Reading(,) Theatre(,) Techniques: Responding to the Influence of Asian Theatre in the Work of Ariane Mnouchkine

Reading(,) Theatre(,) Techniques: Responding to the Influence of Asian Theatre in the Work of Ariane Mnouchkine ADRIAN KIERNANDER It is one of the intriguing coincidences of twentieth-century European theatre history that in 1970 when Ariane Mnouchkine and her company, the Theatre du Solei!, were looking for a permanent home during rehearsals for their production '789, the place they found quite by accident was in the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris - where Antonin Artaud had seen his first performance of Balinese theatre 40 years before. This otherwise insignificant coincidence has symbolic significance because Artaud's frrst exposure to non-Western theatre forms was highly influential on his developing vision of a revitalised Western theatre. That vision in its turn has generated a new tradition of Western theatre practice which looks towards the stylised forms of Asian theatre as a way of breaking out of television-style naturalism. The most prominent exponent of this theatre tradition in France has been Ariane Mnouchkine, who freely acknowledges her debt to Artaud and quotes his maxim, "The theatre IS oriental." Mnouchkine's interest in Asia and Asian theatre forms predates her practical engagement with the writings of Artaud. It has been a recurrent feature of her work as a director, in a number of different manifestations, since her frrst production in 1961, Henry Bauchau's Genghis Khan. This was Asian only in its subject matter, and perhaps in'a certain emphasis on visual spectacle. The same interest in parts of Asia as a theatrical subject has recently reasserted itself in Mnouchkine's work with her productions in the mid to late 1980s of two plays, both by Helene Cixous, set in Cambodia and the Indian subcontinent , L'Histoire terrible mais inachevee de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (The Awesome but Unfinished History ofNorodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia) and L'[ndiade. While in the case of Genghis Khan the focus on a remote Asian history and society can be seen as an excuse for a Western indulgence in the excitement and anxieties of the remote, the exotic, and the spectacular, the two recent plays are much more responsible to the cultural Modem Drama. 35 (1992) '49 150 ADRIAN KIERNANDER specificity of the societies and cultures they refer to, and can be seen as a homage and tribuIe paid in return for Orientalist liberties taken in the past. Superficial references to Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia and so on are not the only Asian references in Mnouchkine's work. After direcIing Genghis Khan she travelled to Japan and South East Asia and since then Asian cultural forms, especially theatre, have increasingly influenced her productions. The first tentative signs of this influence predate the company's arrival at their home at the Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes, the most obvious being in her production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1968 where the court characters wore costumes with a superficial Indian influence - long white cotton tunics and full trousers. But it is in the open spaces of the interior of the Cartoucherie that an Asian influence has had its deepest influence on her work, affecting not only (and sometimes not even) the subjects and locations of the plays, nor just their superficial designs, but more importantly their forms of production and performance. The clearest examples are the three Shakespeares she directed in the early 1980s, Richard II, Twelfth Night and Henry IV, Part J. In these, various Asian influences permeated not only the look of the productions but also the acting styles and the staging. It is in this area where Mnouchkine's work has made a genuine breakthrough in the development of Western performance practice. Asian theatre has been for Mnouchkine a technical way of breaking European theatre's fetishistic dependence on naturalism, psychology and hermeneutics, and rethinking many unstated and unexamined assumptions about what plays should try to do. It is an attempt to shift the work of her actors away from what Eugenio Barba calls "inculturation" techniques, based on "spontaneous", "natural" everyday behaviour, and towards the conscious artificiality of "acculturation" techniques,' In this daring, sometimes uncertain, always exploratory heuristic project, Mnouchkine's most popular work has found its solutions by exploring...