris with an international cast of eclectic actors, Wilson works in Germany with German actors who are members of established repertory ensembles. The most universal German theatre, that is, theatre done in Germany with German actors for German audiences, is made presently by an American.
Intercultural praxis subverts the conventional view that theatre generated in a given country is an expression of its culture. Is this true in the case of Wilson’s Golden Windows in Munich, or HAMLETMACH1NE in New York? In Golden Windows, the laughing aria of the great Munich actress Maria Nicklisch is composed of laugh quotations from her previous dramatic roles at the Kammerspiele. One could argue that this sequence of the play is made from indigenous material of the central European repertory theatre and therefore is an expression of local culture. This central European coding disappeared in the reconstruction of the work at the Brooklyn Academy because American actors don’t have a comparable canonic reference system. HAMLETMACHINE with its many idiosyncratically European and particularly German textual references was staged in New York and “reconstructed” in Hamburg. A specifically American coding of some play sequences, e.g., the “Hamlet walk” of the original production, couldn’t be preserved in the German reconstruction. These differences reflect some specific problems of interculturalism on the level of the aesthetics of theatrical production, which generates its kinetic matrix from the performative qualities of a “found” player.
This produces difficulties in finding adequate substitutes in “replicas” (cf. Golden Windows at BAM and CIVIL WarS in Cambridge). In the casting of “voices” in the performance, theatre problems are not different from those of the transcultural staging of conventional opera. In the reconstruction of the Roman part of CIVIL WarS in Rotterdam, Wilson’s fans missed the Italianate charisma of Luigi Petroni’s (Garibaldi) bel canto, in this case a price Wilson was ready to pay for the cultural transfer.
It is important to recall, however, that Wilson had initially a radically new and more radical concept of transcultural communication with chosen “target” cultures. His current theatre praxis of reconstructing single parts of CIVIL WarS: the Roman part in Rotterdam, the Cologne part in Cambridge, Mass., the Tokyo/Minneapolis part in Frankfurt, etc., is a compromise after the failure of a multi-national project for the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984, designed as a congregation of other cultures.
This project sought five or six production sites—Cologne, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Stuttgart or Marseille, Rome—and all realized parts received some mark of couleur locale: Orientalism of the Knee Plays; Frederick the Great of the Cologne part; Garibaldi of the Italian part; Dutch landscapes of the Rotterdam part, etc. Obviously, the original concept of Wilson’s interculturalism didn’t include a provision for “reproducing” Oriental, Teutonic, Italian, Dutch expressions, but quoting them from the source. The Dutch references of the Rotterdam part may appear as touristic stereotypes (Mata Hari, Queen Wilhelmina, William the Silent, cabbages and tulips), but the dominance of a language of the audience gives the piece a distinct couleur locale. In the Cologne part of CIVIL WarS the collaboration with Heiner Miller led to something more than a “tourist” view of Germany.
Biographical references to Frederick the Great’s youth, military career, and death, taken from Heiner Miller material, provided an illusion of a play-within-a-play and suggested a kind of central focus on a connotatively rich historical figure. Wilson assures us that he is interested primarily in the formal aspect of the “picture book” image: a parallel between the horse’s neck line and the steep shoulder line of the rider. This is correct with respect to his formalist aesthetics. However, the stage figure of Frederick the Great can’t be appreciated as an icon in Germany without diverse, heavily coded historical connotations. In a theatre which sees images as a vehicle for messages, such a gap between the aesthetics of production and reception could be considered a contradiction. But this is obviously not Wilson’s concern.
Robert Wilson’s intercultural praxis does not fit into an otherwise helpful dualistic model of source and target culture, proposed by Patrice Pavis (International Conference on Interculturalism in Theatre, Bad Hamburg, 1988). Pavis’s model could be sufficient to describe the way Brecht used elements of Noh Theatre in his learning play Ja sager-nein sager, but it would already be problematic if applied to his Mahagony opera. The flow of exchanges and transformations in the realm of Euro-American cultures asks for another model in which the very notion of source and target is invalidated.