Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (review)

"Modernity," Arjun Appadurai reminds us in Modernity at Large, "belongs to that small family of theories that both declares and desires universal applicability for itself" (1). This collection of interviews, conversations, and reflections conducted with leading contemporary artists in the fields of dramatic and musical performance is intended to both underscore and question this immutable assumption. Although the works and artists examined here are not "modernist" in the historical sense, they are all imbricated, as the book's title and subtitle imply, in performative acts of transgression and declassification—sometimes merely processually, sometimes through the ephemeral affects of performance itself, and sometimes (new media performance being what it is) through subversive marketing and promotion. In consistently subtle ways, Svich (who conducts many, though not all, of these interviews herself) and her collaborator-subjects illuminate the pitfalls of (post)modern performance and artistic creation in a field concerned with reduced funding, less cultural influence, and scant popular appeal for experimental performance.

The book is divided into four major sections: "Crossing Media," "Crossing Culture," "Crossing Language," and "Crossing Bodies." Fittingly, each of the conversations contained within these sections addresses aspects of all these categories, making the book's organizational structure both fluid and futile, but nonetheless conducive to further rethinking the rigid boundaries of genre and style. The subjects in these pages range from the famous or nearly so (Peter Gabriel, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Peter Sellars) to the more slightly obscure; from those artists who are primarily writers to designers, composers, and performers. What they all have in common is a desire to work within multiple media and a fractured, diverse list of influences and source material, a desire delineated by Svich in her introductory essay: "Rather than submit to the culture of expectation, these practitioners are alive to the culture of curiousity [sic]" (14). Michael Cerveris, in a secondary introductory essay, inscribes this aesthetic drive as placing "a premium on fluidity, intent, integrity, accessibility, communication and universality as (its) dominant meaningfulness" (24).

The postmodern, twenty-first-century, neo-acculturated reader, however, might be forgiven for bringing a slight skepticism to the table regarding this quasi-utopian will to create total artistic access. The artists within this volume, while an admittedly fascinating and supremely talented lot, seem individually to be little concerned with the shadows of neo-colonialism in their roles as twenty-first-century creators. They can certainly be forgiven for this, particularly as editing of the interviews plays a role; however, on the larger level, this volume's sole reliance upon artists whose work has premiered or been performed primarily in Euro-American venues gives one pause. There are diasporic artists, mostly Asian, represented in these pages, but none of the artists demonstrate anything but an educated awareness of globalization and its cultural influences. Cross-cultural debates lose their rhetorical punch when the only perspective being examined is that of the West.

One of the most crucial themes the book attempts to address is the critic's relationship to the practitioner. The critic's double-edged role in analyzing performance as a coterie activity while simultaneously infusing it with popular appeal is a consistent trope in many of these artists' appeals to create greater public access to and understanding of their work. A conversation between Stephen Bottoms and Julie Laffin, which discusses their collaborative work on several environmental performance pieces, is indicative of this relationship. Laffin, who is primarily a performer, states that "I see myself as an educator of audience [sic] . . . I avoid exclusively art-educated audiences because they are not representative of our culture at large." Bottoms—the critic-practitioner—replies with a remark on the unpredictability of audience response: "you never know what they are going to make of your lovingly prepared thing, as they conduct a private conversation about it in their heads" (143). This dichotomous relationship—the Manichean perception of audiences as both raison and antagonist to the performer, and the critic's role in either cultivating or prejudicing those...