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The Tempest in Bali DavidGeorge PRELUDE THE TEMPEST HAD LONG FASCINATED me intellectually for its rich vein of philosophical polarity, its multi-layered metatheatricality. It needed to be explored and tested in performance. But the very opening lines were already daunting: On a ship at sea. A storm with thunderand lightning. The undulating strips of green and blue cloth, the smart lighting and sound effects which normally resolve the problem were never very satisfactory and ultimately counter-productive, for in the very next scene we learn that this storm was caused by Prospero whose "magical power" is therefore exposed already as mere stage manipulation. G. Wilson Knight has called Ariel "Prospero's stage manager." The Indonesian shadow-play offered a potential solution to this opening scene, for an Indonesian dalang is credited with the sort of magical power over the elements ascribed to Prospero: once Prospero becomes a dalang, Ariel becomes light, Caliban matter, the Prospero/Antonio rivalry the Pandawa/Kurawa rivalry . . . for two years we chased the analogies and the parallels. The Murdoch Performing Group first presented The Tempest in Balito a Western Australian audience, and in doing so trod the classical intercultural path, for both those who doubt the ethics of the whole venture and those who are its enthusiastic advocates assume that the audience for which such experiments are undertaken is never of the culture from which the borrowings have been made. Craig, Grotowski, Schechner, Brook et al.have borrowed Asian performance techniques for the sake of Western audiences, to 84 the extent that interculturalism in the theatre is assumed always to mean drawing on one culture's traditions in order to present a new version of a play to the audience of another culture. Brook's now seminal Mahabharata used Indian performance conventions for a Western audience just as Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian dramatists and directors have used Western performance conventions to revitalize their theatres and shock their audiences. Always the intended audience has been other than the one from which critics such as Gautam Dasgupta and Rustom Bharucha have questioned.' The questions remain pointed: can a Western performer so casually pick up performance techniques which take "the natives" years to master? Can these be read "correctly" or even usefully by a Western audience ? If not, is this not mere exoticism, archaeologism, or cultural rape? Though Balinese theatre was originally used to revive a Shakespearean play for a Western audience, that was but a prelude: the ultimate goal was reached when the production was taken "back" to Bali-a quite different matter , for instead of those performances saying: "look how another culture might present one of our plays," the offer now became: "look what we have learned from you and have made of it." We took a new step which made this production fundamentally different from other experiments, in what could be a productive way. From the beginning our ambition was not to learn and use the shadow play or wayang wong in any "authentic" manner. What could be the point in that? We cannot be as good as them at it and must be different. Rather our approach was to be inspired by the other and then to tap that inspiration , not to reproduce and copy but to adapt and develop. The Balinese were presented with a shadow play which sought in no way to be authentic; it was meant to be experimental (the screen made of painted silks not plain canvas, hung in a cyclindrical tube, not flat; our "Arjuna" did not attempt to copy a wayang dancer but devised his own movement patterns from simulating marionette movements in a human-and very Western-body, and so forth). Consequently, the otherwise damning charges-of inauthenticity, failure to master the conventions, illiterate audience, etc.-no longer apply. Instead, with a mixture of arrogance and humility, we set out to play new variations on the conventions and then present them to their source for adjudication . In other words, and summarizing what is strategicallydifferent here: instead of ransacking Asian theatre for clues, formulae, tricks and aides to revive our own waning powers, the inspiration of an Asian culture was used creatively to deconstruct a Western classic...

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