In his book „Theatre and the World. Performance and the politics of culture“ Rustom Bharucha criticizes the notion of interculturalism as a concept widely used by western theatre artists such as Artaud, Brook, Craig, Grotowski, Schechner. He critiques, for example, the way Schechner neutralizes the context of a particular ritual by concentrating on its “physical action” (the same goes for Artaud and Grotowski).
Being the first one to write about the concept of interculturalism in theatre from within an Asian culture, his work exposes the apparently neutral charge of the concept of “intercultural sharing” as naïve and unexamined ethnocentricity.
Our critique draws to the fact that he assumed that these Western theatre artists have decontextualized Indian culture for their own artistic purposes, but he falls into the same trap by disregarding the particular social context in which these Western theatre artists worked. We also think that the strict division between the First World and the Third World that Bharucha uses is a form of simplification. If he considered Grotowski´s social and political context as a Polish citizen, he would have had to draw a more complex and fractured “West”. He also seems to disregard the way in which the process of appropriation and decontextualization happened for centuries between and among cultures, for instance the appropriation of Indian culture in the Southeast Asia.
Taylor, Diana: The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
In her article “Act of transfer” (“The archive and the repertoire”, Duke University Press, 2003) Diane Taylor elaborates on the notion of performance as paradigmatic tools, its reason d’etre as well its importance. She invites us to use performance in historical terms, when the archive, as the most pervasive and institutionalized means of inquiry, cannot capture the ephemerical, live event such as performance. To deal with that problem she suggests the term “repertoire” as a non-archival system of transfer.
Taylor defines performance as “a system of learning, storing and transmitting knowledge: An embodied practice and an episteme.” She also introduces the term “scenario” as a meaning-making paradigm that structures social behaviour, that would allow us to pay attention to the repertoire in its emphasis on the ephemeral character of embodied practice/knowledge (such as spoken language, dance etc.). The Scenario exists as culturally specific imaginaries (ways of how to conceive).
In reading her article, we find that she acknowledges the paradox in the effort to grasp the ephemeral, especially as scholarly works are mostly done through writing (archiving), yet the emphasis on the repertoire would allow us to regain what had been mostly lost in the study of the archive. She states that Theatricality strives for efficaciousness or authenticity. It connotes a conscious, controlled and always political notion that performance does not need to always have.
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