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  • Forging Cultural Dialogue with an Undergraduate International Play Festival
  • Joan E. Robbins (bio)

Introduction

In the fall of 2001, Ohio Northern University (ONU), a small liberal arts institution in rural Ohio, initiated plans for an international play festival. The project, the brainchild of Nils Riess, chair of ONU's theatre program, involved extensive collaboration with many partners, but most centrally with myself as the co-creator and dramaturg. Together, he and I created and implemented plans that came to fruition in the spring of 2002 and every year since. To date, ONU has commissioned and staged sixteen plays from fifteen countries as varied as Iceland, Estonia, Venezuela, and Israel. In part, the new programming fulfilled a long-established international focus of ONU's theatre program. But at the time, in the wake of 9/11, we felt a particularly urgent cultural and educational imperative to reach out to other corners of the globe in some concrete way, to reverse the xenophobic temperament of the time by opening our community up to worldviews and cultural perspectives different from its own. In my role as dramaturg, I have helped give form to these objectives; I have participated in every stage of the festival, from the selection of the playwrights through the writing and rehearsal process, to the final stages of audience and community outreach. And I have monitored the festival's evolution in its eight-year existence, assessing our choices and methods as well as their educational and cultural implications. I thus possess an intimate vantage point from which to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the project.

My account of ONU's International Play Festival will consider the multiplicity of ways in which the theatrical process can encourage cross-cultural understanding. After a brief description of the festival's guidelines and personnel, this essay proceeds first with an account of what we did and how, including examples of intercultural learning that occurred, with a focus on the cultural biases that colored our various collaborations—artistic, cultural, and linguistic. Second, the essay examines the challenges of developing new plays in translation and related issues of intercultural communication, such as the question of what conditions the cultural transfers that occur in our festival and thus also conditions the production of meaning. The playwrights whose work is referenced in this study—Gustavo Ott, Adriana Genta, Oded Liphshitz, Yusef Sweid, Berta Hiriart, and Elaine Romero—represent an effective cross-section of the many cultural perspectives and various artistic styles the festival has presented.

Several questions underlie this investigation: What is the value(s) of such a project? and What is the nature of the cultural intersections that occur? While the virtues of such an undertaking can be quickly identified, so also can the limitations. It is these shortcomings—sometimes a misunderstanding or an unintended appropriation—that we must be particularly mindful of as we embark upon an intercultural journey characterized by unpredictability and lacking a preexisting roadmap. The theoretical frameworks I employ in these discussions include cultural studies/intercultural communication and considerations of the spectator in the intersecting fields of semiotics and audience-reception theory. Mary Louise Pratt's term "contact zone" in Imperial Eyes (1992), [End Page 65] used to describe "colonial encounters, . . . social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (4, 6), helps to contextualize many of the encounters among cultures in our festival. Patrice Pavis's work on intercultural and cross-cultural performance, particularly his Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (1992), applies here. Pavis's focus on the processes of cultural transfer that occur within cross-cultural theatrical events is especially helpful. In considering the role of our audiences in the process of meaning-making, Susan Bennett's work in applying reception theory to the theatrical event is useful, and particularly her reading of the cultural limits that define both an audience's reception and the performance itself (101). Before these theoretical perspectives can be applied, the festival's basic value and guiding principles must be considered.

The significance of ONU's International Play Festival lies in several of its features, notably its commitment to foreign plays in...

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