Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture

by Bharucha,Rustom

• ISBN13: 9780415092159
• ISBN10: 0415092159
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-07-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this passionate and controversial work, director and critic Rustom Bharucha presents the first major anti-imperialist critique of intercultural theatre, and does so from a Third World perspective. Bharucha questions the assumptions underlying the theatrical visions of some of the twentieth century's most prominent theatre practitioners and theorists, including Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook. He contends that Indian theatre has been grossly mythologized and misinterpreted by Western directors and critics, and questions the ethics of representation in these cross-cultural borrowings. As an anecdote to this problem, Bharucha presents a detailed, dramaturgical analysis of what he describes as anintracultural theatre project that provides an alternative vision of the possibilities of true cultural pluralism. Theatre and the Worldbravely challenges much of today's "multicultural" theatre movement by calling attention to thepost-colonial contradictions and immediacies of theatres in India. He shows how "traditions" have, in fact, been invented in the Indian theatre, and offers an inspiring alternative to this official culture in his radical reading of "traditional performance" and in his documentation of the grass-roots cultural activity of Ninasam, which, although based in the tiny village of Heggodu in Karnataka, still maintains links to the diverse cultures of the world. Bharucha counters the increasing hegemony of Western discourses on interculturalism by calling attention to a different history located in India which needs to be represented.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
Part I Points of departure
Collision of cultures: some western interpretations and uses of the Indian theatre	13	(29)
Goodbye Grotowski	42	(12)
The theatre of migrants	54	(14)
Peter Brook's Mahabharata: a view from India	68	(23)
Part II Transition
The Request Concert project: foreword	91	(4)
Request Concert in Calcutta	95	(17)
Request Concert in Bombay	112	(15)
Request Concert in Madras	127	(21)
Retrospect	148	(17)
Part III Returning
Preparing for Krishna	165	(27)
Notes on the invention of tradition	192	(19)
Letter to an actress	211	(9)
Ninasam: a cultural alternative	220	(20)
Afterword	240	(11)
Index	251