The Intercultural Performance Reader

Instead of turning intercultural theatre into a vague terrain for comparing themes or cultural identities (or for contrasting ways of thinking), one should locate it as a crucible in which performance techniques are tested against and amalgamated with the techniques that receive and fashion them.

Camille Camilleri defines culture as kind of shaping, of specific “inflections” which mark our representations, feeling, activity – in short, and in a general manner, every aspect of our mental life and even of our biological organism under the influence of the group. The cultural order is “artificial” in the proper sense of the world: it is created by human art. It is distinct from the natural order. Culture is transmitted by what has been called “social heredity”, by a certain number of techniques through which each generation interiorises for the next communal inflexion of the psyche and the organism which culture comprises.

There are problems when two cultures are put together -> dominant – dominated / rich – poor / majority – minority. This kind of intercultural theatre might end up being an ethnocentric strategy of Western culture to re-conquer or show its power.

Richard Schechner has said that there is no “pure” culture not influenced by others.

Peter Brook has tried to search for a universal theatre language, to “articulate a universal art which transcends limited nationalism in an attempt to reach the human essence”. -> could be called ultracultural

Intercultural theatre could be called as a return to the source of theatre, of the authentic rite and ceremony.