Lee Breuer on Interculturalism

Lee Breuer on Interculturalism Interviewed by Gabrielle Cody Lee Breuerhas been an importantfigure in the American theatre as writer, director, teacher, and one of the founders of Mabou Mines. His recent works include The Warrior Ant, The Gospel at Colonus, Sister Suzie Cinema, and Hajj. His early plays arepublished in Animations: A Trilogy for Mabou Mines. This interview was conducted in 1988. CODY: Your theatre work has led you to deconstruct American culture in pieces like Prelude to Death in Venice and The Shaggy Dog Animation, then, it seems, to develop an interculturalaesthetic which culminatedwith The Warrior Ant andLear. I wonderif,at thispoint,you have apositionon interculturalism.How would you define it? What motivates you to blend culturaltraditions?And what might be the political implications of such work? BREUER: I am desperately trying to develop an overview of what it means to be working interculturally in the theatre. There are a lot of underviews. They fall in the pattern of either I love the world and the world loves me, let's all get together and party interculturally, or, the notion of Western cultural imperialism-that we are ripping off every cultural icon we can get a hold of, and then selling it. These underviews of intercultural work are deeply enmeshed in the given politics of the moment. I'm trying to see the picture in a larger sense. But I realize that different positions are satisfactory and proper for different levels of points of view. 59 For instance, it is useful in contemporary politics to view intercultural events from the point of view of who owns what, which culture owns what bid, whose song belongs to who, what dance step came from where and who's ripping who off. It is equally useful, politically, to view intercultural activity as an attempt to get to know each other and appreciate each other's culture. But both of these approaches are morally informed, they stem from a moral point of view about what's right and what's wrong, and that morality is itself culturally determined. I am more and more interested in the idea of behavior as culture, in cultural biology rather than cultural politics. If behavior is deterministic, part of the genetic picture, then it is a reasonable assumption that culture is part of the genetic picture as well. I think that what constitutes the basis of the form that we perceive as culture is really mass behavior, the collective behavior of various genetic groups, not single individuals. Cultures are, in a sense, the behavioral phenotype of a genetic grouping which manifests itself in certain imagery and form. What I have been trying to look at are the various cultural movements over the face of the earth through theatre. And in the same way that life is ultimately deterministic in that it replicates itself through genes, theatre is how culture duplicates itself. The idea of being theatrical-of theatre, in the abstract sense-is in itself the idea of adding energy to an image so that it will cross over and re-imbed itself in another individual. Theatre is the business of constructing cultural icons, and icons are the semiotics of societies. Now the problem is that there has been a tremendous usurpation of these icons. For instance, in the Western hemisphere, there has been an intricate influx of what, in an interesting political coup, has been called "Hispanic imagery." But it's not Hispanic, it's Indian. There is nothing Hispanic about the entire Western territory from Guatemala on down. It's Indian. The Hispanic overlay is a European usurpation of preColombian imagery and energy. Spain tried to usurp the Moorish culture too. But the idea of calling this Hispanic America is a double irony. Even in naming a Third World, we give it a European metaphor. The politics are fascinating. There is no question that we are locked in a large-scale, profoundly Darwinian biological struggle for the advantage of certain cultures. I think each culture has to be perceived as a Darwinian competing agent, just like people competing for jobs or genes competing to be chosen. It's highly biological, particularly since European standards have so...