When I was growing up, there were certain books which really galvanized me, making me think that critical writing was as richly evocative as any other kind of writing. One such book was Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"; it was so inspiring that I rushed out to get her second collection of essays, "Styles of Radical Will", the minute it was published. (I still have the hardcover, though the jacket has long since disintegrated.) But then I read her novels, "The Benefactor" and "Death Kit", and I was stumped. I couldn't understand how someone with such a keen, critical mind could turn out such ... crap. Soon after, I remember reading Gore Vidal's review of her novels in "The New York Review of Books", in which he explained how the analytic sense and the intellectual enthusiasm, which made Sontag such a formidable essayist, were not the same as the imaginative and emotional qualities needed for a novelist. He noted that Sontag was one of the few American writers well-acquainted with the most recent developments in European literature, but ticking off the influences (a little Sarraute here, a dollop of Robbe-Grillet there, Tomasso Landolfi coming in during the final stretch) wasn't the same as being transported into the imaginative realm of the aesthetic.
Upon leaving the International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures," Brian Singleton gave an interview in which he complicates terms like orientalism, interculturalism and interweaving. In Ariane Mnouchkine's performance Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir he perceives what he calls "an ethically conscious intercultural" he generally believes to not have happened yet. 
Since the late 1980s, Samuel Beckett's plays have come to epitomize the conflict at the heart of dramatic performance in the age of print: do we understand dramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it, as the "declamation and illustration of written drama" (21), or as a means for using writing in the production of an independent artwork, one agency among many in framing the theatrical event? … 
What still resonates, and organizes for me the memory of the entire piece, is the sentence, pronounced quite early on, stating that one of the muezzin’s would only join the others on stage "later…" This announced delay, this procrastinated entering suggests already a kind of separation between those present on stage since the beginning and the belated one, and dramaturgically produces a sense of anticipation clouded by a question: "Why will he come only later?" 
On February 26 at the Kule Theatre in Berlin, I saw "Hotel Arabia" by Carola Lehmann and David Merten, who performed their voyage to ‘Arabia’ in a way reminiscent of the early European narratives from Barbary land. The tendency of exoticising otherness was apparent, and the commodification of cultural difference was at times disturbing during the performance. Rimini Protokoll’s intercultural projects, on the other hand, are neither about sublimating otherness nor reversing the gaze, but rather about the possibilities of transferring the debate taking place in developing countries to the metropolis, through the deployment (rather than invention) of the tradition of docu-drama. "Radio Muezzin", which premiered at the HAU 2 on the March 3, 2009, is a prime example of art that bridges the gap between cultures and reaches across the divide to the Other (the not I) during the ‘imperial’ present.