The Shift to Transculturalism

Evidently, such processes of interweaving European and Japanese cultures in performance at the turn of the last century were linked – albeit in different ways – to the process of modernization and its resulting problems. In this light, it is not surprising that the next wave of modernization – the process of globalization going on since the 1970s – went hand in hand with new forms of interweaving cultures in performance all over the world. Since the 1960s, which marked the end of colonialism, and even more so since the 1970s, processes of interweaving cultures in performances have been taking place in an unprecedented and so far unimagined way. No matter how ‘similar’ or ‘different’ cultures may be, how close or how distant, at any time different cultures may be interwoven in performances. Not only texts, acting styles, artistic devices, and artists travel and sometimes form multicultural theatre, opera, and dance ensembles; it has also become common practice for productions to travel from country to country, continent to continent, from one international festival to the next.

Significant differences remain between the processes of interweaving during the first decades of the twentieth century and those of the last forty years. Whereas the first mainly served to eliminate deficits in one’s own culture by modernizing theatre, the latter involved processes occurring transculturally. Such differences today create and stimulate novel modes and states of in-betweenness in performances. A particularly interesting case in point in this context is the production of King Lear by the Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen. This premiered in 1997 in Japan and then went on tour to Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and Perth. Later it toured Europe. I attended two performances in Berlin.

Ong Keng Sen’s Hybrid King Lear
Ong Keng Sen’s production of Lear played with the state of in-betweenness that affected each participant, performer, and spectator by incorporating the local and the global. It drew heavily on different local acting and performance styles but addressed different audiences all over the world from the very beginning. Lear was played by a famous Noh actor from Japan who delivered his lines in ancient Japanese and performed in the Noh style. Goneril was played by an actor from a Peking opera company representing that particular operatic style, which in many respects differs from the kunju, szechuan, or other styles. In Ong Keng Sen’s production, the actor followed this style and used the Chinese language. The part of Cordelia was played by a Thai dancer who performed in the style of the traditional mask dance Khon. He, too, spoke the lines in his own language.

The choreography underlying the movements of Goneril’s three warriors followed the traditional Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat. The participating musicians also hailed from these different traditional backgrounds. However, they did not accompany the performer of their own tradition, but that of another. The Fool was played by a young Japanese actress who spoke in English and followed a mostly realistic acting style. The Shakespearean text had been changed substantially to reconcile the conventions of the three performance traditions.

As stated above, the production drew heavily on very different local performance traditions, which it assembled in a way that celebrated difference. Although the performers all followed their own styles, they performed together – that is, they established particular relationships among each other. The effect was enhanced by the music, which did not match the performance style in which it originated. This created not just a hybrid performance based on a variety of performance traditions, but one that reflected on the very concept of hybridity, on so-called hybrid identities and passages.

The performance space was defined by two broad passages, crossing each other and leading nowhere beyond the stage. On these passages the performers displayed their particular stylistic identity which, however, was questioned, if not alienated or even transformed, by the accompanying music from another performance tradition. Ong Keng Sen used this method to shape dramatic figures undergoing the process of losing their identities. These dramatic figures were poised on the passage between a former identity and, it was hoped, a new one arising from the processes of interweaving achieved by the coupling of acting and music from two different performance traditions.

Although proceeding from well-defined local traditions, the performance focused on the passage from one tradition, culture, and identity to another, and so created something new which was neither one nor the other but both at the same time. The result was a state of liminality or ‘third space’ (to use Homi K. Bhabha’s term), brought about by the interweaving of cultures.10 No performance allowed its spectators to feel entirely at home in it or to identify completely with a performance style or dramatic figure. In this way, the performance created an effect similar to that of globalization – on people as well as on performance. It not only transferred the spectators into a liminal state but also challenged them to reflect on this state. The aesthetic experience it enabled comprised a particular kind of liminal experience, embracing fascination as well as alienation, enchantment as well as reflection.

Although Ong Keng Sen worked with different performance traditions in his production of Lear, it had little in common with what we conventionally described as intercultural performances in the 1970s, 1980s, and partly even the 1990s. These productions usually had the stage director, who was firmly rooted in his or her own tradition, select theatrical elements and sometimes performers from other cultures and include them in their productions. The work of Eugenio Barba, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Tadashi Suzuki, and Yukio Ninagawa may serve as examples here. The result could still clearly be identified as European or Japanese performances that for certain aesthetic or maybe even political reasons referred to elements from other performance traditions or cultures.

Ong Keng Sen’s Lear, in contrast, must be seen as a product of interweaving different cultures. It was neither Japanese nor Chinese nor Thai, nor Indonesian, nor European (with regard to the Shakespearean text). Rather, it referred to all these theatrical traditions and presented them not in a distorted but a clearly recognizable manner. Yet, bringing these elements together did not simply neutralize them but created something absolutely new and breathtakingly beautiful. The theatrical traditions of different cultures were assembled here to bring forth something new in which these traditions still resonated without determining it. Wherever the performance was shown it appeared to transfer spectators into a state of in-betweenness or into a ‘third space’, that is, an effect similar to that of globalization.

However, there are important differences to be considered between performances of the production in Asian and in European countries. In Asia, this state of in-betweenness by the spectators might have enabled the anticipation of some kind of a new ‘pan-Asian’ cultural identity that does not destroy or annul different local traditions but is able to interweave them productively, although there will always remain domains not to be understood. Here the political dimension of such processes of interweaving in the production as in the course of the performance was therefore foregrounded. So the community that might have come into being in and through the performance in different Asian countries, at the same time reflected on the conditions of its very possibility.

10. Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Homi Bhabha, ‘Culture’s In- Between’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, ed., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996). [↩]