East of West: Cross-cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference (review)

The front flap of the cover to East of West heralds it as an "ambitious collection of essays," a truism which serves to point out simultaneously the edited collection's strength and weakness. The scope of its coverage may indeed be too ambitious, particularly in regard to its loose interpretation of "theatrical exchanges" (front flap) or even the terms "performance" and "staging" used in its title. Some of the chapters focus on media such as Concrete Poetry, stylite asceticism, and contemporary film—modes that can be categorized as performative but hardly qualify as theater, performance, or staging in a conventional sense. This irregularity is compounded by the unevenness with which the essays treat the identified themes of "looking specifically at performances that escape national boundaries . . . [,] what happens when performances and performers are transported from their 'native' lands to new locales, especially across . . . the vast East-West divide," and "ways in which performances and performers from one cultural milieu have been poached, imitated, and transformed in geographically and culturally different contexts . . . [,] how local traditions have managed to adapt to and productively transform imported cultures" (pp. 1-2). More succinctly, according to coeditor Claire Sponsler in her introduction, "East of West explores the complicated things that happen when performances from one geographical location are recreated within another" (p. 2). Each essay does succeed in presenting a richly woven fabric of cultural factors that influence its subject of analysis (with the possible exceptions of Jinhee Kim and Robert L. A. Clark's contributions, which are comparatively simplistic, although the latter is well researched). However, the phenomena treated do not involve geographical border-crossing or transplantation so much as a more generic Western (or Eastern) "influence" or representational images of a Western/Eastern "other."

The chapter that most explicitly addresses an actual physical transference of the "East" (in this case sixteenth-century Brazil) to the West is Sponsler's treatment of the grand spectacle presented for Henri II and his wife Catherine de Médici upon their entrance to Rouen, France in 1550, complete with a recreation of a Brazilian rainforest. From his post on scaffolding high above the constructed environment, Henri could observe 250 naked "savages" (fifty actually imported from Brazil and the remainder impersonated by Norman sailors) enact commercial trading activities and then erupt into fierce tribal combat culminating in the burning of a hut. Intended to flatter the king and suggest French superiority over Portugal in the struggle for influence in Brazil, the recreated rainforest performance also invites analysis of performer subjectivity and spectator engagement, the two areas that Sponsler wishes to highlight.

As indicated in her introduction to the volume and evidenced in her own essay, Sponsler joins the other contributors in privileging reception theory, emphasizing "consumers of culture rather than its producers," where "audiences become operators, performers, and even coauthors of texts" (p. 2), while also addressing the interaction of the actual performers. Her thesis becomes problematic, however, when she identifies the "direct encounter" between the real imported Brazilians (probably Tupinamba) and the Norman sailors imitating these villagers as an "unmediated form of cultural interaction" (p. 179), seeming conveniently to forget that the entire performance is just that: a performance of both self and other directly framed by structures of political hegemony; the environment's constructedness and Henri's presence on an elevated platform as an all-powerful voyeur hardly suggest a natural or "unmediated" environment in which "there exists the possibility of 'going native' and experiencing the integration of self with other" (p. 179). Sponsler's effort to link the Normans (both performers and spectators) with the Brazilians in contrast to Henri as the actual "outsider" is intriguing but not altogether convincing. It is hard for this reviewer to imagine that the people of Rouen felt the familiarity with these "savages " that Sponsler suggests (except, perhaps, the sailors themselves, who encountered them in Brazil on their trade...