Beyond a "Taxonomic Theater": Interculturalism after Postcolonialism and Globalization

The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theater in an Age of Globalization by Rustom Bharucha. 2000: Wesleyan University Press

Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture by Johannes Birringer. 2000: The Athlone Press

Women's Intercultural Performance by Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins. 2000: Routledge

East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference edited by Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen. 2000: Palgrave

To cut across boundaries and borderlines is to live aloud the malaise of categories and labels. It is to resist simplistic attempts at classifying, to resist the comfort of belonging to a cultural or aesthetic genre, and of producing classifiable works.

--Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red

In On the Verge, Eric Overmyer's 1986 theatrical meditation on the futuristic contours of the present, three Victorian "lady explorers" stumble out of their time into ours, leapfrogging the century that links our postmodern condition with their colonial one. Although Overmyer's focus is not the postcolonial world that has resulted from the "travels" of Europeans, his subtitle--The Geography of Yearning--is a good description of the theatrical practice that makes that world its arena. The practice is interculturalism, and Overmyer's subtitle illuminates it not only because it is a literal geography, or "place-writing," but because its strong orientation toward the future makes yearning, even utopianism, one of its chief characteristics. Interculturalism, which received considerable critical attention about a decade ago, "emerged principally from the practice of western theater artists . . . performing well beyond the borders of their own countries," as Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins put it in Women's Intercultural Performance. ¹ Though an increasingly wide-ranging and differentiated practice, interculturalism came to be associated with what Holledge and Tompkins felicitously and ironically call "the taxonomic masterpieces of the late 20th century"--works like Peter Brook's Mahabharata (1985) and Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Atrides (1992).

The books under review here share the great virtue of helping to dislodge, once and for all, the handful of works and artists that have occupied interculturalism's center stage for so long. The single greatest endeavor of the books--indeed, that of all progressive intercultural theory and practice today--is the closure of "taxonomic theater," which Holledge and Tompkins define as intercultural theater dedicated to clearly and simplistically demarcating the boundaries between cultures. Since taxonomic theater (sometimes called theater anthropology) begins with a self-conscious act of cultural displacement and intercultural encounter, it can be said to construct and install cultural distinctions as well as to bridge or mix them. Taxonomic theater stands accused here of emphasizing, even fetishizing, cultural difference, even though its major projects have been undertaken in the name of universalism:

Rigid boundaries isolated the different performing bodies and framed them as supposedly pure and authentic cultural essences. Like safe sex, this safe theater refused to let fluids and flesh touch. It was as if the anxieties generated by globalism were the repressed underlying this work. On the one hand, the fear of conflict was ameliorated by a utopian vision of global collaboration and harmony, and on the other, economic injustices and inequalities were justified by a re-affirmation of the innate and essential differences between races and cultures.

By contrast, the new intercultural theater analyzed and celebrated in these books goes far beyond simple combinations--or even complex juggling--of well-recognized cultural categories and differences. Although none of these books is intended to supply systematic or comprehensive coverage of current intercultural practice, they convey its general range and impressive quality through the examples they discuss, including works like the Australian-Japanese Masterkey and the French-Algerian You Have Come Back, groups like the cross-gendered and "cross-ethnic" Takarazuka Revue of Japan and the French multicultural Ilotopie, solo performers like Butoh artists Yoko Ashikawa and Tomiko Takai, and the Slovene artist Marko Peljhan's MACROLAB, which Birringer describes as a "counter-surveillance system by artists who realize that...