Womens Intercultural Performance

Women’s Intercultural
Performance
Women’s Intercultural Performance explores contemporary feminist performance

in the contexts of current intercultural practices, theories, and debates. It is
the first in-depth examination of contemporary intercultural performance
by women around the world.
In this study, Holledge and Tompkins raise major questions about the
relationship between politics and aesthetics, the transmission of culturally
specific identity spaces, the sexually and culturally differentiated female
body in performance, and the commodification of this body within the
global marketplace. In analysing these questions the book draws on mate-
rial from the early years of the twentieth century to the 1990s and from the
work of artists in many countries – Ghana, South Africa, Algeria, Iran,
Great Britain, Argentina, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, and Korea.
While this study is still predicated on the existence of cultural and sexual
borders, it acknowledges that these borders are constantly shifting. Women’s
Intercultural Performance is a fascinating analysis of cultural production and
exchange and is essential reading for anyone studying or interested in
women’s performance.
Julie Holledge is Professor of Drama and Director of the Drama Centre at

the Flinders University of South Australia. She is the author of Innocent
Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre and has worked in the theatre as a
director, actor, and dramaturg.
Joanne Tompkins teaches at the University of Queensland. She is a co-

editor of Modern Drama and has published on postcolonial, multicultural,
and intercultural theatre. She is the co-author of Post-colonial Drama with
Helen Gilbert.
Women’s Intercultural
Performance
Julie Holledge and

Joanne Tompkins
London and New York

First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 2000 Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Holledge, Julie
Women’s intercultural performance / Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women in the performing arts. 2. Rites and ceremonies. 3. Intercultural communication. I. Tompkins, Joanne.
II. Title.
PN1590.W64 H65 2000
791´.082–dc21
99–089005
ISBN 0–415–17378–7 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–17379–5 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-13665-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17941-2 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
List of plates vii

Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: culture, feminism, theatre 1
1 Narrative trajectories: A Doll’s House and Antigone 18
2 Ritual translocations: Kim Kum hwa and

Warlpiri women 56
3 Layering space: staging and remembering ‘home’ 87
4 Intercultural bodies: meetings in the flesh 110
5 Intercultural markets: the female body and

censorship 151
Conclusion 176
Notes 184
References 202
Index 218
Plates
1 The Seito Collective, 1912 26

2 Matsui Sumako as Nora in the Shimamura Hogetsu
production of A Doll’s House at Bungei Kyokai Shenjyo
in Waseda, Japan, 1911 29
3 Lan Ping (Jiang Qing) as Nora in Zhang Min’s 1935
production of A Doll’s House, Shanghai 35
4 Niki Karimi in Sara, 1994, directed by Dariush
Mehrjui 38
5 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina, 1999 48
6 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina, 1999 49
7 The Korean shaman, Kim Kum hwa, 1994 66
8 Warlpiri women painting up for performance, 1998 79
9 Top End Girls, Adelaide, 1994 116
10 Costume designs from Masterkey,Adelaide, 1998 124
11 Gone with the Wind,Takarazuka Revue, Kobe, 1988 131
12 Tomiko Takai in Nobana No Tsuyu, Adelaide, 1999 141
13 Pol Pelletier in Joie, Montréal, Canada, 1993 147
14 The 1998 Telstra Adelaide Festival Poster 168
Acknowledgements
Various funding bodies have provided us with the means to complete this
project.We are indebted to the Australian Research Council, University of
Queensland New Staff Grant fund, and the Research Committee of the
Faculty of Education, Humanities, Theology and Law at Flinders Univer-
sity. We would also like to acknowledge the colleagues in our respective
departments for their support throughout the project.
We have been particularly fortunate to have had such a talented and
culturally diverse group of research assistants, including Monica Farias, Marilie
Fernandez, Mary Ann Hunter, Rebecca Lawson, Li Jiaojiao, Jane McGrory,
Yoko Nemoto, Anne Thompson, and Christine Watson. Particularly warm
thanks go to Tseen Khoo, Adele Chynoweth, Alice Parkinson, and Anna
Johnston.
A project as broad as this inevitably requires assistance with translation
from a variety of languages, namely Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Korean,
Warlpiri, Tagalog, and French. In addition to the research assistants who
worked on this project, we would like to thank the following professional
translators: Sabina Chang, Emiko Mayer, Jennifer Hargreaves Nampijinpa,
Kay Ross Napaljarri, and Elizabeth Ross Nungarrayi.
Others who provided various types of adminstrative help include Kate
Ferry, Noel Ferry, Michael Harries of theYuendumu School, Jackie Hayvice,
Annette Henderson, Li Ying Ning, and Carmel O’Shannessey of the
Lajamanu School.
We would like to thank the following people for providing us with
feedback and/or assistance at various points in the project: Frances Bonner,
Lynne Bradley, Rustom Bharucha, Lee Cataldi, Hyun Chang, Catherine
Fenn, John Frow, Miriam Lo, Sue Magarey, Nima Naghibi, Paul Newman,
Dimitri Poulos, Suh Kwang Seok, Sue Sheridan, Peta Tait, and Chong Zhou.
Acknowledgements ix
Practitioners, artists, and arts administrators who have assisted us include:

Michiko Aoki, Robyn Archer, Australian Performing Arts (APA), Rob
Brookman,Venetia Gillot, Nicholas Heyward, Kim Kum hwa, Mary Moore,
Ian Scobie, and Tomiko Takai.
Finally, we would like to thank Talia Rodgers for being a marvellously
supportive and insightful editor, and Mary Moore and Alan Lawson for
catering and comic relief.
The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permis-
sion to reproduce copyright material: Waseda University Theatre Library
for Plates 1 and 2; Ross Terrill for Plate 3; Dariush Mehrjui and Hashem
Seifi for Plate 4; Lucila Quieto for Plate 5; Clara Rosson for Plate 6; Lisa
Tomasetti and the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference for
Plate 7; Kate Ferry and Dolly Daniels Nampijinpa for Plate 8;Venetia Gillot
for Plate 9; Mary Moore for Plate 10;Takarazuka Revue for Plate 11; David
Wilson for Plate 12; Fabienne Sallin for Plate 13; and the Adelaide Festival
for Plate 14.
Introduction
Culture, feminism, theatre
Culture as product, thing, substance is culture disembodied from

experience. It is culture neutralized and turned into objects of
consumption.
(Friedman 1994a: vi)
Interculturalism could be viewed as a ‘two-way street’, based on a

mutual reciprocity of needs. But in actuality, where it is the West that
extends its domination to cultural matters, this ‘two-way street’ could be
more accurately described as a ‘dead-end’.
(Bharucha 1993: 2)
It is not a matter of finding common elements among the texts written or

produced by women and defining them in terms of a presumed
femaleness or femininity, which, to my mind, is highly suspect of sexual
metaphysics; rather, it is our task to envision a feminist theory of the
process of textual production and consumption, which is of course
inseparable from a theory of culture.
(de Lauretis 1987: 92)
Intercultural theatre projects that originate in the west tend to focus on
aesthetics first and politics second, almost as an after-thought or
superficially. Interculturalism all too frequently is perceived to become
‘political’ only when a critic complains about (mis)representations of
otherness or appropriations of culture. Feminist theatre, meanwhile,
usually operates in reverse: the political imperative that underpins
feminism – women’s equality to men – is the starting point for feminist
performance. When women produce intercultural theatre, they frequently
2 Women’s intercultural performance
begin from the point where cultures meet to speak about women. In the
following pages we explore numerous examples in which intercultural
performance by women is refracted through culture and gender, or how the
self meets the other (in terms of both gender and culture) in theatre.
The ways in which interculturalism assumes a significant role in both
local and global cultural interactions are frequently paradoxical. In fact,
paradoxes and oppositions abound in interculturalism. We begin our
analysis by locating ourselves among these sometimes oppositional terms.
Our own positions as two women living in Australia mirror the global/
local paradox: any sense of an unproblematic cultural connection to
Australia, the country in which we live, is impossible for both of us, living
and working in a culture that is comparable to our birth cultures, but not
quite our own: we share a language, dominant race, and basic
understanding of feminism with the culture in which we live, but our work
finds us interacting more and more with people from other cultures. Our
access to any fixed sense of identity is compromised by the actuality of our
migrations to Australia. Our western backgrounds (English and Canadian,
respectively) fix us as economically privileged, relative to many non-
western cultures. Our heritages have been variously inflected by the latent
effects of imperialism. Yet our impulse is to find intersecting points within
the national identities which we can claim – even tangentially – rather than
assuming an overarching globalist position which risks accepting
automatic membership to numerous cultures at the expense of
acknowledging cultural difference.
In its current form in the late twentieth century, intercultural performance
has emerged principally from the practice of western artists, in particular
the practice of performing well beyond the borders of their own countries.
It is complicit with a postmodern licence to borrow theatrical techniques
from different cultures (both in the west and beyond) within a western
defined global and theatre practice. We find ourselves able to engage with
the underpinnings to these practices and able to deploy some of the very
cogent arguments that critics of these practices have developed from
outside the west. Rather than an attempt to sit on both sides of the
metaphorical fence, this insider/outsider position reflects the multi-
dimensional locations that culture, interculturalism, gender, identity, and
performance now inhabit.
This study introduces many of the important debates in the development
and consumption of women’s intercultural performance work, a subject
Introduction 3
that has been sadly neglected in critical work on interculturalism and

performance generally. We do not provide a singular definitive model of
interculturalism or of women’s intercultural performance because such a
model would risk assuming too many similarities among cultures and
theatrical practices, and ignoring too many of the crucial local differences.
Instead, we provide ways of thinking about and analysing contemporary
performance and, particularly, representations of the performing, female,
culturally marked body. While our principal focus is on intercultural
performance, we are also aware that contemporary theatre tends to deploy
various postcolonial, intercultural, and feminist performance theories, and
that critics and audiences alike are seeking more politically astute ways to
read contemporary theatre. This book aims to produce politically and
culturally inflected reading strategies for contemporary performance.
Given the multiplicitous influences on theatre and culture generally, we
find it useful to unravel some of the specific theoretical strands and the
political/cultural considerations that shape contemporary performance:
culture, feminism, and theatre all operate as mechanisms that define and
contest (often simultaneously) self, identity, representation, and context.
Among its functions, theatre in the west helps to make culture intelligible.
Phillip Zarrilli explains that ‘performance as a mode of cultural action is
not a simple reflection of some essentialized, fixed attributes of a static
monolithic culture but an arena for the constant process of renegotiating
experiences and meanings that constitute culture’ (Zarrilli 1992: 16). In
western societies, theatre can be defined as that practice which removes
culture from its flow, isolates an aspect of it, packages it, and sells it back
to the community. Just as theatre acts as a mechanism for making culture
intelligible in the west, each culture has a mechanism for making another
culture intelligible. This intelligibility is frequently achieved by
consuming the ‘other’ as an attempt to understand it, own it, and/or control
it. Theatre artists frequently try to represent or configure on stage what is
outside their own identity space (the global) not in terms of homogeneity
but in terms of a clashing of ethnoscapes and the global/local relationship.
The specificity of both one’s own perception of the local’ and the other’s
‘local’ becomes important in this context. There are very few critical
mechanisms for analysing this representation of the other’s culture on
stage. To that end, we apply Zarrilli’s dynamic model of culture and
cultural performance, enabling us to analyse the constant renegotiation of
the shifting definitions of culture.
CULTURE
Culture is frequently associated with nationalism, yet efforts to configure

the world in terms of a global culture continue to dominate western
discourses. Postmodernism often tends to draw on cultures and histories
without concern for previously demarcated boundaries. Many companies
advertise their products as bringing the world together or making the world
smaller in a contemporary adaptation of Marshall McLuhan’s global
village. The success of this discourse is compromised, however, by the
continued influence of ethnic imperatives or ‘ethnoscapes’ – to employ
Arjun Appadurai’s expression in a more specific context (Appadurai 1990:
296). Partly in an attempt to bridge the divide that has emerged in the latter
half of the twentieth century between globalism and nationalism,1
Appadurai developed five ‘scapes’ – ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes (ibid.: 296) – which act as
formative social, cultural, and political structures. The importance of
ethnoscapes points to the continuing significance of culture, even in a
global climate that frequently purports to have transcended any need for
cultural difference.
Of course, culture is not an isolated concept or an empty sign waiting to
be filled by that which we deem ‘intelligible’. Culture has a context as well,
which Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ makes clear.2 Culture is
located in the construction of the self (or the subject position) and in the
context for that self. Culture is, of course, always more than just the
national cuisine and costumed folk dance that are frequently used to
represent it: culture is the way in which we understand our own identities
and the means through which we encounter other cultures. Any
understanding of culture is inevitably refracted through one’s own
experiences, or ‘identity spaces’, to use Jonathan Friedman’s phrase. For
Friedman,
culture is about the products of a more complex and specific substrate

of cathected identity spaces embedded in hierarchical processes of
socialization. Identity spaces . . . are about the construction of
selfhood and worldhood. The two are aspects of the same process.
(Friedman 1994a: 76)
Introduction 5
One of the major unifying strands of our argument in this study is the
complex and shifting nature of identity spaces accessed through
performance.
Part of the complexity associated with identity spaces results from the
fact that identity formation does not remain fixed: as Stuart Hall explains,
‘identities are never completed, never finished; . . . they are always as
subjectivity itself is, in process’ (Hall 1991b: 47). This constant re-
negotiation of identity and identity spaces is central to this study. One of
the basic and formative components of identity space for the performers in
this study is, of course, gender.
FEMINISM
Like culture, feminism as a discourse is based on and in western experience

and makes our world intelligible to us as western women; this feminist
methodology – or ideology – is not necessarily transferable to other
cultures, but most other cultures have ways of categorising according to
sex.
Western feminist critique is, as Janelle Reinelt metaphorically explains,
as integral to one’s subject position as culture:
since it is political and also deeply personal, it cannot be put on and

taken off again like a critical coat every time the scholar goes calling
on a new topic; it is rather more like a second skin, which goes
everywhere.
(Reinelt 1992: 227)
Paradoxically, this second skin has not been adequately considered in

intercultural work, because intercultural performance’s prestigious
international profile has ensured that interculturalism has been a male-
dominated field.
It is a truism in feminist theory now that there are many feminisms; but
many women in non-western countries refuse the word altogether because
of a perception that feminism is based on western women’s activism and
its tendency to essentialise women’s experiences, forgetting the specific
importance and place of history, culture, race, class, and politics. Chandra
Mohanty (1991a: 7) claims that ‘third world women have always engaged
with feminism, even if the label has been rejected in a number of

instances’, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan provides an example of such
feminist work in India:
The resistance of oppressed groups, including women, takes place on

several levels of response, ranging from non-violent collective
struggle, as in anti-dam and ecology struggles, to armed insurgency,
as in several secessionist movements. The subjectivities of women, as
victims of violence and agents of resistance, are constituted through
the negotiations of these situations.
(Sunder Rajan 1993: 6)
Both critics maintain the importance of specificity when referring to

women from non-western regions, so as to avoid creating monolithic
categories of a particular, culturally or geographically defined ‘Woman’.
As Mohanty explains,
Western feminist discourse, by assuming women as a coherent,

already constituted group which is placed in kinship, legal, and other
structures, defines third world women as subjects outside social
relations, instead of looking at the way women are constituted through
these very structures.
(Mohanty 1991b: 72)
The definition of feminism presents another problem for the texts that we
address: not all the work that we discuss in this text is feminist according
to understandings of western feminism. For instance, the theatre of the
Japanese women’s troupe, Takarazuka, which we discuss in Chapter 4,
cannot be described as implicitly feminist in its politics and execution,
even though it is created for the almost exclusive enjoyment of female
audiences. Most of the companies or practitioners that we consider
foreground women, even if the political underpinnings are not necessarily
theoretically feminist according to the western definitional models. In
order to address both the political problems of general terms like feminism
and to acknowledge the variety of performance traditions in which women
engage, we have adopted the use of ‘women’s intercultural performance’
instead of ‘feminist intercultural performance’ as we analyse the ways in
which women work across cultural boundaries.
Introduction 7
INTERCULTURALISM
[Interculturalism is characterised by] the tension between common

goals and clashing cultures.
(Lampe 1993: 153)
Interculturalism is the meeting in the moment of performance of two or

more cultural traditions, a temporary fusing of styles and/or techniques
and/or cultures. Interculturalism is sometimes confused with theatre
anthropology which analyses another culture’s ‘theatre’ – or events which
the anthropologist considers to be theatrical – without a sharing of
traditions.3 If every theatre collaboration can be fraught with difficulties
(including personal interactions and production problems), intercultural
collaboration also brings with it different expectations regarding culturally
determined processes and the additional problems of working in
translation (both the translation of different languages and theatre
‘languages’). It is impossible to provide an elaborate ‘recipe’ of or for
interculturalism because the nature of the interrelationship between
cultures and between artists depends heavily on the individuals and the
individual cultures concerned. It also depends on the encounter, the
exchange, any financial contributions, and the complexities of mixing
certain cultures. Some collaborations will work well, as Eelka Lampe
documents regarding the intercultural collaboration between Anne Bogart
and Tadashi Suzuki across American and Japanese cultures: the two
practitioners ‘plainly accept and respect their differences; they do not
attempt to artificially merge their culturally and individually acquired
styles and ethics, but have allowed themselves to take a risk and open up to
a creative coexistence and learning experience’ (Lampe 1993: 156). Much
like a chemical explosion generated by two otherwise non-reactive
substances, the nature of interculturalism is such that collaborations may
not work despite all best intentions and good planning.
Interculturalism is, of course, hardly a recent phenomenon. It could be
said to be inevitable as cultures attempt to define themselves by exploring
their boundaries: once cultures push that exploration beyond their borders,
they intersect and/or clash with other cultures. Antonin Artaud’s use of
Balinese techniques and Bertolt Brecht’s forays into Chinese theatre
traditions (to choose just two early examples) illustrate the ways in which
elements of non-European theatre represented exotic devices for western
stages.4 The motivation of early interculturalists tended to vary greatly

from those artists crossing cultures today: neither Artaud nor Brecht
endeavoured to bring two (or more) types of theatre together. Rather, as
modernists, they were interested in uncovering new traditions and
theatrical languages to make artistic and/or political statements in the
western theatre.
Three intercultural models
We reiterate at this point that our aim in this study is not to provide a model
of women’s intercultural performance. We must, however, outline
examples of existing models. The most general is Marvin Carlson’s model,
to which we broadly subscribe. Endeavouring to itemise the gradations of
interculturalism, Carlson has developed a seven-step model of the
‘possible relationships between the culturally familiar and the culturally
foreign’:5
1. The totally familiar tradition of regular performance.

2. Foreign elements assimilated into the tradition and absorbed by it. The
audience can be interested, entertained, stimulated, but they are not
challenged by the foreign material.
3. Entire foreign structures are made familiar instead of isolated
elements. The Oriental Macbeth would be an example of this.
4. The foreign and familiar create a new blend, which then is assimilated
into the tradition, becoming familiar.
5. The foreign itself becomes assimilated as a whole, becoming familiar.
Examples would be commedia dell’arte in France or Italian opera in
England.
6. Foreign elements remain foreign, used within familiar structures for
Verfremdung, for shock value, or for exotic quotation. An example
would be the Oriental dance sequences in the current [1990]
production of M. Butterfly in New York.
7. An entire performance from another culture is imported or recreated,
with no attempt to accommodate it with the familiar.
(Carlson 1990: 50)
Carlson’s model acknowledges that there is a great deal of variance among

intercultural activities. A successful intercultural project in which both
Introduction 9
cultures engage in an equitable exchange does not necessarily have to

coincide with Carlson’s fourth step.
If Carlson’s definition of interculturalism is deliberately wide-ranging,
Bonnie Marranca’s formula for interculturalism is based on social
commitment. She distinguishes between geo-political engagement:
‘[t]hose artists inclined toward formal experimentation and abstraction as
a performance mode will draw closer to Japanese aesthetics. Others who
declare themselves for a politically engaged, popular theater will
emphasize Latin American, Indian, Southeast Asian, and African
affiliations’ (Marranca 1996: 213). While many projects are not as easily
categorised as Marranca suggests, the ‘aesthetic’ opposition to the
‘popular’ theatre can provide one generic frame.
Patrice Pavis has pioneered a more extensive intercultural theory with
his hourglass model of intercultural exchange:
(1) cultural modeling (modélisations), sociologi-

cal, anthropological codification, etc.
(2) artistic modeling
(3) perspective of the adapters
(4) work of adaptation
(5) preparatory work by the actors, etc.
(6) choice of theatrical form
(7) theatrical representation/performance of culture
(8) reception-adapters
(9) readability
(10) reception in the target culture
A. artistic modeling
B. sociological and anthropological codification
C. cultural modeling
(11) given and anticipated consequences
(Pavis 1992: 185)
Since the direction of this model pertains to only one of the collaborating
cultures, the hourglass must be turned upside down, each of the two
cultures taking a turn at being ‘source’ and ‘target’. Pavis explains:
It is turned upside-down as soon as the users of a foreign culture ask

themselves how they can communicate their own culture to another
target culture . . . [and such turning enables cultures to] question once
again every sedimentation, to flow indefinitely from one culture to the

other.
(ibid.: 5)
He acknowledges the risks inherent in the hourglass:
If it is only a mill, it will blend the source culture, destroy its every
specificity and drop into the lower bowl an inert and deformed
substance which will have lost its original modeling without being
molded into that of the target culture. If it is only a funnel, it will
indiscriminately absorb the initial substance without reshaping it
through the series of filters or leaving any trace of the original matter.
(ibid.: 5)6
Pavis’s hourglass model accounts for most of the factors involved in the
research, production, performance, and critical reception of intercultural
theatre work, but, as he himself is all too aware, the use of the model is not
foolproof.
Chief criticisms of interculturalism
Interculturalism in the late twentieth century continues to be a theoretical,

theatrical, and cultural minefield. The most celebrated theatre event which
exemplifies this minefield, Peter Brook’s marathon performance, The
Mahabharata (1985), based on the Hindu epic, has been heavily
documented.7 The most notable critic of The Mahabharata has been
Rustom Bharucha, for whom Brook’s version represents a cultural theft
perpetrated on India by western theatre practitioners: ‘borrowing, stealing,
and exchanging from other cultures is not necessarily an “enriching”
experience for the cultures themselves’ (Bharucha 1993: 14). More
specifically, Bharucha finds in the Brook version of The Mahabharata a
potent example of other ways in which many western intercultural events
manipulate their non-western ‘partners’:
the implications of interculturalism are very different for people in

impoverished, ‘developing’ countries like India, and for their
counterparts in technologically advanced, capitalist societies like
America, where interculturalism has been more strongly promoted
both as a philosophy and a business.
(ibid.: 1)
Introduction 11
Brook’s production and Bharucha’s critique have been the most public
and visible discussions in intercultural theatre, raising a completely new
ethical debate for theatre artists working in an increasingly global arts
market. This global market in theatre has provided artists with increased
access to the performance techniques and theatrical signs and symbols of
other cultures. In most western cultures, this market opened up in the
1970s, when large numbers of artists began to travel (often with the
assistance of government arts grants) and study the traditional
performance techniques of other cultures. Trained to value the uniqueness
of their artistic voice above other aesthetic considerations, they viewed all
the artefacts available in the intersecting flows of the new global culture as
accessible building blocks for their original performance texts. The right
of western artists to draw freely on the signs and symbols circulating
within their social worlds has hardly been questioned. In contrast, many of
the cultures they were studying had rigid mechanisms for determining the
right of artists to practise performance techniques. For example, the
Japanese traditional forms of Kabuki, Noh, and Kyogen,8 which have a
magnetic attraction for western artists, are practised through rights of
inheritance by the natural or adopted male heir.
The increasing number of commercially and critically successful
western intercultural productions which employed techniques from the
theatre of east and South-east Asia prompted further accusations of
appropriation echoing Bharucha’s. At gatherings of Asian artists, western
theatre practitioners were frequently accused of building their
international reputations by bastardising ‘oriental’ performance
techniques. Inevitably such claims of appropriation and exploitation were
vigorously denied by western theatre practitioners, the majority of whom
identified with oppositional elements in their own cultures and found it
difficult to see any parallels between their fascination with world theatre
and facets of neo-imperialism. As Una Chaudhuri notes, however, ‘well-
meaning intercultural projects can unwittingly perpetuate a neo-
colonialism in which the cultural clichés which underwrote imperialism
survive more or less intact’ (Chaudhuri 1991: 196).9 With the intercultural
theatre debate, new questions arose about cultural production and the
nature of the theatrical process. The use of the modernist perception of an
artist, free to borrow at will from various cultures to depict their artistic
vision, has continued in intercultural practice at the end of the century
where postmodernism appears to approve of cultural ‘patchwork’

activities. What impressions and influences did artists have a right to use?
Could artists draw on cultural traditions and symbolic forms that
originated outside of their immediate cultural context?
Interculturalism also risks fixing on easy cultural markers or signs of
cultural difference as a shorthand that precludes research or cultural
understanding and reduces culture to a stageable sign. Chaudhuri calls this
‘museum interculturalism’ which ‘literalizes difference itself, reducing it
to the grossest and most material of conceptions’ (ibid.: 196). Daryl Chin
reads this type of interculturalism as ‘a form of connoisseurship, a new
form of worldliness’ (Chin 1991: 94). The overwhelming criticism of the
intercultural practice of western artists leaves little space for artists to
negotiate the paradox of their experiences as both local and global
practitioners. Despite all the admonitions from critics and theorists, they
work in an increasingly global environment with colleagues from other
cultures.
Commodification and interculturalism
While many right-wing politicians and commentators cling to fixed,

outmoded signifiers of culture and identity, culture constantly evolves.
Just as culture changes and mutates, it also has the capacity to be bought
and sold when culture turns from a way of reading the self in the context of
the world to a commodity that is for sale to the world. The global
environment is, as the advertising for multinational corporations
constantly reminds us, predicated on convincing consumers to desire and
purchase products. Theatre is no exception to such laws of supply and
demand: certainly theatre companies’ subscription series are carefully
designed to maximise financial returns in this product-oriented way. This
is hardly new, although, as Lukács outlines, we frequently tend to assume
that ‘art’ is somehow exempt from market forces. McClintock (1995: 212)
explains that for Lukács, ‘the commodity lies on the threshold of culture
and commerce, confusing the supposedly sacrosanct boundaries between
aesthetics and economy, money and art’. The potential is even greater for
intercultural performance than for other performance modes to be
circumscribed in a world of commodification, particularly when the
economics of first world/third world intercultural collaborations come
into play.10
Introduction 13
This partly results from intercultural work – even more than other types
of performance – frequently seeking cultural difference in the form of
‘exoticism’, particularly for western audiences.11 When interculturalism
brings at least two cultures to a performance relationship, the audience
impulse tends to read the performance in terms of cultural difference only.
This is to some extent unsurprising, since, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett maintains, such objectification has already occurred when
people from other cultures are put on display in ethnographic or festival
contexts. She argues that ‘[e]ven when efforts are made to the contrary, live
exhibits tend to make people into artifacts because the ethnographic gaze
objectifies’ whatever it sees. She cautions that ‘[w]hether the
representation essentializes (one is seeing the quintessence of
Balineseness) or totalizes (one is seeing the whole through the part), the
ethnographic fragment returns with all the problems of capturing,
inferring, constituting, and presenting the whole through parts’
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991: 415, 416). In an effort to recognise culture’s
relationship with commodification, this study also traces the processes by
which cultures – and women – are consumed in performance. The
commodification of culture, performance, and women forms one of the
major strands of our argument. While commodification helps shape each
chapter, it is the major focus of Chapter 5 on the marketing of women’s
intercultural performance at arts festivals in particular. We now turn to the
most specific form of the intercultural relationship that helps generate this
heavily commodified equation, the self–other duality.
The self-other duality
Interculturalism requires a perception of the subject–object or self– other

duality.12 Adorno and Horkheimer term the subject–object duality of
western thought ‘instrumental rationality’ (cited in Gardiner 1996: 125).
As our study focuses on women’s intercultural performance, it is hardly
surprising that we are influenced by feminist theories of alterity, which in
the light of Jessica Benjamin’s assertion that the ‘missing piece in
analyzing rationality and individualism is the structure of gender
domination’ (Benjamin 1986: 81), helps us determine a working
relationship for this duality. If we ascribe feminist principles to this
construction – specifically if ‘instrumental rationality’ is predicated on a
male subject and a female other – then women artists have a vested interest
in creating an aesthetics of intersubjectivity or finding methods of bringing

subject and object into a different relational order. The experience of
playing the other within their own culture may make them weary of
imposing the same role on a cultural other. A formulation of
interculturalism as an exploration of intersubjectivity, then, is at the basis
of this study. We explore cultural encounters, not only through audience
perceptions, but also through the motivations and subjective experience of
artists.13 This is not to imply that the intentions of the artists are
synonymous with the reception of their work, but rather that the space
between intention and reception provides a rich seam of intercultural
enquiry. It is this contested transitional space between cultures, and the
ways in which female artists and their audiences negotiate this
intersubjective space, that we find particularly intriguing.
WOMEN’S INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE
The field of culture is . . . a constant battlefield where there are no

victories to be gained, only strategic positions to be won and lost.
Cultural practice then becomes a realm where one engages with and
elaborates a politics.
(Niranjana et al. 1993: 7)
As will be obvious by now, this study is not a history of interculturalism,

but rather an analysis of cultural production and exchange at work in
examples of women’s intercultural performance. Our definitional
approach to intercultural performance remains as broad as Carlson’s
possibilities for cultural interaction, so that interculturalism can contain
both the on-stage interaction between two or more cultures and the
culturally homogeneous audience presented with a foreign cultural
artefact. The structuring principle for this book comes from the theatre
itself. Each group of performance texts is discussed through the framing
device of one of the following theatrical tropes: narrative, ritual, theatrical
space, the body, and markets. This structure enables us to demonstrate how
interculturalism and feminism intersect through space and time in
performance to generate a variety of possible identity spaces for women
from different cultures. It also enables us to highlight the interaction
between theatre and politics.
Introduction 15
Chapter 1 concentrates on narrative or theatrical plot, which is generally

the first exchange between western and eastern theatre. We trace the
cultural exchange of two European plays, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and
Sophocles’ Antigone, through numerous transformations in Asia, the
Middle East, and Latin America to consider how identity spaces can shift.
Nora, from A Doll’s House, has been played by Matsui Sumako, one of the
first women to appear on the public stage in Japan, by Jiang Qing (Madame
Mao), and by the popular Iranian film actress, Niki Karimi. The different
socio-political contexts for these narrative transformations create a useful
model for understanding how one narrative can provide so many different
possible identity space options. Numerous women playwrights have
reworked Antigone to help counter totalitarian regimes, including
Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. Our example here, Griselda Gambaro’s
Antígona Furiosa, enables us to trace in more depth the effects of the
manipulation of identity spaces for women in Argentina. The chapter
analyses the ways in which non-western women artists have translated and
adapted these narratives to foreground the struggle for women’s rights
within public and private spheres.
The second chapter concerns ritual: often considered to be theatre’s
ancestor, ritual continues to be performed around the world, albeit in the
different cultural and social circumstances of postmodernity. Rather than
analysing ritual per se, we focus on the postmodern desire to consume
‘authentic’ indigenous performance. The first section charts the
translocation of a shaman ritual from central Korea to four Australian
cities, and analyses the heavily commodified representation of the leading
performer and shaman, Kim Kum hwa, in the Australian media; the second
section addresses a ritual performance by Warlpiri women from central
Australia. In both accounts, we consider the divergent meanings attributed
to the ritual performances by the artists and their urban Australian
audiences, and assess the impact these intercultural encounters have on the
identity spaces occupied by their participants. Chapter 2 acts as a
complement to Chapter 1 in its continued exploration of the public and
private sphere.
Rather than overtly addressing the public/private sphere, the next
chapter concerns public and private space. Chapter 3 analyses the use of
theatrical space as a metaphor for colonial (and sociopolitical)
displacements, enabling us to reconsider transformations of space in the
light of the multiple subject positioning that informs feminist and
postcolonial theories. In an endeavour to narrow down the vast topic of

theatrical space, we address the postcolonial situation of the return ‘home’,
particularly when that ‘home’ is multiply articulated in the national
imaginary. We focus on three plays from Algeria, South Africa, and Ghana
that stage the return ‘home’: inevitably more intricate than ‘just’ a conflict
between coloniser and colonised subjects, this return triggers a conflict
between at least two competing socio-political identity spaces. Theatrical
space, then, acts metonymically for a variety of geo-political
displacements in order to address multiple subject positioning and the
spatialisation of personal and public imaginaries.
While Chapter 3 explores theatrical space and theatre space, Chapter 4
narrows further the theatrical metaphor from space to the acting body in
space. The female performing body is the site of the next intercultural
encounter. Every performance involves a complex interrelational dynamic
between bodies, but in Chapter 4 we confine our attention to three genres
of women’s performance. The first genre is taxonomic, because it seeks
clearly to demarcate the boundaries between cultures; the second is hybrid,
because two cultures in some way merge; and the third is nomadic, because
cultural and geographical boundaries are transgressed. Our examples
include the work of Takarazuka, the all-female Japanese revue company,
which has perfected an intercultural, ‘intergendered’ performance style;
and an adaptation of Masterkey, a thriller by Masako Togawa, involving a
cross-cultural female cast and crew presented in 1998 at the Perth Festival
and Telstra Adelaide Festival. Finally, we address the work of artists who
combine diverse cultural influences in their solo performance work,
including the butoh performers Tomiko Takai and Yoko Ashikawa from
Japan, and Pol Pelletier, a Canadian actor/director who mixes a number of
‘oriental’ techniques to harness performance energy. From our analysis of
these examples we assess the representation of racial and cultural identity
via the sexually differentiated performing body.
The final chapter considers the larger market forces which govern the
distribution of women and women’s performance in the international
marketplace. While not a performance trope as such, the marketing of
performance can significantly determine its shape, content, and politics.
Chapter 5 pursues the image of the female body but in the context of the
marketplace where the issue of censorship compromises the nature of the
performances. We explore the dynamic that exists between the voluntary
exchange of the female performing body through the international arts
Introduction 17
market, and the enforced exchange or trafficking of the commodified

female body through the international ‘black’ market. Our analysis, then,
draws attention to the many levels of commodification that inevitably
underpin any discussion or production of international intercultural
women’s performance. The analysis in Chapter 5 points to the importance
of further situating performance in the context of its socio-political and
economic environments.
The materialist approach to women’s intercultural performance that is
key to Chapter 5 structures the entire study to some considerable extent.
The diverse and wide-ranging performance examples demonstrate the
struggles women performers encounter in order to establish identity
spaces, and to make larger cultural and political statements. Such
performance work is often mediated by local and global forces, enabling
us to examine the development and consumption of women’s intercultural
work in different locations. Women’s Intercultural Performance
investigates how culture, feminism, and theatre intersect with one another
and with globalism, commodification, and consumption to weave together
a complex and often paradoxical social and theatrical practice.
Chapter 1
Narrative trajectories
A Doll’s House and Antigone
How many other women in this world live a life like Nora’s? Her
awakening is the awakening of the women of the world. Yet awakening
is the beginning of a new battle, a battle that needs a strong will. Women
must build their own lives for themselves. We must throw off the
bindings that men have placed on us and cross over the border to
freedom.
(Seito 1912: 96)
Nobody can pretend not to see them. Here they are in the bright afternoon
light with their white kerchiefs and with the photographs of their
disappeared hanging from ribbons around their tired necks. They are
willing to use women’s true and ineffable recourse in their battle: the
body itself as a weapon, exposed, subjected to hunger strikes, to long
marches, to all sorts of abuse, at times given over to torture.
(Agosin 1987: 433)
We begin this investigation of women’s intercultural performance with the

simplest form of cultural exchange in theatre: the adaptation and
translation of dramatic texts. As Rey Chow explains in a different context,
translations are never perfectly ‘faithful’ to their ‘original’ texts (Chow
1995: 176) and adaptations are even less so. It is for this reason that
adaptations are ideal intercultural texts because they mix (at least) two
cultures, two time periods, and in some cases, two divergent theatrical
worlds. New dramatic narratives emerge from story-lines, plots, and
characters as they travel through time and across cultural borders; these
transformations and mutations are the subject of this chapter.
Narrative trajectories 19
In recent intercultural theatre criticism, the two major strands of debate

over translation and adaptation have concerned the appropriation of
mythic or sacred texts by western practitioners, and the process of
assimilation and abrogation of the western canon by postcolonial artists.
We shift this focus to consider specifically women-orientated intercultural
transmissions, in which European texts from the western canon have
served women’s political struggles in Japan, China, Iran, and Argentina.
These texts are translated, adapted, or completely rewritten by non-
western artists for explicitly socio-political as well as aesthetic reasons,
and they speak directly to, or about, women. We examine the specific ways
in which these texts are reproduced as women-centred narratives,
encouraging an interactive engagement with gendered subjects in their
new audiences, and assuming a symbolic importance in wider political
struggles. Despite the fact that these same texts are frequently refracted or
interpreted in contemporary European productions through feminist
discourses, we are aware of the universalising tendencies in western
feminism and seek to avoid automatic assumptions concerning the
meanings these narratives hold in their new contexts.
The dramatic texts that dominate this chapter, Sophocles’ Antigone and
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, have been linked in twentieth-century dramatic
criticism by the perception that they share a common theme: the conflict
between the individual (and specifically a female individual) and the state
(specifically the patriarchal power invested in that state). A Doll’s House is
seen to raise questions concerning the role of women in the private sphere,
while Antigone fulfils the same role in the public sphere. We do not wish to
engage in a comparative criticism of these texts, but we shall indulge in
some structural paralleling in considering the processes by which they are
chosen, adapted, and employed by their new hosts. Barbara Herrnstein
Smith provides us with the starting point:
At a given time and under the contemporary conditions of available

materials, technology, and techniques, a particular object – let us say
a verbal artefact or text – may perform certain desired/able functions
quite well for some set of subjects. It will do so by virtue of certain of
its ‘properties’.
(Herrnstein Smith 1984: 30)
We begin by attempting to identify the ‘contemporary conditions’ in host

cultures that match ‘properties’ contained in the imported texts. In the case
of Antigone, we consider these ‘contemporary conditions’ to be the
political instability induced by totalitarian regimes. Our approach follows
Friedrich Hölderlin’s suggestion that the play thrives in a context of
‘“national reversal and revolution”, a dramatic revaluation of moral values
and political power-relations’ (cited in Steiner 1984: 81). In contrast to
these volatile power reversals, the ‘contemporary conditions’ that
underpin the adaptations of A Doll’s House appear to be the social
upheavals associated with modernity. Our analysis of A Doll’s House
covers 50 years, beginning in East Asia in the early twentieth century, and
takes its cue from Erika Fischer-Lichte’s statement that theatrical
innovators in Japan and China imported European social realist texts ‘to
popularize the representation of the individual in society, as well as to
introduce rationalism and to demand further modernization’ (Fischer-
Lichte 1990b: 15).
We are particularly interested in the central protagonists in both plays,
Nora and Antigone. There are major dramaturgical differences in the
translations and adaptations we consider, but in all these intercultural
productions the characters of Nora and Antigone are invested with
extraordinary degrees of symbolic significance. They appear to offer
women spectators identity spaces, which in Chun’s terms act as
‘interpretative mechanisms . . . to negotiate a meaningful life space’ (Chun
1996: 69). These characters offer up possible identities that are tested out
by spectators during the performance, either through analysis and
observation, or directly through an empathetic relationship. Outside the
theatre – on the streets, in lectures, and in pamphlets – the characters are
recreated as icons in a collective struggle. One of the crucial textual
‘properties’ that facilitates this process is the open-ended structure of the
original narrative which allows the artist/adapter the freedom to write
alternative endings and dramatic sequels.
A Doll’s House dominates the first section of this chapter, and in a series
of snapshots through time and space, we consider the multiple meanings
that have been invested in Nora: as an icon of resistance against feudalism;
a comrade involved in a revolutionary struggle; a victim of western
decadence; and an advocate for a radical reinterpretation of the Qur’an. In
the second part of the chapter we take a detailed look at a recent adaptation
of Antigone and its place in the 25-year struggle between the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo and the Argentinian state.
THE MANY FACES OF NORA
In the first half of the twentieth century, Henrik Ibsen was the most
performed dramatist in the world, with Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and A
Doll’s House his most popular plays. Before we can explore A Doll’s House
as an intercultural site, we must first investigate the dynamic new identity
space that Nora offered late nineteenth-century Europe.
When the European critics and audiences of the late nineteenth century
dubbed Nora and Hedda Gabler ‘new’ or ‘modern’ women, they saw them
as representatives of the middle-class women who were agitating for
financial independence, the vote, equality before the law, access to
education, and a place in the workforce. These women were gaining
control over their lives in a world where traditional family structures were
being disrupted by demographic upheaval and urban growth, and women’s
labour power was both invisible in the home and undervalued in the
marketplace. The critics were not implying that Nora and Hedda were
‘modernist’ literary heroines, any more than that the texts were
‘modernist’ plays. The modernity embodied in Ibsen’s characters was
reflective not of aesthetic modernism (associated in theatre with
dramatists such as Pirandello, Wedekind, and Brecht), but of the quality
defined by Habermas as the essence of modernity, or subjective freedom:
‘the space secured by civil law for the rational pursuit of one’s own
interests: in the state, as the in-principle equal rights to participation in the
formation of political will; in the private sphere, as ethical autonomy and
self-realisation’ (Habermas 1987: 83). This subjectivity, established
through the Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution, had
already been claimed by the bourgeois male citizen, but it was not until the
late nineteenth century that it became available to the bourgeois female
citizen. The historical specificity of this late nineteenth-century struggle
by European women for a subjectivity tied to modernity is crucial to an
understanding of A Doll’s House.
The conventions of a social-realist text surround the identity space
embodied by Nora. The text conceals its own construction, hides its author
and its theatrical tricks, and pretends that it has sprung into existence
directly from the lived reality of its audience. It moves through time by
means of a narrative structure based on the logic of cause and effect, and it
organises space behind a ‘fourth wall’ to create the illusion of a single
perspective that ties the viewer into a unified subject position. Ibsen uses
these conventions to work an extraordinary sleight of hand, without
disturbing the supposed transparency with which the world of the play
reproduces the world of the audience: he shifts the single viewing eye out
of the universal male body and into the female body.
The audience views the play through the actions of the female
protagonist, which are the logical result of the causal flow of events
embedded in the plot. At the opening of the play, the Helmer family is about
to celebrate Christmas; Nora has been buying the children presents and is
thrilled that her husband has been made the vice-president of the local
bank. She is relieved because the additional income from this new position
will release her from a secret debt incurred when her husband fell ill in the
early years of their marriage. At this time, doctors advised Nora that
Helmer would not recover unless he was moved to a warmer climate, and
she secured a loan to pay for the journey by forging her dying father’s
signature. Nora has never told her husband about the debt, and every month
for eight years she has repaid the loan with her secret earnings as a
seamstress. Krogstad, who works at the bank and negotiated Nora’s loan,
believes Helmer intends to sack him. In order to secure his job, Krogstad
attempts to blackmail Nora; when this fails he tries to blackmail Helmer.
Nora is convinced that her husband will defy Krogstad and sacrifice
himself rather than allow her to be harmed; but when Helmer reads the
blackmail letter it becomes clear that he will neither confront Krogstad, nor
risk his reputation to save his wife. He tells her that she is corrupt and unfit
to be the mother of his children. The threat of blackmail passes, but Nora
can no longer accept her role as Helmer’s protected songbird. She decides
that she must leave her ‘doll’s house’ and become an independent human
being.
If the audience is to believe Nora’s decision to leave her children to be
logical and causally justified, it must engage empathetically with her
character. The success of this psychological stratagem depends on the way
Ibsen lures the audience into a powerful sense of identification with Nora.
These narrative hooks were designed to connect with the gendered
experience of the middle classes in late nineteenth-century Europe. The

play opens with an idealised depiction of the happy bourgeois couple in a
beautiful home with lovely children. Gradually, Ibsen reveals the power
dynamics underlying this image: a dependency that forces women to
survive by seducing, amusing, and coaxing their husbands while their
labour remains invisible and their bodies are subject to constant
surveillance. At the most fragile point in the text, when the whole structure
might collapse if the audience fails to sympathise with Nora, ambiguity
silences any misgiving. The door may slam shut behind the departing
figure of Nora, but the openness of the text leaves her in limbo, subject to
endless rewritings, critical speculations, and dramatic sequels. The
audience is free to fantasise about the return of Nora to her children, the
reconstruction of the marriage, or Nora’s new life as an independent
woman.
This potential for variations on the text made the play a powerful tool for
women struggling with the social changes associated with modernity. By
imaginatively inhabiting the role of Nora, women on the cusp of new social
identities were able to explore possible futures and the consequences of
possible actions. There is ample evidence that this interactive mechanism
in the play worked for a large number of the European women who were
actively engaged in the first wave of the women’s movement. In the
accounts of the actresses who played Nora, and the audiences who watched
her in late nineteenth-century Europe, the most striking quality is the depth
of the empathy felt by these women for this fictional character. They stated
repeatedly that Nora was ‘them’ (Holledge 1981: 24–32). The process of
identification was so strong that the character was operating as a conduit
through which a new subjectivity was being explored. The impact of the
play can be judged, not only through the theoretical writings of women like
Eleanor Marx and Alexandra Kollontai1 who used Nora as a
representational paradigm in discourses on women’s emancipation, but
also in the subsequent attempts by drama critics to save the play from
feminist ‘contamination’ (Templeton 1997: 110–28).
At a specific stage in the history of social modernity, A Doll’s House gave
European bourgeois women the opportunity to explore subjective freedom
through a process of empathy and identification. But if A Doll’s House is
tied to a subject position defined by European modernity, how does it
function as an intercultural text? Does it require certain parallel social
structures to thrive? Any attempt to identify parallel social patterns in non-

European societies risks falling into the trap of creating a metanarrative of
modernity in which the whole world is categorised according to a western
definition of development and progress. Such a system of categorisation is
based on the colonial assumption that each culture is stationed at a different
point on the ‘road to progress’: the ‘west’ inhabits the present, while the
‘rest’ are locked in the past.2
Sociologist Goran Therborn’s theory of the ‘Four Gateways’ provides a
structural mechanism for analysing global flows of modernity which
bypass such western-centred narratives of cultural ‘progress’ (Therborn
1995: 132). The empirical basis of Therborn’s structure is based on
democratic voting procedures. He is interested in two social spheres – the
economy and the family – and looks at a range of conflicts and
confrontations in these spheres through patterns of individualism and
association. With its emphasis on voting systems, the family, collective
and individual subject positions, Therborn’s structure provides a
sympathetic framework for examining Nora’s travels.
A Doll’s House was produced under the sign of Therborn’s first gateway
to modernity, the European gate of ‘revolution or reform’ (ibid.: 131).
European artists toured the play through his second gateway of
‘independence’ to the new worlds (ibid.: 132), and through his fourth
gateway of ‘conquest, subjection, and appropriation’ to the colonies (ibid.:
133). It is the journey Nora took through his third gateway, of ‘imposed or
externally induced modernity’ (ibid.: 132), that provides us with the most
fascinating translations and adaptations of Ibsen’s work. This third
gateway involves the selective importation of aspects of modernity:
industrialisation, education, scientific knowledge, technology, new
bureaucratic structures, including various degrees of enfranchisement.
Simultaneously though, this gateway maintains traditional power
structures within the host society. Therborn cites Japan as the society that
has perfected this delicate balancing act, China as attempting ‘a Sino-
Communist variant of the same game’, and the Shah of Iran as the leader
who went through this gateway and hit a cul-de-sac (ibid.: 133). In each of
these countries, artists have translated and adapted A Doll’s House to fit the
specific dynamics of gendered power relations within their culture. We
look at the political contexts surrounding some of these productions, and
ask whether the play still carries a discourse of European emancipatory
feminism.
Through the third gateway
The cultural transmission of A Doll’s House from Europe to Japan was

comparatively smooth; the play moved from one confident culture to
another, and both the Japanese artists who produced it, and the women
activists who critiqued it, had a clear understanding of how the text could
be made to operate in Japan. Originally translated into Japanese in 1901, A
Doll’s House was first performed in September 1911 by the Association of
Literature and Arts at Bungei Kyokai Shenjyo in Waseda, and directed by
Shimamura Hogetsu (Sato 1981: 278). Social drama, in the form of realist
texts, was one of the many features of European modernity imported into
Japan in the early years of the century, and the most popular of these texts
prior to 1941 was A Doll’s House. Writings on women’s emancipation in
Europe and America, including dramatic texts, started to be available in
translation during the period immediately after the Russo-Japanese War in
1904–5, and debates about the relationship between the sexes became
popular in intellectual circles. In 1907, the ‘new woman’ became a popular
expression after it appeared in Quilt, a novel by Tayama Katai. When Nora
walked on to the Tokyo stage four years later, she immediately became the
quintessential ‘new woman’ from the ‘west’ (ibid.: 278).
Although the Japanese women activists claimed that they were 50 years
behind Europe in their struggle for emancipation, they used the play not as
a model for action, but as a catalyst for debate about gender relations in
their own culture. The heart of this debate appeared in Seito
[Bluestocking], a magazine that first appeared in the same month as the
1911 production of A Doll’s House: it was mockingly referred to as ‘a
nursery for Japanese Noras’.3 The women associated with Seito analysed
major differences between traditional family structures in Japan and the
west, and made a key distinction between structures that favoured the
consolidation of family interests through arranged marriages, and the
selection of marriage partners through individual feelings of love and
sexual attraction. Traditional family life in Japan was deeply influenced
by Buddhist and Confucian thought and in many respects placed women
as subservient to men. Women were governed by three obediences: from
the daughter to the father, the wife to the husband, and the mother to the
son. Seven sins were added to this list: the inability to bear a son and the
Plate 1 The Seito Collective, 1912. Photo reproduced with the permission of the Waseda
denying of sexual intercourse to a husband, disobeying parents-in-law,

talkativeness, theft, jealousy, stubbornness, and incurable disease. These
rules began to break down in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as
women were recruited into the industrial workforce, particularly in textile
and other light industries. They were further eroded by the growth in
educational opportunities for women, regardless of the fact that the stated
aim of many of the new girls’ schools was the education of ‘good wives and
wise mothers’ (Nolte and Hastings 1991: 158).
‘Of course, the success of Nora had no little influence on the world of
drama’, the critic Akiba Taro wrote in 1937, ‘but more than that, it
considerably stimulated the world of thought in that age. It was this age
when a group of “new women”, the Bluestockings, advocated Noraism for
the emancipation of women’ (cited in Sato 1981: 279). Raicho Hiratsuka,
the Seito editor, devoted the first issue of 1912 to A Doll’s House. The
female reviewers concentrated almost exclusively on the character of
Nora, and they were not entirely sympathetic: ‘Nora, Japanese women find
it incredible that you could be such a thoroughly instinctive and blind
woman’ (‘H’ 1912: 133). Helmer was perceived to be weak and shallow,
but not violent, so the relationship was considered unsatisfactory but not
irredeemable. Opinion was divided over Nora’s decision to leave her
children and her husband. This element of the plot, so controversial in
Europe, appears to have attracted less debate than the nature of Nora’s
‘awakening’. ‘Under a withered field that has suffered the harshness of
winter’, wrote ‘Midori’, ‘buds beneath the cold ground await spring. And
in Nora’s heart the buds of awakening lie’ (ibid.: 118). This concept of the
‘awakening woman’ was prevalent even in the Japanese newspapers. The
implication behind the term was that the ‘new woman’ must awaken, in a
Buddhist sense, from the illusions of the visible world if she is to free her
inner self. In the introduction to the first edition of Seito, Raicho wrote that
‘sexual differentiation of man and woman belongs to the middle or the
lowest strata [sic] of self that is transient, false, and to die and disappear’
(cited in Sato 1981: 275). Within this philosophical framework, Nora’s
claim to an awakening within a period of three days appeared superficial:
Self-awakening is no simple thing. If you think that a woman can

become a human being simply by doing what you did, you are wrong.
One’s true self is not something that can be discovered with such ease.
(‘H’ 1912: 138)
Whereas European audiences concentrated on the social drama of the play,

the Japanese Bluestockings appear to have been looking for a
metaphysical reading of character. This search for a spiritual dimension
within the text resulted in one of the most fascinating sequels ever written
to A Doll’s House. In 1924 a Buddhist missionary, Tanaka Chigaku, wrote Out
of a Doll’s House, a play set in Italy several years after Nora has left home
(Nakamura 1985: 166). After seeking spiritual enlightenment in a convent,
she travels to Paris to join an aviator school and train as a pilot. She hears
that an Italian company is planning to promote world peace with a series of
flights to East Asia. She applies for a job only to discover that Krogstad and
Kristine run the company, with Helmer as their employee. Reunited with
her husband, who is filled with remorse over his past conduct, her marriage
is saved through the miracle of their mutual desire for world peace and
harmony.
The male critics who attended the first Tokyo performance of A Doll’s
House made an interesting conflation between the ‘new woman’ as
represented by Nora, and the ‘new woman’ as personified in the actress,
Matsui Sumako. As Kusuyama Masao pointed out:
Without reservation or exaggeration, I believe that the Nora played by

this actress Matsui Sumako must be remembered as a monument
which resolved for the first time problems of using actresses in Japan,
and which, on stage, emancipated women for the first time.
(cited in Sato 1981: 278)4
In the two Japanese reinterpretations of A Doll’s House that appeared after

the 1911 production, this implicit connection between Nora and
performance practices became explicit in the character’s transformation
into a professional entertainer. In Feeble Husband (1914) Yukiko is an
actress who leaves her husband to pursue her career (Nakamura 1985:
165), and in Sunrise, Nora in Japan (1912) Hamako is an ex-geisha who
commits suicide to escape her dishonourable past (Nakamura 1985: 163).
These reworkings of the play develop the implication within Ibsen’s text
that Nora’s role as wife and mother includes the acting out of Hel-
mer’s sexual fantasies: she is his personal geisha or actress when she dan-
ces the tarantella for him.
Plate 2 Matsui Sumako as Nora in the Shimamura Hogetsu production of A Doll’s

House at Bungei Kyokai Shenjyo in Waseda, Japan, 1911. Photo reproduced
with the permission of the Waseda University Theatre Library.
Instead of discussing her position as one of the first actresses in Japan, or

the conflation between the role of actress and character, Matsui Sumako’s
published comments on the production focus on the response of the
audience:
Listening to people’s reactions after the performance, some expressed

their dismay at what a strong and cold woman Nora had become. . . .
Perhaps their dismay is due to the fact that it has long been accepted
practice for women, even when they have a husband like Helmer, to
hide their suffering and sacrifice themselves unendingly as if this was
a woman’s virtue. . . . I believe that the average person, even if derisive

of Helmer’s response, was scathing of Nora’s actions.
(Matsui Sumako 1912: 163)
Matsui Sumako does not imply that it was her intention to represent a
‘cold’ Nora: she clearly equates the character’s situation with the plight of
sacrificing and suffering wives, but it is still impossible to gauge whether
it was her performance or the character’s actions that elicited this reaction
in the Tokyo audience. Yet the actress’s comments provide a fascinating
insight into the workings of the production because they indicate that she
did not feel an empathetic connection with the audience in the final scene
of the play. While departing from her doll’s house, the actress must have
sensed that the audience was not responding sympathetically to the
character’s emotional state. Whereas this absence of empathy in a
European production might have indicated that the performance was not
successful, the records show that in Osaka and Tokyo the production was
extremely popular. This presents us with an interesting intercultural
conundrum: if the play was working despite this empathy, how did the
audience read the performance? At this point we must take a conjectural
leap and question whether a text that is designed as realism in one culture
can be consumed as realism in another. In other words, was it possible for
the character of Nora to work empathetically with an audience that had no
familiarity with the middle-class domestic life of late nineteenth-century
Europe?
The Japanese audiences which watched this first production of A Doll’s
House were not familiar with the cultural milieu reflected on the stage.
Consequently the basic premise of a realist text could not function, nor
could the acceptance of the inevitability of causal connections, and the
invisibility of theatrical artifice. The Japanese audiences were watching
the representation of a ‘foreign’ relationship between Nora and Helmer
enacted within a ‘foreign’ performance convention. It was not just the
Japanese audience that experienced these conventions as strange:
according to Matsui Sumako, the actors found working in European
costumes and constructing an occidental image extremely challenging.
‘When Helmer returns home from the dance, he slings the coat over a chair
and because both sides are black it is difficult for him to distinguish
between the collar and the hem and he often gets into a muddle’ (Matsui
Sumako 1912: 162). This lack of familiarity with the European clothing
codes indicates the degree of strangeness with which the Tokyo audience
viewed the production. Not only the characters, but also their actions were
carried out under a sign of racial and cultural difference which inevitably
limited the possibility of audience empathy and identification.
Visually, culturally, and theatrically, the audience was distanced from the
text, but this distance allowed them to use the play to compare and contrast
the potential subjectivities available to the ‘new woman’ on a global scale.
It appears that the audience did explore the identity space provided by
Nora, but in a highly selective way. Aspects of traditional culture were
assessed in relation to the imported European model and an amalgam of
European emancipatory thought and traditional Buddhist beliefs were
merged by the Seito writers into new identity spaces. This combination of
influences is apparent in their 1912 editorial which introduced the issue on
A Doll’s House:
Men and women must empathise with each other and compromise to
find peace between them. Of course a woman must be a ‘good wife
and wise mother’, but to ask her to be obedient compromises a
woman’s self-respect. This is not to suggest that all women must be
wives or mothers. There are many scholastic and artistic ambitions
that are not compatible with marriage. In the west the number of single
women increases year by year. Many have their own professions and
support themselves. Ideally, women, whether they choose to marry or
remain single, should be able to stand equal with men. Women should
not have to abide by laws created by men. They should have the right
to vote.
(Seito 1912: 105–6)
The merging of influences reflected in this Seito editorial on A Doll’s

House is typical of the delicate balance between traditional thinking and
imported elements of social modernity that characterised Japanese society
in the early twentieth century. In contrast, it is the turbulence of China’s
journey through the ‘third gateway’ of modernity that is reflected in the
Chinese production history of A Doll’s House, the most widely known
foreign drama prior to 1949. The Chinese Nora wore an ever-changing
face in the 44 years that separate the first performance in Shanghai in 1912
and the 1956 production commemorating the half-century since Ibsen’s
death. The early history of A Doll’s House in China was linked to Japan
through two students studying in Tokyo in 1911. When they returned home
to Shanghai in 1912, they established the New Play Group; two years later
they created Chunliu Theatre and presented Nora in a theatre on the
Nanjing Road.
It is uncertain whether a woman played the first Chinese Nora, because
the New Play Movement relied on female impersonators. If Chunliu
Theatre was using a translation of the play, it was never published: it is
possible that the actors were working from a mubiao, or summary, pinned
to the back of the stage (Min 1962). It was not until 1918 that the first
translation of A Doll’s House appeared in New Youth (Wu 1956), a
periodical associated with the May Fourth Movement. This reform
movement took its name from the date of the student protest demonstration
against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had legitimised Japan’s
claim to a province in Northern China. Hu Shi, a leader of the May Fourth
Movement and an advocate of the total westernisation of China, was one
of the translators of the play (Yan 1992: 56).
Over 400 new periodicals appeared in Beijing during this period and a
number of them ran special features on Ibsen. The ‘women’s question’ was
debated at length in many of the journals, including a number that were
written and published exclusively by women. New Woman, the most
successful of these feminist publications, included in its manifesto the
promotion of the ‘latest American and European literature on the new
woman’ (Croll 1978: 85). In the drama clubs based in the Beijing colleges
and universities, productions of A Doll’s House were ubiquitous, but in
1924 the warlords who controlled Beijing banned the play on the grounds
that its popularity was undermining the moral integrity of China (Min
1962). A number of Chinese plays based on A Doll’s House appeared
during this period including Hu Shi’s The Great Event of Life, which is
often mistakenly referred to as the first Chinese spoken play.5 The
dramaturgical structure of Hu Shi’s play is based on Ibsen, but the plot line
revolves around the conflict over an arranged, rather than an
unsatisfactory, marriage. The heroine, Tian Yamei, elopes at the end of the
play and leaves her parents the following note: ‘This is the greatest event
in your daughter’s life. Your daughter ought to make this decision for
herself. She has left in Mr Chen’s car. Goodbye for now’ (Yan 1992: 56).6
Feminist activity reached a height in the early 1920s, but there was a
growing impatience with the liberal humanist agenda imported from the
west that had characterised Nora’s popularity, namely individual rights
and liberties for women. Even Hu Shi, the great advocate of individualism,
began to question whether capitalism could ‘lead human beings to attain
their true “freedom, equality, and fraternity’” (ibid.: 60). As the feminist
activists drew closer to the anti-imperialist and socialist parties, Ibsen’s
play no longer appeared relevant. In this new phase of activism, militant
women’s unions were established, and ‘girl agitators’ (Croll 1978: 151)
took the demands for women’s emancipation into the countryside. Their
zeal for change was notorious, particularly in rural areas where they
claimed divorce rights for wives of labourers and peasants. In 1927, a
violent backlash occurred when the coalition between the Guomindang
and the Communist Party broke down, and Chiang Kai-Shek began a
military offensive against the CCP. The repression against women’s
activism7 was eased in 1930, when the Guomindang released their Civil
Code in an attempt to balance traditional values with aspects of modernity.
The Code improved the legal position of women, but only middle-class
urban women benefited. Continued efforts to establish Confucian precepts
within the framework of a modern western democracy resulted in the
Guomindang launching the New Life Movement in 1934 (Croll 1978:
157). It was within the context of this attempt to reconcile women’s
emancipation with traditional values of motherhood, sacrifice, loyalty, and
honour that the most famous Chinese production of A Doll’s House
appeared in Shanghai.
In the entire global history of A Doll’s House, the Nora who appeared in
the 1935 Shanghai production must be the most infamous. Jiang Qing,
known outside China as Madame Mao, played Nora when she was still a
relatively unknown actress in her early twenties working under the stage
name of Lan Ping. She had arrived in Shanghai two years before, joined a
left-wing theatre group giving benefit performances for striking tobacco
workers, and became involved in the League of Left-Wing Theatre People.
She had no connection with the underground Communist Party in
Shanghai, but she was arrested and imprisoned for her propagandist
activities. Jiang Qing claimed that she was a fearless prisoner, but there is
evidence to suggest that she implicated others during her interrogation and
signed a confession that gained her an early release in 1934. A few months
after her term in prison, she was cast in A Doll’s House, and 1935 became
known as the ‘Year of Nora’ in Shanghai theatre. The production ran for
two months at the Golden City Theatre. It was directed by the
Stanislavskian Zhang Min; he believed that foreign plays should be
performed in ways that maximised their positive influence on Chinese
society. His production of A Doll’s House was noted for its emotional
intensity and the integrity of the characterisation. Zhao Dan, the prominent
actor known for his left-wing affiliations who played Helmer, recalls in his
autobiography the director telling the cast that an actor ‘must absolutely
believe that what his character does is completely right and reasonable.
That it is the only way to behave’ (Zhao Dan 1980: 136). Jiang Qing
claimed that A Doll’s House had been her favourite play since she had
studied Ibsen at the Arts Academy in Jinan (Terrill 1984: 67). Her
interpretation of Nora became the subject of numerous reviews and
newspaper articles; she felt that she had discovered the ‘woman-rebel’ in
the play and the critics and the audiences concurred (Terrill 1984: 67). Cui
Wanqui, a leading Shanghai critic, commented: ‘it was breath-taking, she
took Nora as such an extreme rebel. And being her, she said this was all
very revolutionary’ (ibid.: 68). While recalling the performance in an
interview with Roxane Witke, Jiang Qing suggested that her connections
with the cultural elite in Shanghai may have influenced the critics, but
added that the audience enthusiastically applauded her performance, an
unusual practice in Shanghai theatre during the 1930s (Witke 1977: 102).8
The success of Jiang Qing’s interpretation indicates how the function of
the play in China shifted from the early 1920s to the early 1930s. Nora had
became a popular heroine in the 1920s because the May Fourth Movement
looked to the west for progressive models of emancipation. When she
reappeared in left-wing intellectual circles in the 1930s, it was as a symbol
of rebellion and revolution. A clear distinction had developed between the
reforming agenda of the Guomindang, which sought to reconcile the
traditional role of Chinese women within the increasingly modernised
society, and the revolutionary agenda of women’s emancipation
introduced in the communist-held areas. In Shanghai, where the open
expression of pro-communist sentiments resulted in imprisonment, it was
necessary for artists to work through vehicles that allowed multiple
interpretations. Jiang Qing’s Nora lived in a conventional European
drawing room, but her audience read her rebellion as a symbol of their own
revolutionary thinking.
Plate 3 Lan Ping (Jiang Qing) as Nora in Zhang Min’s 1935 production of A Doll’s
House, Shanghai. Photo reproduced from The White Boned Demon with
the permission of Ross Terrill.
Once again the text became a displacement for a local political struggle,
but this time the model from the west was presented as outmoded, and
Jiang Qing claimed that she had gone far ‘beyond Ibsen’s original
conception of the character’ (Terrill 1984: 67).9
As a symbol of radical thought, Nora retained her popularity until 1949
when the Communist Party gained power. With the introduction of the
Marriage Law in 1950, inequalities in the domestic sphere became the
subject of legislation and the Party took a direct interest in the
emancipation of women in the home. Playwrights were encouraged to
write short domestic dramas showing that marriage conflicts could be
successfully resolved with the assistance of a third party in order to
promote the Party’s Marriage Laws. Nora’s miracle was transformed into
the benevolent intervention of the state in the role of marriage counsellor.
A Doll’s House was still performed in the 1950s, but it had become an
example of the pathetically backward nature of relationships between the
sexes in the west. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ibsen’s death, the play
was staged in Beijing; the reviewer in the People’s Daily took the
opportunity to celebrate the new position of women in post-revolutionary
China:
In our present time, the life of a couple is built on mutual respect, love,
and support. This was the family life that Ibsen longed for. The rights
of women are no longer just talk, they are the general standards
accepted by our new world.
(Wu 1956)
In post-revolutionary China, then, Nora demonstrated the achievements of

the Communist Party and functioned as an exemplar to educate backward
elements in the audience. Early productions of the play emulated the west,
whereas later productions despised it. In the space of 44 years, Nora
transformed from a progressive heroine to a symbol of revolution, to an
outmoded relic from an oppressive past, her character functioning as a
variable symbol embodying diverse identity spaces.
China is not the only post-revolutionary state to enmesh Nora in an
ideological battle with the ‘decadent’ west. In 1994 she reappeared in a
veil, living behind closed doors in a bourgeois suburb of Tehran. If Japan
can be characterised as a culture that successfully integrated aspects of
European modernity, and China as a culture in which the volatile dynamic
between tradition and modernity is still unresolved, then Iran is a country

in which the imposition of modernity created a ‘double culture’. On the one
hand, the upper and emerging middle classes became increasingly
westernised; on the other, the majority of the population continued to live
by traditional religious practices. The period of imposed modernity in Iran
coincided with the Pahlavi dynasty from 1925 to 1979. The second Pahlavi
Shah established a royal dictatorship in 1953 with the support of British
Intelligence and the CIA, and he maintained his power-base for the next 25
years with the aid of Savak, the political police force.10 One of the legacies
of this period is that feminism is firmly associated in Iran with western
imperialism because the legislation improving the status of women was
introduced by a regime pandering to foreign interests. Women were given
the vote, but for elections that were boycotted for lack of genuine
opposition parties. Not surprisingly, the most popular Iranian version of A
Doll’s House does not date from the Pahlavi era; it was released as a film
under the title Sara in 1994, and explores the position of women within the
Islamic Republic.
Dariush Mehrjui, the director and scriptwriter of Sara, played a major
role in the development of the new Iranian cinema. For 30 years his films
have won critical acclaim both within Iran and internationally. Mehrjui’s
first international success, The Cow, convinced the Ayatollah Khomeini
that cinema could have a social function (Cheshire 1998: 28). Yet Mehrjui
has had films banned by both the Shah’s regime and the Islamic Republic.
Sara is one of four films with strong central female characters made by
Mehrjui between 1992 and 1997. In his adaptation of A Doll’s House, time,
place, and culture are all changed, and the artistic medium has moved from
theatre to film, but overall the text is extremely faithful to the original,
despite some significant deviations. The question we need to ask of this
Islamic Nora (renamed Sara, and played by the popular Iranian film actress
Niki Karimi) is what identity space does she offer her Iranian audience, and
does she hold residual meanings of European emancipatory feminism that
transcend the process of adaptation? In order to answer this question, it is
necessary to contextualise the film within the ongoing debates about the
position of women in post-revolutionary Iran.
Women were involved throughout the coalition – made up of bourgeois,
nationalist, and Marxist–Leninist parties as well as religious activists – that
caused the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty (Shahidian 1997: 8). It took
several years for the Islamic Republic to silence the secular elements of this
Plate 4 Niki Karimi in Sara, 1994, directed by Dariush Mehrjui. Photo reproduced
with the permission of Dariush Mehrjui and Hashem Seifi.
coalition. Although there has been a slow resurgence of secular discourse,

particularly since Ayatollah Khomeini’s death, discussions regarding the
position and role of women are still framed through interpretations of the
Qur’an and the life of the Prophet. Some commentators argue that the
Qur’an provides a strong basis for equality between the sexes, especially
with regard to religious duty, and therefore it is not necessary to go outside
the traditional belief system to address problems of gender inequality.

Moreover, the Prophet’s own life indicates Islamic respect for women,
because he married a wealthy woman, Khadija, who ran her own business
in which he was an employee. Advocates for this approach include Faezeh
Hashemi, a popular member of the elected assembly (the Majlis) and
daughter of the former President, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Her father
was noted for his views that western-inspired feminism and materialism
were responsible for ‘severely impairing women’s growth and progress’
(Organisation for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms for Iran
1997). According to Faezeh Hashemi, the real issue is not a bias against
women within the Qur’an, but textual interpretations; she argues that men
have always been in control of the interpretation of Islamic laws and have
‘implemented them due to their own interests’ (Organisation for Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms for Iran 1997).
Regardless of interpretative subtleties, the regulations in the Qur’an
concerning marriage, divorce, and child custody are biased towards men.
The dower system, or mahr, gives women some financial independence
(Mir-Hosseini 1993: 60), and as Islamic law regards marriage as a contract,
a woman can insert divorce clauses, subject to her husband’s approval
(Karmi 1996: 75). In contrast, men may marry up to four wives, have
numerous mistresses, and can divorce with comparative ease. Child
custody rights also favour the father: under Article 1170 a mother is given
custody of her daughter until the age of 7, and of her son until the age of 2;
if she remarries she loses all rights over her children (Mir-Hosseini 1993:
67). This legal framework provides the background to the narrative shifts
that are visible in the Iranian A Doll’s House.
Nora has become Sara, Mrs Linde is her schoolfriend, Sima, Helmer is
transformed into Hessam, and Krogstad reappears as Goshtasb. The
forged signatures, blackmail, and revelation letters remain the same, but
the threat that Hessam will be implicated in the forgery is magnified. In
contrast, the notion that the law is man-made has diminished, and all
discussion of sexuality has been removed. The suggestion that Sara might
have committed adultery to pay the loan is dismissed as preposterous.
There is no hint of Hessam’s sexual fantasies, the tarantella is cut, and the
Christmas party becomes a promotion party for Hessam where he dances
with the men, while the women sit and watch. A close-up of Sara shows her
gently swaying to the music as a tear falls from her eye. Sexuality has been
displaced on to the sensuality of the food; rejected food congeals on the
plates after Hessam has read the blackmail letter.
The film medium gives Mehrjui a locational freedom that allows him to
develop the sense of a sex-segregated world. The two spheres are clearly
delineated: the home, hidden behind layers of walls, gardens, doors,
curtains, and veils, is contrasted with the modern city run by men. Outside
the home women are subject to constant surveillance: when Sima and Sara
stand together ‘immodestly’ laughing in the street, a car accelerates
towards them, splattering Sima with water from the gutter. The world of
work is totally male-dominated, yet Mehrjui’s mise-en-scène is filled with
the products of women’s labour. The female body may be totally covered
by the hejab (the long black veil), but the sensuality of women is present in
all their traditional labour: the bazaar is filled with the beauty of the carpet
weaving, needlework, and handicrafts; the fruit and vegetables are
voluptuous. Sara sleeps in her sewing room surrounded by beads and white
satin, though this romantic image is countered by the knowledge that her
eyesight is fading. In contrast, there is no beauty in the women’s labour at
Hessam’s bank. At no point in the film is the life of an unmarried,
financially independent woman presented as a viable alternative to an
unhappy marriage.
Faced with the decision whether or not to leave Hessam, Sara has no
hesitation, but she does not follow in Nora’s footsteps. She will return to
her father’s house, but she will not seek employment or education.11 The
most profound difference between Nora and Sara is tied to the fate of their
children. Mehrjui cuts all implication from the text that a child can be
corrupted by the lack of moral virtue in a parent, and his heroine defies her
husband and insists on taking her 3-year-old daughter with her when she
leaves her doll’s house. This significant shift in the narrative can be
interpreted as a challenge to Iranian child custody laws.
To return to the question regarding the identity space offered by Sara to
an Iranian audience, we must assess the relative strengths of the religious
and secular discourses within the film. An analysis of the adaptations of the
narrative would imply that the religious discourse is pre-eminent. It is not
the gender division within the Islamic Republic that is problematised,
rather it is the specific relationship between Hessam and Sara and their
inability to reach equality within their different roles. Two devices frame
the film: sickness and sight. Hessam lies in hospital in the prologue, but he
is brought back to health through Sara’s actions; as the film ends, he is sick
once again, but this time he must heal himself. Paralleling Hessam’s
sickness is Sara’s faulty vision: she has partially lost her sight through her
secret labours as a seamstress, but her symbolic blindness can only be
cured through her realisation of Hessam’s true nature. It can be argued that
the solution to the problem within their relationship lies in one of the most
disputed of the Qur’anic verses, the gaymuma, which is interpreted either
as giving men authority over women, or the financial responsibility for
their well-being (Karmi 1996: 74). This would presuppose an Islamic
interpretation of Sara’s miracle, in which Hessam accepts that it is his duty
to sacrifice himself in order to protect his wife.
Although aspirations for a modernist subjectivity which link women to
the workforce, education, and the world outside the home appear to be
eradicated from the narrative, a secular discourse is still present within the
film through the politics of clothing. The historical link between
modernity and clothing codes is particularly strong in Iran. In 1928, the
Pahlavi Shah imposed a universal dress code for men that specified
western dress and a round peaked cap; in 1935, the hejab was banned for
women and the male dress code replaced the cap with a brimmed felt hat.
Riots broke out in response to these clothing edicts and a number of people
were killed in Azerbaijan, where protesters claimed that the brim of the felt
hats prevented their foreheads from touching the ground during prayer.
Significantly, it was only the obligatory clothing for women, the hejab,
which was reintroduced by the Ayatollah Khomeini for workers in post-
revolutionary government ministries.12 Women demonstrated in the
streets in protest over the imposition of the veil, but they were subjected to
stoning and the revolutionary guards were ordered to fire over their heads
(Hiro 1985: 132). Mehrjui uses the dress codes within the film to raise
questions about power and gender. The hejab that Sara wears restricts her
physical freedom as she runs through the streets, picks up crates of bottles,
cooks, and cleans. In contrast, western clothes denote power. Hessam, at
his most successful, wears and receives gifts of western clothing; but when
he is sick at the beginning of the film, or stands in the street powerless to
stop Sara and his daughter leaving home, he is draped in the long white
folds of the bed-sheets. By analysing the dress codes within the film, we
can read a subtle questioning of the Islamic premise of equality in
difference. By emphasising the physical restrictions placed on women by
their traditional clothing, Mehrjui seems to suggest that women will never
achieve equality while they are excluded from the secular world of Iranian
modernity.13 If subjective freedom is the essence of modernity, as
Habermas suggests (1987: 83), then the character of Sara is as
symptomatic of the identity spaces associated with social modernity as the
Noras of Japan and China.
In all the productions we have considered, with the exception of the
performance in China in 1956, traditional Confucian or Islamic laws
dominate the domestic sphere, and these laws are enforced by men who
have been catapulted into a modern world. In this context, male identity is
dependent on the capacity of women to embody the traditional cultural
values that are threatened by social change. As the inevitable contradiction
between the domestic and public spheres intensifies, Nora and Sara, and
the women they represent, struggle to transcend the yoke of tradition. The
paths they take are determined both by social context and the divergent
cultural frameworks of their artist/adaptors. Mehrjui’s Sara appears the
furthest removed from Ibsen’s play since the plot has been assimilated into
an Iranian world and the medium has shifted to film. Yet in another sense,
Sara is the most faithful of these adaptations and translations because it
works as a social-realist text through identification and empathy. In Japan,
the Buddhist concept of ‘awakening’ is predominant, but sexuality and
performance are major themes, as indicated by the re-working of the plot
in Feeble Husband and Sunrise, Nora in Japan. All references to
performance and sexuality are removed from the Iranian adaptation, which
seeks to re-interpret rather than overthrow Islamic law. In China, the text
variously becomes, over a period of 44 years, an advocate for
westernisation, the embodiment of the communist revolution, and a
condemnation of western decadence.
Despite the differences in the translations and interpretations of A Doll’s
House, in each culture the central character functions as an ‘interpretive
mechanism’ (Chun 1996: 69) for the audience to explore the consequences
of adopting new identity spaces made available to women through the
social changes associated with modernity. It is this acquisition by women
of an identity embodying subjective freedom, rather than the adoption of

the specifically western form of emancipatory feminism, that appears to
traverse geographical boundaries. As the identity space embodied by Nora
shifts and adapts to diverse cultural contexts, certain aspects of the
character are highlighted and others are marginalised. It is ironic that
Nora’s decision to leave her children, the most controversial aspect of the
late nineteenth-century European productions of Ibsen’s play, is treated as
a minor rather than a major aspect of the narrative in Chinese and Japanese
productions, and it is completely removed from the Iranian version. Hence
motherhood is not presented in these adaptations as contradictory to the
creation of an identity space embodying subjective freedom; rather it is
represented as an adjunct identity that can coexist with new social
formations. In order to consider the creation of an identity space within an
intercultural text that directly challenges the social order through a re-
working and re-defining of motherhood, we must leave A Doll’s House,
and look instead at a play marked by maternal absence.
ANTIGONE IN THE PLAZA DE MAYO
Antigone has become identified in the late twentieth century with one of
the most important collective struggles against the violence of the state, a
struggle conducted by a group who define themselves first and foremost as
mothers. In a paradigmatic version of Antigone for the late twentieth
century, Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa, mothers and motherhood
in Argentina take up a public and even subversive role. It may seem curious
that this study of women’s intercultural performance returns to Antigone
as an intercultural site. Antigone may also seem removed from
interculturalism because ancient Greece is the culture that most Europeans
and westerners feel they ‘own’: it plays a wise ancestor role in the exalted
heritage of western culture, when in reality most cultures retain only a
distant aesthetic appreciation of Greek theatre.
The narrative of the play pits Antigone against her uncle, Creon, who has
contravened spiritual laws by forbidding the burial of Antigone’s slain
brother, Polynices. Antigone deliberately buries Polynices, and each time
an enraged Creon insists that his body be disinterred. Creon’s son,
Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone, tries unsuccessfully to convince
his father to relent, on the grounds that his decision represents poor
leadership. The blind seer, Teiresias, prophesies a bleak future, following
Creon’s stubborn action (and Antigone’s equally stubborn reaction),
which prompts a reluctant Creon to relent. He orders the burial of
Polynices and pardons Antigone, only to find that he is too late: both
Haemon and Antigone have killed themselves out of divergent senses of
honour. The tragic day is concluded when Creon’s wife commits suicide.
The Chorus, composed of elders of the city of Thebes, acts as the bridge
between the audience and the actors/action, becoming more powerful as
the play proceeds. The role of the Chorus suggests that they hold a possible
compromise between the stances adopted by Antigone and Creon, also
reminding the audience that the play presents a political dilemma as well
as a domestic drama.
The narrative is open to multiple interpretations and recontextualisa-
tions, because of its polarising of opinions and its refusal of narrative clo-
sure. It demands answers to the following questions: Is Creon to blame for
the various deaths? Should Antigone have capitulated? Should Creon have
relented on his harsh and strident decree? Antigone has thus been taken up
for a variety of critical, literary, political, cultural, and even moral pur-
poses. As a means of validating the tenets of the Church of the Latter Day
Saints, for example, Antigone holds ‘a timeless and eternal . . . lesson [that]
is grounded in family. Every individual, unless he is truly rootless, experi-
ences in his own context the same conflict that the Theban uncle and his
niece undergo’ (Waterstradt 1979: 507). From a radically different per-
spective, Ynestra King has used Antigone to justify ecofeminism (King
1990: 107–8). George Steiner chronicles how Antigone, rather than Oedi-
pus Rex, has intrigued writers and philosophers including Hegel and
Kierkegaard (Steiner 1984: 104).14
Throughout the twentieth century, the play has been used so often as a
vehicle for political resistance that Steiner claimed in 1984 that ‘no
complete catalogue of the explicit and implicit lives of the Antigone
theme, from its mythical, “pre-epic” origins to the present, has been or can
be drawn up. The field is too vast’ (ibid.: 194). The most famous of the
twentieth-century versions of Antigone is Jean Anouilh’s war-time
production, which premiered on 4 February 1944 at the Théâtre de
l’Atelier in Paris. In fact, some contemporary productions of the play
borrow from Anouilh more than Sophocles. Employed specifically to fight
the Nazi Occupation of France, Anouilh’s text was cleverly designed to
satisfy both parties: the German officials were pleased with the cultural
exhibition and the conclusion which seemed to vindicate their government
– because, as Steiner points out, ‘Creon wins’ (ibid.: 193) – while the
French audience read it as a warning that Creon’s ruthless power would
continue if they failed to resist the Occupation.
Since the Second World War, Antigone has been read increasingly as an
example of a woman defying the patriarchy of the state. The play has been
championed for its feminist possibilities, but as we have argued with
regard to Nora, the manifestation of this women-centred approach can and
does vary depending on the cultural context. Antigone resists political
tyranny, but she also represents an individual woman defying patriarchal
control and insisting on the validity of her own autonomy. This is
particularly true in those adaptations set in repressive states. As Hölderlin
reminds us, the attraction to Antigone is its marking of ‘a moment of
“national reversal and revolution’” (ibid.: 81). Among the women writers
or directors around the world who have returned to Antigone are Ratna
Sarumpaet in Indonesia15 and Somalatha Subasinghe in Sri Lanka.16 Both
their versions highlight state inequity and injustice and investigate how
women can help redress state violence. We look specifically at the ways in
which Gambaro has adapted Antigone to foreground the struggle for
women’s rights. In contrast to the focus on the resistance of a female
protagonist in the private sphere that dominated in the first part of this
chapter, we shift here to a focus on the resistance of a female protagonist in
the public sphere.
Griselda Gambaro and the Mothers of the

Plaza de Mayo
The most significant adaptation of Antigone in recent years is Gambaro’s
Antígona Furiosa.17 Well known for her novels as well as her plays,
Gambaro is unafraid of drawing attention to the violence that has
characterised Argentine governments for decades. Her work is closely
associated with her country and its complex social politics. Gambaro
acknowledges that her culture is quite different from Sophocles’ and that
she has not studied the extensive intellectual and analytical history of
Sophocles’ play. Nevertheless, she maintains that Antigone is Argentinian:
Antigone belonged to us because we had painfully earned the right to

it. Antigone lived and still lives in Argentina, a country which has
repeated, in a parallel way impossible to conceal, the old story of
unlimited power that takes revenge, kills those whom it considers its
enemies and denies them not only a funeral and a tomb, but also the
right to be remembered.
In my case, when I had finished telling the story, I could see, not so
much of that Antigone who has been present in so many pages, but
rather those Antigones who every Thursday, during the most difficult
days of military rule, their heads covered with white scarves and
carrying photos of their children, walked around the square, shaking
with fear.
(Gambaro 1995: 58)
Rather than using Greek theatre to consider rights or wrongs or to explain

Argentina, Gambaro deploys Antigone interculturally to combine gender
with social politics and aesthetics to comment on women’s roles in
contemporary Argentina. She firmly states her intention to rewrite
Antigone in ‘the voice of a Latin American and Argentinian woman and
with the voices of other women who had tried to do in Argentina what
Antigone did: disobey omnipotent power and bury their loved ones’ (ibid.:
57).
Contemporary Argentinian history is notorious for the highly repressive
military juntas that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. The self-
imposed powers of the military government enabled a ‘structural
transformation of the economy and the extension of an anti-insurgency
campaign to all areas of political life. Civil and political rights were denied:
the Constitution was suspended, Congress was closed, unions were
terrorized, and the judiciary was silenced’ (Brysk 1994: 677). The
favoured mechanism for ensuring the continuation of power and the
quelling of opposition was ‘disappearance’.18 Over 30,000 citizens
disappeared, many simply because they were educated. The excuse the
Argentinian government gave for this violence was the necessity of
preventing further infiltration by supposed Marxist elements. Schirmer
explains that
[disappearance] is the perfect crime, as the crime itself is invisible,

except to those who are victims or relatives. Both are meant to suffer
silently, individually and alone. The victim is denied martyrdom;

those left behind are prohibited the final ritual of bereavement. . . .
Disappearance then is a form of censorship of memory by the state.
(Schirmer 1989: 5)
Most were young, some were even children, and one-third were women.
Most of the victims were savagely and repeatedly tortured before being
killed, and only 1,500 people ‘returned’ from the 342 concentration camps
around the country (Taylor 1997: 151). This act of disappearance
attempted to reshape the people completely into a more conservative,
subservient populace. This culture of silence and blindness, supported by
the American government and multinational corporations,19 was
challenged by Las Madres or the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
The Mothers have been an important political and cultural presence since
13 April 1977, when 14 women began their march. The numbers have
gradually increased, and the women continue to march every Thursday
afternoon at 3.30 pm to remind Argentinians of their recent past and to
ensure that history is not repeated. They have always been very visible
because of their choice of meeting place: the Plaza de Mayo, well known
in Argentina for its patriotic and historical significance, is ‘in front of the
Casa Rosada, the headquarters of the Argentine government in the center
of Buenos Aires’ (Femenía 1987: 14). While disappearances no longer
occur, the Mothers still march to ensure that their children are
remembered, and to demand that the perpetrators of these and other
government-sanctioned crimes against humanity be brought to justice.20
As they gather into their marching circle, the women don their costume
(a white headscarf embroidered with the name of their missing child/
children and the date of the disappearance), and they begin to perform the
social role of mother. They refuse to accept the state’s lies that they were
bad mothers, or that their children were deviant, or even that their children
never existed (Schirmer 1989: 20). The Mothers deploy the social
expectations of mothers looking after – or here looking for – their children.
In performing motherhood they play, to some degree, with the gender roles
available to them as women within the very conservative social order in
Argentina, where women’s roles are limited to two: madonna-like mother
or whore. These women have become activists by default, simply by trying
to find out what happened to their children.
Plate 5 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina, 1999. Photo credit: Lucila Quieto.
Plate 6 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina, 1999. Photo credit: Clara Rosson.
The Mothers succeeded both in challenging the codes by which they

were represented and in making their children (or at least the memory of
their children) symbolically reappear. Success is, however, a relative term
here. The Mothers were almost completely unsuccessful in having their
children materially or literally restored to them (even in death: their bodies
were by and large unrecovered, having been buried in mass, unmarked
graves or thrown – alive – from planes into the sea, or chopped into pieces
before being burned) but their persistent protest focused international
attention on the atrocities of the government.21
Not content just to make life-risking statements by turning their own
bodies into ‘walking billboards’ (Taylor 1997: 183), the Mothers have also
incorporated their children’s ‘bodies’ into their protest. They pin their
children’s photos to their clothes, wear photos around their necks, hold
small photos and large placards, all bearing the young faces of their
disappeared children. Some of the Mothers even say that they feel their
children’s presence, walking beside them as they march (Agosin 1987:
434–5). The signification of the photos has changed over the years. Most
people who witness the Mothers’ march comment on the age of the photos:
the haircuts, clothes, and styles of, usually, the early 1970s. At first
representing both loss and hope, they have come, after the revelation that
the children were long since murdered, to represent torture and repression.
This is not, however, the only manner in which the Mothers have
deployed ‘bodies’. Nora Amalia Femenía lists their tactics:
they constructed life-sized paper silhouettes, labeling each one with

the name of an actual desaparecido. These posters appeared on the
walls of buildings around Buenos Aires. In another campaign, they
circulated paper cutouts shaped like human hands to symbolize the
actual hands of their missing loved ones. They released balloons with
the names of the disappeared attached to them. Later, they paraded
wearing identical masks, to symbolize the common plight of all the
victims. . . . [T]he individual nature of their losses was transformed
into a collective loss. ‘One child, all the children’, the Mothers said.
(Femenía 1987: 15)
In the early years, the Mothers carried photos of their own children. Now
they take up posters of any of the disappeared, or what they also call their
‘living apparitions’ (Ortiz 1995: 24).
The effect of this corporeal sleight of hand is to enforce a cultural

memory that recalls both the individual bodies and the collectivised body
of the disappeared. From these disembodied images comes a material
insistence on the danger of forgetting. The Mothers have ensured that
traces of bodies and traces of body parts crop up all over the place. People
in the centre of the city must continually ‘see’ the images of the Mothers
themselves and their mission. It is against the background of the Mothers
in the Plaza and the events they represent that Gambaro’s Antígona
Furiosa was written.
Antígona Furiosa
Gambaro explains that Antígona Furiosa is a
collage, unified by my own language. . . . [It] does not follow the

structure of a classical play, but that of a cantata where it is clear from
the beginning what is going to happen. Antígona, who appears
strangled at the beginning of the play, revives to tell her story and this
initial death somehow renders Creon’s actions useless.
(Gambaro 1995: 57)
While Sophocles’ play pits the heroine with and against Creon, Gambaro’s
play figures the relationship in more of a triangle: Antígona (as Gambaro
names her), Creon, and the Chorus figures, the porteños (men from Buenos
Aires). The porteños, Coryphaeus and Antinous, are party to Creon’s
violence, but they are also distinct from him. This stripped-down version
of the play has only three actors. The roles of Ismene and Haemon are
‘played’ by Antígona and thus represented through her perspective.
Antígona also re-enacts the battle between her brothers. Coryphaeus
doubles as Creon, who is represented by a large, hard-framed costume that
resembles a protective, armoured shell. In contrast to Creon’s stiff, shell-
like appearance, Antígona moves with sensuality and fluidity. Teiresias’
presence is felt, but he is not represented on the stage. The plague that he
prophesies is manifested in slime that falls upon the porteños, and the
wings of an enormous bird that represents death to Antígona. When the
play begins, Antígona is seen hanging from one of the bars, foreshadowing
the end of the play. She then comes to life, but remains locked in a pyramid-
shaped cell or cage, with the audience seated around her. Around the cage/
cell are several café tables where Coryphaeus and Antinous sit.
Antígona Furiosa is based on constructions of power, particularly power
divided along gender lines. The most powerful figure is Creon, whose
military-style language (and even its rhythm) represents a more
authoritarian, fear-based, iron-fisted rule than Sophocles’ Creon. When
Gambaro’s Creon begins to repeat himself maniacally, his power becomes
terrifying. He does pardon Antígona, too late of course, but he refuses to
bury Polynices, the very thing that she – like the Mothers – demands.
Unlike Sophocles’ even-handed play, Gambaro’s version takes a
principled stand with Antígona.
It is in the representation of the two porteños that the nature of absolute
power is most apparent. Unlike a Greek Chorus, Coryphaeus and Antinous
are differentiated. Coryphaeus has a lugubrious and self-serving sense of
humour whereas Antinous is stupid, easily frightened, and confused by
both Coryphaeus and Antígona. The porteños are allied to Creon through
fear and their common desire to exert power over other human beings.
They are complicit in acts of torture with Creon. Their continual mocking
of Antígona (as well as Antinous’ bumbling confusion) prevents them
from acting, like Sophocles’ Chorus, as the identificatory bridge to the
audience. They believe themselves to be superior to Antígona, because
they are male and she is female: they judge her life to be worthless. Neither
the porteños nor Creon has the last word in the play because they are
complicit in the Argentinian atrocities, and cannot speak dispassionately
about human nature (the characteristic choric ending to a Greek play). The
inability of the porteños to see the effects of their actions feeds Antígona’s
fury.
The behaviour of the porteños points to the inhumanity of a corrupt
regime where brutal punishment and the complicity of the country’s
citizens cheapen all lives. Like the symbolic power of the figure of Nora,
Antígona represents a subversive collective identity, one figured in
Argentina most powerfully by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This
collective identity is designed to force the nation to remember the
disappeared in opposition to the very deliberate intention of the
disappearances to prevent memory and the marking of either life or death.
While Coryphaeus taunts Antígona with comments such as
‘Remembering the dead is like grinding water with a mortar and pestle –
useless’ (Gambaro 1992: 140), she insists on acknowledging the death of

her brother. The Mothers’ power and right to remember is raised later when
Antinous, in a confused state, asks ‘If we know already that she dies, why
doesn’t she die?’ (ibid.: 154). While this acts as a metatheatrical statement
and points to the audience’s role in the shaping of future events, Antinous’
comments also reveal that the dead do not simply die and go away.
CONCLUSION
Antígona dares to challenge the patriarchal order and surprises Antinous

who maintains that ‘Women don’t fight against men!’ (Gambaro 1992:
145). Both the audiences and the texts we have considered in this chapter
prove his statement wrong. The narratives revolve around the fate of two
female protagonists who defy male-defined sacred or secular law; the
open-ended structures of these texts allow for cultural relocations and
multiple rewritings. We have argued that these narratives have an
intercultural value to societies gripped by the social upheavals associated
with modernity, or the political turmoil triggered by state violence, and that
the translations and adaptations we have discussed are motivated by social,
more than aesthetic, considerations.
The initial impetus to re-work these narratives is tied to the recognition
by artists that women are challenging conventional gender norms within
their societies. They also look to other cultures for additional
representational vehicles configured as identity spaces to conceptualise
these transformations. We do not intend to suggest that these theatrical
representations instigate social change, merely that they give symbolic
expression to the lived realities of women enacting these changes.
Gambaro re-interprets the actions of the Mothers through the myth of
Antigone, a symbolic figure who crosses the important public/private
divide, daring to demonstrate publicly, daring to insist that her demands be
met. In Argentina, their actions have disengaged motherhood from its
association with ‘oppression’ in a patriarchal culture and re-associated it
with political intervention. Gambaro draws on the lived reality of the
Mothers to reconfigure the myth of Antigone but her adaptation does not
function merely as a reflection of the demonstrations at the Plaza de Mayo;
the dramatic text engages dialogically with its audience. Towards the end
of the play, Creon pardons Antígona and mourns all he has lost, but then
Antinous re-defines Creon’s actions when he says: ‘(theatrical[ly]) Bravo!
(CORYPHAEUS removes the robe, bows)’ (ibid.: 158). In this fascinating
play on theatricality, the role of the audience, and the complicity of the
witnesses, Antígona Furiosa demonstrates that it is, indeed, all an act, an
act that can either be played again or adapted, depending on its audience.
A dialogic relation linking theatre to political struggle is equally apparent
in the relationship between Nora and the writers of Seito: they address her
literally by name in their critical writings. Censorship makes this process
more oblique with regard to A Doll’s House in Iran, but in China the
ongoing dialogic and interactive process between the theatre artists and
their audiences is manifested in the changing interpretations of Ibsen’s
play.
Is it just the narrative and dramaturgical structures of these texts that are
crucial to this dialogic process, or is the relationship between the central
protagonist and her audience also an essential element in this interaction?
Nora and Antigone are constantly re-defined by the lived reality of women
engaged in the struggle for social change, but they also offer back to these
same women a three-dimensional theatrical embodiment of new identity
spaces. ‘Bluestockings’, ‘girl agitators’, and ‘Mothers’ are living images
tied to discursive practices; they are also referents for Nora and Antigone.
Rosi Braidotti argues that:
[i]dentity and subjectivity are different and interrelated moments in

the process of defining a subject position. This idea of the subject as
process means that he/she can no longer be seen to coincide with his/
her consciousness but must be thought of as a complex and multiple
identity, as the site of the dynamic interaction of desire with the will,
of subjectivity with the unconscious.
(Braidotti 1994: 196)
Subjectivity, by this definition, is an amalgam of multiple identities drawn

from a culturally specific repertoire. Members of the audience explore
these identity spaces as they follow the characters through the dramatic
narrative, accepting some elements while rejecting others.
It is our contention that the translation and adaptation of texts across

cultures can increase the repertoire of identity spaces available to
audiences, and can assist in articulating the shifts in subjectivity triggered
by social upheaval. This process is particularly significant when the
identity spaces contained within the performed texts are capable of
expressing a lived reality that is insufficiently symbolised within the
existing frameworks of the host culture. Although the plays explored in
this chapter are part of the European canon, we would argue that the
intercultural process of translation and adaptation has minimised the
cultural imperialist dangers of these texts while maximising their social
and political value to women struggling for social change. In consequence,
these texts succeed in performing a desirable function for a culturally
diverse set of female subjects across both space and time.
In the next chapter, identity spaces and the construction of subjectivity
are still central to our critique, but from intercultural texts that aid the
construction of female subject positions within modernity, we move to
intercultural performances that aim at filling an imaginary lack within this
same subjectivity. Our focus shifts from the pursuit of subjective freedom
to the perceived lack of spirituality that lies deep within the subjective
constructions of modernity, and the concomitant desire expressed by
western consumers for products that provide a return to a state of
imaginary plenitude. One product that is marketed in post-industrial
western cultures as capable of satisfying this need is women’s intercultural
ritual performance.
Chapter 2
Ritual translocations
Kim Kum hwa
and Warlpiri women
[A]rtists and Aborigines emerge as the redemptive bearers of the power

to heal our spiritual alienation from ourselves which modernity has
inflicted. . . . This aestheticising of Aborigines transforms them into the
spiritual side of the western self, they become that which the West lacks
and must recoup if it is to re-establish wholeness.
(Lattas 1991: 323)
I would not be able to perform any kind of ritual, even in a theatre context,
without the gods residing in me. Without the gods that I serve residing in
myself, I wouldn’t be able to perform on the razor sharp blades. The
limited time, the bright light, the audience not being attached to the
performance, these things make a difference and can disturb me, but I
invite all the gods within myself and that remains the same.
(Kim Kum hwa 1995: 20)
In the previous chapter we argued that the female identity spaces contained
in A Doll’s House and Antigone contributed to the successful export of
these European narratives to non-western countries. The trading of
subjectivities also dominates this chapter, but from western exports we
turn to western imports, and particularly to the shifts in subjectivity
introduced to audiences through the performance of shamanic and
indigenous rituals. Once again we make the distinction between identities
linked to the private and public domains. In the realm of the private, we
shall consider a performance tour of four Australian cities by the Korean
Ritual translocations 57
shaman and spiritual leader, Kim Kum hwa; with regard to the public
domain, we consider ritual performances in these same four cities by
indigenous women from the Central Australian Warlpiri clan. In both these
accounts we invite the artists to explain their motivations for performing
ritual in an intercultural context, and we explore the meanings derived
from their performances by urban Australian audiences. We argue that the
Korean performances were consumed as a form of personal spiritual
enrichment and the Warlpiri performances were consumed as symbolic
gestures in the creation of national identity.
Ritual has long been associated with theatre and, more importantly, with
intercultural theatre. Artaud, Grotowski, and Brook incorporated the
rituals of other cultures to ‘try to shake theater out of the slumber of
aestheticism’ (Grimes 1982: 539). In addition, ritual has long been an
interest for theatre anthropologists who tend to suggest that just by staging
rituals, we can ‘reacquire’ pathways to lost spirituality, albeit in a slightly
different, mediated form. There are three major strands in current
definitions of ritual. The first and most narrow tends to analyse particular
rituals as frozen, unchanging moments associated with non-western
cultures that are frequently described by (problematic) words such as
‘primitive’. The second situates ritual in the role of the ancient ancestor of
contemporary theatre, a location which also makes links between ritual
and the primitive very easy, and which implicitly justifies the use of ritual
as theatre, regardless of context. The third, more encompassing definition
suggests that virtually every activity in which humans regularly engage
can be considered a ritual act.1
We prefer not to subscribe strictly to any of these three strands. Rather,
we see ritual as being an activity performed in a particular location that has
been prepared in some way; by an authorised practitioner(s); at a particular
time that may not pertain to clock time; for an audience who may or may
not share the culture/faith of the practitioner(s); and for the specific benefit
of a community. In this context, then, ritual is inflected with religious
worship or recognition of religious spirituality: the faith that maintains a
culture or a community, whether in worship, re-affirmation, celebration,
solidarity, or continuity. ‘Ritual action effects social transitions or spiritual
transformations; it does not merely mark or accompany them’ (MacAloon
1984: 250). Barbara Myerhoff (1984: 155) explains ritual as ‘a form by
which culture presents itself to itself. It takes place in a particular
timeframe that differs from regular, lived time: ‘[t]o do their work rituals
must disrupt our ordinary sense of time and displace our awareness of
events coming into being and disappearing in discrete, precise,
discontinuous segments’ (ibid.: 173). Just as the time is at odds with
conventional, chronological time, so, on occasion, are the participants:
many rituals include an audience of ancestors and ‘members’ of the
community who are, as yet, unborn.
Rituals are not impervious to change. As a community inevitably
changes, so do its rituals, which, Grimes reminds us, ‘have life cycles and
life spans’ (Grimes 1982: 543). Other socio-political factors (such as the
introduction of a colonial presence or a technological shift) can affect the
way in which rituals are performed, and, indeed, if they are even performed
at all. The major factor affecting the rituals that we are about to consider is
the translocation of the ritual site. Removing a ritual from the location in
which it evolved, and from the community that gives it purpose, changes
not only the form and function of the performance, but also its meaning.
When ritual performances are imported into post-industrial western
societies, these new meanings are frequently tied to the audiences’
perceived lack of spirituality.
Western culture has been haunted by nostalgia for a primordial union, or
a return to a state of imaginary plenitude, since reason replaced religion,
and the cohesive social body founded on religious observation
disappeared from the modern world.
Since the close of the eighteenth century, the discourse of modernity

has had a single theme under ever new titles: the weakening of the
forces of social bonding, privatisation, and diremption – in short, the
deformations of a one-sidedly rationalised everyday praxis which
evoke the need for something equivalent to the unifying power of
religion.
(Habermas 1987: 139)
With the Enlightenment, the determining structure of subjectivity became

possessive individualism: self-reliance, private conscience, and
individual rights to property, person, and body. Deprived of a sense of
community, the rational subject of modernity was doomed to search for
some panacea to ward off existential isolation and loneliness. The
consequences of this shift in subjectivity have been eloquently theorised
by Jurgens Habermas: ‘[s]ome place their hope in the reflective power of

reason, or at least in a mythology of reason; others swear by the
mythopoetic power of an art that is supposed to form the focal point of a
regenerated public life’ (Habermas 1987: 139). The nineteenth-century
Romantics popularised the view that art was a mechanism for reclaiming
social harmony, and they looked to nature as the source of their new-found
spirituality. The qualities attributed to the supernatural in traditionally
defined religious faith were re-assigned, and an assumption made that in
the vastness of nature, it was possible to glimpse the vastness of the soul.
In the late twentieth century this conflation of community, nature, and
spirituality has found its expression in New Age and neo-pagan
movements which almost always have an environmental message, one in
which women, and their reproductive capabilities, are central. Carol P.
Christ’s vision of the world is typical of the relationship between nature,
spirituality, and women:
With many spiritual feminists, ecofeminists, ecologists, anti-nuclear

activists, and others, I share the conviction that the crisis that threatens
the destruction of the earth is not only social, political, economic, and
technological, but is at root spiritual. We have lost the sense that this
earth is our true home, and we fail to recognize our profound
connection with all beings in the web of life. . . . The preservation of
the earth requires a profound shift in consciousness: a recovery of
more ancient and traditional views that revere the connection of all
beings in the web of life and a rethinking of the relation of humanity
and divinity to nature.
(Christ 1989: 314)
It should not surprise us to discover that once a lack has been identified in
a western consumer-oriented culture, a product appears in the marketplace
that promises to satisfy the need. In the case of a lack that is perceived as
spiritual, the postmodern marketplace (with its talent for selling non-
western cultures in a borderless global interchange) offers new types of
spiritual wellbeing borrowed from an amorphous mass of different
cultures. Spirituality is perceived to be extant in those cultures considered
‘other’ by the west and variously labelled as primitive and irrational. One
of the inevitable results of this appropriation of a variety of cultural
customs is the collapse of boundaries in the rhetoric of New Age and neo-
pagan movements. Indigenous spiritualities become homogenised and

then blended with references to nature and environmentalism, all in
opposition to mainstream culture. Leslie Jones concludes that ‘the explicit
message of the druid-asshaman’ is, then, to ‘assume that their spiritual
opposition to the worst of culture makes them automatically One With
Nature’ (Jones 1994: 136).
The packaging of spirituality as a commodity – and particularly the
spirituality of an indigenous culture defined by the west as primitive,
mythic, and irrational – presents peculiar problems for the marketplace.
‘Indigenous wisdom’, Piers Vitebsky notes, ‘must be packaged into the
format of a database: the butterfly must be killed in order to take its rightful
place in the glass case’ (Vitebsky 1995: 199). The product must be
packaged in a form that can be readily consumed, but retain the essence of
the raw material of spirituality which may well have been defined as the
inalienable connection between a culture and the land. There is an
inevitable contradiction implied in the process of translocation of a
spiritual essence from an imaginary site of spiritual plenitude to the
alienated urban environments of post-industrial capital. Cultural artefacts
in the form of live ritual performance have distinct advantages within this
packaging process because the spiritual strength of the ritual performers
allows them to act metonymically for the land. Ritual can offer a heady
mixture of spirituality, nature, and community to the purposive rational
subject suffering from existential angst, and the product can be consumed
through an intercultural encounter without ever leaving home.
KOREAN SHAMANISM: KIM KUM HWA
In 1994, Kim Kum hwa performed extracts from a Kut, or ritual

performance, in four major Australian cities. Evidence suggests that the
audience expected an ecstatic experience and personal spiritual
enrichment from the performance, but it is not clear whether they were
latter-day Romantics, or followers of Nietzsche looking to the realm of
aesthetics to undermine the rational and pragmatic basis of all thought and
action. Habermas has suggested that Nietzsche opened the door to a
postmodern subjectivity by proposing a fragmented subject capable of
self-oblivion through an aesthetic encounter with rapture and the
unforeseen. He believed that an ecstatic experience could undermine the

basis of individualism and open up ‘the escape route from modernity’
(Habermas 1987: 94).2 The audiences may have been looking for this
‘escape route’, but is the modern subject, schooled in self-reliance,
scientific rationalism, and personal freedom, capable of breaking down the
boundaries of the individual ego to merge into a ‘communion’ stimulated
by ritual performance? In this context, we are using Georges Gurvitch’s
definition of ‘communion’ as a state ‘when minds open out as widely as
possible and the least accessible depths of the “I” are integrated in this
fusion (which presupposes states of collective ecstasy)’ (cited in Turner
1982: 45).3
According to Hahm Pyong-choon, in Korea the ‘communion’ associated
with shamanistic ritual is being eroded by ‘modernisation, Westernisation,
urbanisation, industrialisation, and the development of science and
technology’ (Hahm 1988: 95). Shamanistic subjectivity is predicated on a
sense of continuity with nature; any boundary created between the
individual and the community is feared and abhorred. ‘[T]he continuum of
the human ego is not limited to interpersonal relations and human
behaviour: the human ego overlaps with non-human beings as well’ (ibid.:
67). But Hahm concludes that this subjectivity has been undermined by the
introduction of an industrialised economy. In the light of his comments, it
appears impossible for the average purposive-rational subject in post-
industrial Australia with no knowledge of Korean culture or language to
experience a state of communion in a ritual performed by a charismatic
shaman from Seoul. On the other hand, as Hyun Chang, Kim Kum hwa’s
interpreter during the Australian tour, points out: ‘we are culturally
conditioned, but spirits are not. If there are spiritual realms which influence
our emotions it would not be necessary for the audience to have a good
understanding of Korean language or culture’ (personal correspondence
with authors, 14 May 1999). But the question remains: how was the
expectation of this experience manufactured within the Australian
audience? To understand this dynamic, we must examine the promotion
and marketing of the performance tour, in particular the pre-publicity that
appeared in the Australian press, the subsequent reviews of the
performance, and the use of Kim Kum hwa’s image in a wide variety of
publications from daily newspapers to academic journals. In the light of
this evidence, we highlight the contradictions that emerged between the
press coverage of the tour and Kim Kum hwa’s motivations in performing
a shamanic ritual for Australian audiences. The gap between the intentions
of the ritual performers and the expectations of the audience provides a rich
seam of intercultural enquiry. However, before we can examine this gap,
we must contextualise Korean shamanism, the infrastructure of Kim Kum
hwa’s tour, and provide a description of her Australian performance.
There are two distinct forms of shamanism in Korea: the southern part of
the peninsula is known for its highly musical form of hereditary
shamanism, while the central and northern parts are known for charismatic
shamanism and the technique of trance possession by which the pantheon
of Korean gods appear.4 As a folk religion, shamanism holds a place
alongside the official belief systems of Buddhism and Confucianism,
which were introduced into Korea in elitist and male-dominated forms.
After Confucianism was adopted by the Chosun Kingdom in 1392,
shamanism became associated with women and the home; today 90 per
cent of the charismatic shaman, or mudang, are women.5 The traditional
role of the mudang is to act as a medium between the worlds of the living
and the dead, and to ensure the spiritual well-being of the community. With
the growth of the prodemocracy movement in the 1970s, the figure of the
shaman became a popular national icon: a representation of the true spirit
or culture of Korea. In the political theatre of the 1970s, the shaman figure
was ubiquitous.6 Cultural assertion was a strong element of the pro-
democracy movement in South Korea, and the traditional arts of dancing,
drumming, and pansori (a folk opera form) were learned by many of the
student activists. It was with the assistance of the San Maek Theatre
Company, which specialises in teaching these skills to students and
workers, that Kim Kum hwa was invited to perform in Australia. The Third
International Women Playwrights’ Conference (3IWPC) had issued the
invitation,7 and the San Maek director, Suh Kwang Seok, convinced Kim
Kum hwa that the cultural movement in Korea would benefit from her
presence at the Conference.
Kim Kum hwa accepted the invitation on the condition that the
Conference organised ritual performances in a number of major cities.
These were arranged in partnership with the Perth Arts Trust, the Victorian
Arts Centre in Melbourne, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Sydney. Additional funds were raised from the Australia Korea
Foundation, which was actively encouraging cultural exchanges during
this period as Korea had become Australia’s second largest trading partner.
The contractual arrangements were based on Australian entertainment
industry standards and were approved by the Media and Entertainment

Arts Alliance. In every respect – from the applications for artists’ visas, the
booking of venues, and payment of performance fees – the Australian tour
was designed to conform to entertainment industry standards. At no point
was Kim Kum hwa’s identity as a spiritual leader considered within these
transactions. On a contractual level the performances were treated as
secular entertainment; it was only in the subsequent marketing campaigns
that they were attributed a spiritual content.
Kim Kum hwa decided to perform a Taedong Kut, a ritual celebration for
the community, in Australia. According to Suh Kwang Seok, the elements
of the performance were derived from the Ch’olmuri-gut, or Great Ritual
of Good Fortune, which originated in Hwanghae-Do, the province of
North Korea where Kim Kum hwa and the older members of her company
were born. There are many variations of the great ritual, and its exact form
is determined by its function: a community celebration connected to a rural
calendar, a birth or death rite for a private family, or a ritual performed by
a shaman for initiatory or supplicatory purposes. The basic structure of the
great ritual involves a pre-rite of purification, between 12 and 24 discrete
episodes, and a post-rite of exorcism through fire. Each of the episodes
involves the invocation of a particular deity or set of deities and follows a
standard pattern: the deity is invoked, descends, issues warnings regarding
the future, and is entertained and dismissed. Specific costumes, props,
songs, and dances are associated with each of the deities. Shaman, or
mudang, become known for their close affinity to particular figures from
this pantheon. The great ritual cannot be performed in less than one day (in
a rural environment it may take as long as a week) but adaptation is
permissible and condensed versions are performed in civic theatres
throughout Korea.
In Australia, the performance had to fit into a 75-minute slot and was
adapted by Kim Kum hwa to please an audience unfamiliar with Korean
language and culture. The performance consisted of extracts from seven
episodes, or kori, with the emphasis on visual spectacle, music, and
comedy.8 Throughout the performance the musicians accompanied Kim
Kum hwa and the junior shaman as they sang, danced, and transformed
into the deities. The drums provided the rhythmic structure for the
spiralling and jumping movements that preceded these trance states. The
company performed three famous spectacles from the repertoire of the
charismatic shaman (mudang) of North and Central Korea: a male shaman,
cross-dressed as a woman, balanced a pig carcass on a trident to symbolise

the presence and blessings of the deities; nine yards of white cloth (the road
to the other world) was torn apart by the body of a female shaman forcing
a pathway through the woven material to demonstrate the interweaving
and subsequent separation of the living and dead; and, at the climax of the
Kut, Kim Kum hwa appeared as the Knife Riding General. The rite she
performed is known as the Chak Doo Ta Ki, a version of the Warrior Deity
episode, which involves dancing on the sharpened blades of
ploughshares.9 This dance is intended to frighten away unwanted spirits
attracted to the ritual site by the noise of the Kut. A comic interlude
followed the Chak Doo Ta Ki and provided a transition from the intense
concentration of the trance performance to the celebratory conclusion of
the Kut. A member of the audience was invited on to the stage and, while
wine was poured down her throat, Kim Kum hwa impersonated a
lecherous farmer with a mock phallus made out of a drumstick. The phallus
was thrust at the women drum players and at the laughing members of the
audience, until the company, exuding good will, invited the whole
audience to join them on the stage. Everyone was dressed in elements of
the brightly coloured shaman costumes as they danced to the compulsive
rhythms of the drums and cymbals. The stage was packed with exuberant
dancers. When the drums stopped, the exhausted audience joined hands
with the company and knelt, placing their foreheads on the ground, to
receive a communal blessing.
Marketing the Kut
Having described the basic structure of the Australian Taedong Kut and the
logistical arrangements of the tour, we can now focus on the central aspect
of this account of ritual translocation: the construction of audience
expectation through the marketing strategies, pre-publicity, and
performance reviews. Prior to the commencement of the tour, all the
venues were provided with the necessary background material for their
marketing and production departments. This included information about
the Conference to contextualise the tour, basic factual material about Kim
Kum hwa and the importance of shamanism in Korea, the technical
specifications for the performance, and a video of a similar performance
presented by Kim Kum hwa and her company in a theatre venue in Korea.
Vicki Laurie, a freelance journalist based in Perth, contacted the

Conference and requested that an interview be arranged for her with Kim
Kum hwa in Seoul. This interview appeared in slightly different forms in
The Bulletin, The West Australian, and The Advertiser.10 In all the versions
of her article, the following etymology of the word shaman appeared: ‘its
origin is obscure, thought to be a native Siberian word for “healer” and
probably originating in Sanskrit (from “Srama” religious exercise)’
(3IWPC 1994b). Laurie continued, ‘perhaps more helpful in grasping the
shaman’s role are terms like mystic, fortune-teller, and faith-healer’. In
fact, the Chinese word for shaman phonetically represents the Sanskrit
sramana, meaning diligent or laborious, and the Sanskrit root is sran, ‘to
be fatigued’ (Turner 1982: 31). Ch’ach’a ung, which is Korean for
shaman, is also the name of the second King of Silla (Chang 1988: 31), but,
in the hands of the Australian media and the venue publicists, the word
‘shaman’ became increasingly charged with paranormal significance.
Portraits of Madame Kim appeared throughout the Australian media,
and an analysis of these images clarifies the role Kim Kum hwa
unwittingly began to play in the public imaginary. Not only did her image
accompany all the Taedong Kut pre-publicity features and interviews, it
was also used indiscriminately in conjunction with general articles on the
Conference.11 None of these photographs features any other company
member, and only two out of a total of 15 portraits show Kim Kum hwa
looking at the camera: both are long shots and the direction of her gaze is
unclear. In all the photographs she is dressed in traditional shaman
costume, and in ten of the images she is involved in some aspect of ritual
performance. She is looking down and her expression is filled with
concentration and sometimes verges on pain. In the five photographs that
show Kim Kum hwa outside the performance context, two show her
dancing and three with her hands together in an image a Christian audience
would associate with prayer. In only two photographs is she smiling. The
photographs came from a variety of sources: the original press-kit
contained photographs from Kim Kum hwa’s own collection; four came
from the collection taken by Vicki Laurie in Korea; and the remaining ten
from photographers working for the media reporting on the Conference.
Despite the range of photographers supplying the images, all these
photographs have a common fascination with the exotic and spiritual
Plate 7 The Korean shaman, Kim Kum hwa, 1994. Photo credit: Lisa Tomasetti.
Reproduced with the permission of Julie Holledge for the Third Interna-
tional Women Playwrights’ Conference, Adelaide, 1994.
object.The body is always witness to the ritual action: it is always on

display for the viewer and, despite the fact that six of the articles that
accompany the image are purported to include interviews with Kim Kum
hwa, the image distances any notion of direct address from the interviewee.
She is a fascinating but strange object, and the introspection and possible
pain suggested by her expression signify an inner world which the reader
cannot access.
There was a clear bias in the organising and framing of the written
material that accompanied these images. The sociopolitical context of
shaman belief and the immediate context of the tour as an adjunct to the
Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference dropped out of view.
The information that appeared in the articles, though loosely based on the
material supplied through the Conference publicity unit, included highly
selective quotations from various interviews with Madame Kim. It tended
to commodify and exoticise the spiritual content of the Kut, and offer the
experience up to readers as a night of supernatural titillation. Like other
reports, The Bulletin focused on the ‘enigma’ of the charismatic shaman;
whilst The Subiaco Post portrayed the performance as an ‘ancient’ ritual
with the power to ‘transport the audience into a world of mysticism and
magic’. According to The Canning/Melville Times, the shaman was going
‘to get rid of evil spirits’, and perform ‘birth and fertility rites’ culminating
in ‘the skewering of a wild boar and the descent of the god!’
By the time the news of Kim Kum hwa’s tour had reached Adelaide, The
Adelaide Ray was sure that ‘the shamans not only become possessed and
experience ecstatic trance states themselves but may induce their clients to
do the same’. These journalistic excesses reached their height in the article
by Nadine Williams in the Adelaide Advertiser.
Kim Kum hwa strongly believes good and evil spirits still exist and her
ritual would remove ‘bad spirits and spirits with grudges’ hampering
Adelaide women. . . . A pig carcass may be used to pacify angry gods
or dangerous dance on two-edged swords performed to ‘threaten’
them. The priestess and medicine woman – or shaman – says she also
uses divine gods to heal people and forecast the future.
The Age in Melbourne was slightly more circumspect:
When Kim Kum hwa goes on stage, she falls into a deep trance. Then
she dances on razor-sharp knives, pierces her arms, legs, and tongue
and balances the carcass of a pig on a pitchfork. It sounds like a circus
act, perhaps, but she is performing rituals that go back thousands of
years.
As Kim Kum hwa and her company moved around Australia, a side-show
developed surrounding the carcass of the pig which was repeatedly
described as a sacrifice or sacrificial offering. In the technical
specifications for the show, the venues were asked to acquire a medium-
sized dead pig from a local butcher. In Perth one of the local radio stations
suggested that the pig would be slaughtered on stage, which resulted in
some talk-back radio outrage. The pig was transformed into a ‘wild boar’
in Perth by The Canning/Melville Times, and assumed a subject position in
The West Australian: ‘[t]he pig, one suspects, is rather less pleased by it
all.’ And by the time it reached Sydney and The Sydney Morning Herald,
it had become a little ‘white piglet which must have died of natural causes’
and was to be supplied to the company along with ‘25 kilos of rice and a
bottle of Houghton’s White Burgundy’.
There were two reviews of the Taedong Kut: one by Leonard Radic in The
Age and the other by Samela Harris in The Advertiser. Both reviewers
featured the pig which readers were reassured by Radic had been ‘pre-
slaughtered for the occasion’, whereas Harris told readers it had been
‘humanely killed’ even though it was ‘impaled . . . through its neatly gutted
belly with a three-pronged fork’. The visual spectacle of the knife riding
sequence was acknowledged, and particularly the sequence in which Kim
‘gracefully attacks herself with razor-sharp blades’ and ‘drew the blades
across her arm, her legs and (for those who could bear to watch) her
tongue’. But the overriding tone of both reviews was mildly supercilious.
The opener of The Advertiser piece read: ‘[h]ow do you know a person has
been to see Kim Kum hwa and company? Because they’re the ones without
any evil spirits; spirit nasties have been driven away.’
Yet the pieces also revealed a longing or lack for an imaginary that had
not been satisfied. Harris ended her review with the observation that it ‘is
more of a visual phenomenon than the soul-quaking physical and spiritual

experience of trance ceremonies in situ’. Radic mused: ‘we were told that
in ancient times shamanistic performance went on for three or four days,
ending in a celebration, which is probably a euphemism for an orgy.’ But
the Taedong Kut ‘lasted a mere hour-and-a-half and there was no orgy or
ecstasy – simply a final celebratory dance’; though he admitted that he had
been ‘curiously invigorated by the experience’.
Given the pre-publicity, then, it was not surprising that the performance
was ultimately framed with the expectation that individual audience
members would take part in a communal ecstatic experience. The
association between ritual performance and sacrificial rites can be traced
to the Romantics and their obsession with Dionysus, the Greek god of
frenzy, wine, and rapture. Nietzsche inherited the Romantic fascination
with Dionysus and tied the god irreversibly to the history of western theatre
by linking him with the Greek chorus and the origins of the drama. This
connection, coupled with the associations forged by the Romantics
between the narrative of the sacrificial Greek god and Christianity,
provides a strong framing device for the interpretation of ritual
performance in western cultures. This paradigm includes the complete
denial of subject-centred reason and the loss of consciousness in some
form of madness or frenzy. There is also an unspoken assumption that all
such rituals are based on sexual licentiousness, the sacrifice of a human
victim, and cannibalism. Viewed through this framing device, the media
coverage of Kim Kum hwa’s tour assumes a predictable form. The pig, a
symbol of a repressed fascination with cannibalism, is transformed into the
white piglet in such a way that it conjures up images of a human infant. A
suggestion is floated that this ancient ritual was connected to sexual orgies,
and the possibility raised that audience members might themselves fall
into a trance. Finally, the whole performance is undermined by the fatuous
statement that Adelaide women have been freed of ‘spirit nasties’.
The reviews express a latent desire for a Dionysian ecstatic experience.
This aspect of the media coverage, which is symptomatic of more general
patterns of ritual consumption, requires further investigation. Popular
assertions that ritual performance can stimulate states of communion in
purposive-rational subjects rely upon a combination of evolutionary and
psychoanalytic theory, which suggests that the evolution of the entire
species can be replicated in the development of each individual.12 This

interweaving of evolutionary and psychoanalytic theories makes it
possible to argue that a state of communion associated with so-called
‘primitive’ societies can be retrieved from the dyadic relationship between
the mother and child. Even if a mode of subjectivity has been constructed
as excessively private or personal, it can be tempered by a retrospective
connection to the pre-Oedipal intersubjective relationship. Theoretically,
it should be possible for audience members to achieve a state of
‘communion’ through the memory of this formative experience, whatever
the social construction of their subjectivity.13
Yet enormous obstacles lie in the way if we are to accept this formulation.
The pre-Oedipal has been the source of wide-ranging feminist theory14
and can function as a conceptual space to theorise an alternative to
phallocentric discourse. It is, however, extremely problematic to argue that
a parallel exists between the consciousness of the child and the lack of ego
individuation associated with pre-modern communal societies. Belief in
the possibility of the retrieval of early childhood states (and the assumption
that these duplicate the psychological states experienced by ‘primitive’
peoples) is deeply ingrained in the residues of western colonial thinking.
But does it offer an acceptable basis for an analysis of audience responses
to the translocation of ritual performance?
Although a concoction of evolutionism and psychoanalysis may assert
the theoretical possibility of a post-industrial Australian audience
experiencing an ecstatic communal state, the reviews of Kim Kum hwa’s
performance make it abundantly clear that this state was not achieved
during the Taedong Kut. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that the
shaman intended to lead her audience to a state of communal ecstasy. But
if this was not her aim, what did she wish to communicate to an audience
with little or no understanding of the spiritual significance of Kut?
Kim Kum hwa’s response
Kim Kum hwa’s clearly stated intention was ‘to introduce Korean
shamanism to Australia’.15 At no point did she suggest that it was possible
to provide a foreign audience, or for that matter a Korean audience, with an
ecstatic or deeply spiritual experience in a 75minute extract from a Kut.
However, she insisted that her spirits entered her with undiminished
strength in Australia and can appear in any place and at any time: ‘They
come and help us wherever we are in the universe and live in our bodies
and minds just like Jesus Christ or Buddha.’ Even when members of the
audience knew nothing about her belief system, they still benefited from
the blessings of her gods: ‘Gods are called different names in different
places. Linguistic difficulties do not have any significance in the spirit
world.’ For Kim Kum hwa, the important issue was whether members of
the audience were willing to participate without cultural prejudice. On her
first tour to America, Kim Kum hwa encountered hostility, particularly
from Americans of Korean descent. She was performing as part of a
celebration of Korean culture in Knoxville. When she began the
preparations for the Kut, people started to leave. Her account of this
incident illustrates her response to audience resistance during an
intercultural performance:
I was not afraid of performing a Kut in front of foreigners, but of the

disappointment in Korea if I failed. . . . I jumped up. Instantly I felt a
strong spirit coming up from my toes; it spread all over my body.
Sweat was flowing and I could no longer see the audience. My body
was as light as a feather. It was a rare and wonderful possession by the
gods. Without any hesitation I climbed up on the ploughshares and
danced. When the spirit left me I was standing on the blades with my
eyes closed. The audience seemed too quiet and I felt faint. I thought,
‘The audience has gone. What can I do? I’ve done my best but it was
not enough.’ . . . I decided to accept the will of my gods and slowly
opened my eyes. I could not believe it. The audience members, who
had been about to leave, were all sitting down watching. I could not
hear anything. Everyone stood up. I saw them putting their hands
together – they were clapping.
(Kim Kum hwa 1997: 202)16
Kim Kum hwa is convinced that the translocation of Kut is possible, but
she does not deny that differences exist between performances in Korea
and overseas. In North Korea, where she began her work as a shaman, she
remembers whole villages laughing, crying, and singing together as a
single entity during the ritual. Everyone knew the rules that governed the
performance and the patterns of the kori, or ritual episodes: ‘village people
are all shaman.’
In Australia, Kim Kum hwa was impressed by the sincerity of the

audiences; she felt they tried to understand the Kut without prejudice, but
the time constraints and the audience numbers were disappointing. She
does not believe that a great deal can be achieved in one visit. A strong
pedagogical motivation is clear from her statements, and the decision to
perform overseas is driven by the desire to establish shamanism as a formal
religion that ‘can systematically help poor, hungry, and sick people’. She
acknowledges the difficulties of adapting her work for foreign touring, and
some Korean theatre critics feel that the spiritual dimension of her work
has suffered,17 but she believes that the spiritual integrity of her
performance remains unaffected.
Kim Kum hwa considers that the Australian performances were
spiritually efficacious through the blessings of her gods, but she never
suggests that the Kut could satisfy a spiritual lack associated with
modernity within an individual audience member. Hence the
contradictions of this intercultural site. Whereas in the previous chapter we
suggested that identity spaces could cross cultural borders and influence
the constructions of subjectivity by means of an intercultural text, no
equivalent process appears to underlie the enactment of the Korean Kut.
This is not surprising, considering the fact that the audiences’ expectations
were framed by a classical western view of ritual and were manufactured
through the mechanisms of a postmodern marketplace. The audience was
encouraged to assume that an intangible spiritual presence would
accompany the performance and be registered by individual audience
members as some kind of epiphany. Yet as Kim Kum hwa’s account of her
performance makes clear, her spirits manifest themselves through the
body ordeals of the performer. In Australia, where the performance of
physical ordeal is associated with circus tricks and side-show magicians,
the spiritually inflected identity space offered by the shaman was
consumed by her audience primarily as a form of popular spectacle.
WARLPIRI YAWULYU
Our second investigation into intercultural ritual in Australia focuses on

the translocation of indigenous women’s ritual from the Tanami Desert to
the urban periphery of the continent. This account is based on the
experiences of Warlpiri women from Lajamanu and Yuendumu in the

Northern Territory who have danced and exhibited art works in the major
cities of Australia.18 They are respected elders within their communities,
have considerable ritual responsibility, and represent Warlpiri interests at
important land claims. In the wider Australian community they are known
as performers and prominent visual artists. Their intercultural
performance fills a lack in the national imaginary, rather than in the realm
of individual subjectivity.
The research and writing of this account coincided with heated political
debates in Australia over Native Title. The High Court of Australia made
a historic decision in 1992, regarding Eddie Mabo’s case against the State
of Queensland, which threw out the premise that Australia was terra
nullius (a land belonging to no one) at the point of colonisation. It found
this claim to be a ‘discriminatory denigration of indigenous inhabitants,
their social organisation and customs’ (Eddie Mabo v. The State of
Queensland 1992). The Mabo case confirmed that under certain
conditions, Aboriginal title and Crown title could co-exist. The High Court
decision recognised Native Title, but instead of resolving land rights
issues, it opened up a new era of controversy and legislation over
Australian land ownership and usage.19 All interactions between
indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in the late 1990s were
sensitised by the political debates surrounding this issue. Our research into
the translocation of indigenous ritual, the intentions of its performers, the
responses of the non-indigenous audiences, and our account of these
transactions, were inevitably shaped by these public debates. In an effort
to avoid any misrepresentation, we have tried, wherever possible, to quote
directly from interviews with the Warlpiri women who are the traditional
owners of the rituals that are the subject of this account.20
In analysing the reception of these ceremonies, we have had to engage in
a level of speculation. The performances are not presented in traditional
theatre venues, they are not reviewed, and have no paying audience. None
of the conventional indicators of audience response is available to us; there
are neither box office figures, nor contrasting reviews from diverse media
outlets. The performances are not subject to conventional advertising, they
are not commodified in the conventional sense, and they fit neither into the
conventional performing arts marketplace, nor into the tourism sector. In
fact they fall into a distinct genre of performance that maximises symbolic
rather than financial value. This genre we broadly define as ‘performance
in the service of the state’.
In our analysis we are indebted to Andrew Lattas and his work on the
process of ‘ventriloquism’ (Lattas 1991: 314) through which one culture
is forced to speak on behalf of another. Lattas argues that one of the
responsibilities of the state is to provide a ‘corporate cultural identity for
its citizens’, and that in Australia, Aboriginal art has been used to
symbolise ‘primordial truths of origin that have created the fiction of a
national identity’ (Lattas 1990: 50). Despite the tendency to use
Aboriginal art as a national logo, the social and economic realities faced by
the indigenous population remain unchanged, and there are still major
problems in the areas of health, education, and employment.
The spatial metaphors employed by Lattas are of particular relevance to
our analysis. He suggests that the endless angst surrounding the search for
an Australian national identity – variously attributed in the popular press
to the relative youth of the nation, its diverse population, or its superficial
materialism – creates and sustains an imaginary inner void or lack. This
void is believed to lie beneath the ‘tinsel town’ of the urban culture. In
contrast, the sparse and empty interior of the continent becomes an
imaginary place of spiritual plenitude, the continent’s ‘red heart’. Thus a
fascinating spatial irony is created: the emptiness of terra nullius that
justified colonial annexation is reconfigured as a spiritual fullness,
reaching its greatest intensity in the landscape and peoples of the Central
Desert. It is for this reason that we have focused on the ritual performance
of Warlpiri women from the Tanami Desert; we argue that urban audiences
are encouraged to read the symbolic landscape of spiritual renewal through
the Warlpiri performing bodies. It no longer becomes necessary to
undertake the journey to the red centre, which in Lattas’s terms is the site
of the Australian postmodern pilgrimage, because the centre has been
translocated to the periphery of the coastal cities. Before we can comment
further on this symbolic transaction, we must explore the meanings that the
sacred dances hold for the Warlpiri and how they fit within the kinship
structure and the system of ritual ownership.
Yawulyu are an expression of Warlpiri women’s Jukurrpa or Dreaming.
The term Jukurrpa can apply to ‘individual ancestral beings, or to any
manifestation of their power and nature, i.e. knowledge of their travels and
activities, rituals, designs, songs, places, ceremonies’ (Laughren et al.
1999). The Jukurrpa provides the ‘Law’ for all human and non-human
activity and, because it is not fixed in any temporal sense, it is conceived
as a continual living presence. In Yawulyu, the ancestors from the Jukurrpa
stories are represented: the ritual performances involve songs composed in
couplets, highly codified movements, and the painting of kuruwarri, or
sacred design, on ceremonial objects, the rock face, or ground, and the
upper bodies of the dancers – particularly the breasts and shoulders. A
cycle of songs is usually sung by women as they paint the intricate
‘designs’ on each other’s bodies with ochre in preparation for the dancing.
The ‘designs’ are a significant aspect of the story or stories being told.
Performance of Yawulyu is strictly controlled through the Warlpiri
kinship system, explained here by Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi:
The Warlpiri kinship system determines how people – and which

particular people – may or may not interact with one another. It
determines our obligations to others and our relationships to others. It
determines whom we can marry. It also determines what designs we
are allowed to paint on our bodies, what stories we can tell, what
dances we can do, what songs we are allowed to sing. Problems arise
when people attempt to operate outside this system. The kinship
system is too complicated to explain in depth like this – it takes
Warlpiri people a lifetime to learn – but I’d like to explain a little bit
about it.
There are eight skin names in the Warlpiri kinship system:
Nungarrayi/Jungarrayi
Napaljarri/Japaljarri
Napurrurla/Japurrurla
Nakamarra/Jakamarra
Nangala/Jangala
Nampijinpa/Jampijinpa
Napanangka/Japanangka
Napangardi/Japangardi
. . . I’m a woman of the Nungarrayi skin-group. The skin names

starting with ‘N’ are all female. The names starting with ‘J’ are all
men. Nungarrayi/Jungarrayi, they’re sisters and brothers; Napaljarri/

Japaljarri, they’re sisters and brothers; and so on.
Mothers and daughters are in two groups and they cycle four times.
Starting with Nakamarra, as an example, her daughters are
Nungarrayi. Nungarrayi, her daughters are Nampijinpa; and her
daughters are Napanangka; and her daughters are Nakamarra. And the
other group, for instance starting with Napaljarri, her daughters are
Napurrurla; and her daughters are Napangardi; and her daughters are
Nangala. See, it cycles four times. So, we know who [our] mothers
are. On our father’s side, there are four groups that cycle twice.
Jungarrayi, his son is Japaljarri, whose son is Jungarrayi, and so on. It
cycles twice. Japurrurla and Jakamarra. Jangala and Jampijinpa.
Japanangka and Japangardi. Fathers and sons.
(Herbert Nungarrayi 1995: 14–15)
The kinship system determines access to ritual knowledge: it gives each

woman in the community the right to perform particular Yawulyu, paint
specific designs, and tell selected Jukurrpa stories. There are two forms of
ownership or management of ritual:
For each Yawulyu re-enactment of a particular Jukurrpa, Warlpiri

women are either kirda or kurdungurlu. Kirda are owners or bosses
related to a particular tract of country or place and therefore to a
particular dreaming from their father’s side. Kurdungurlu are the
guardians or stage managers or ‘directors’ of the country or dreaming
from their mother’s side. Both kirda and kurdungurlu must be present
to properly enact the Yawulyu. The kurdungurlu woman paints her
Jukurrpa designs onto the body of the woman who is kirda for that
dreaming, singing while she paints. Sometimes the women paint all
day, sing all day, for a ceremony. Then, the kirda begin to dance. The
kurdungurlu, who are guardians of that dreaming, act like ‘stage
managers’ or ‘directors’. They are responsible for the correct
enactment of the ceremony and may, at any time, stop the ceremony
or insist it is enacted another way. If the kurdungurlu think that the
kirda are performing any part of the ceremony incorrectly, they can
tell them off, or move them around, or intervene in the ceremony in
any way they wish.
(Herbert Nungarrayi 1995: 17)
This doubling of responsibility between the kirda and the kurdungurlu is

of vital importance in any discussion of ritual translocation: it operates as
a system of checks and balances ensuring that the ritual retains its essential
character. The structural relationship between the kirda and the
kurdungurlu ensures that ritual responsibility is dialogic and is
continuously renegotiated as part of the practice of ceremony. It has
assisted the Warlpiri in their resistance to the pressures from the dominant
commodity culture of Australia to reify ritual inheritance into individual
private property.21
Performing for kardiya
Yawulyu have been performed in city locations in front of kardiya, or white

Australians, since the mid-1970s. The first invitations came from kardiya
in Adelaide and were linked to the establishment of the Yuendumu
Women’s Museum designed, not for the display, but for the preservation of
ritual objects. Prior to settlement living, these objects painted with juju, the
powerful sacred designs, were kept in bough shelters or put up in the trees,
but there were no appropriate places to store them in Yuendumu and they
were being damaged by the weather. Judy Granites Nampijinpa and Darby
Ross Jampijinpa were sent to Adelaide to speak on behalf of the
community:
We asked them to take pity on us because all our sacred objects were
in humpies and the water was getting in and damaging them. If they
gave us the buildings, we said we would teach white people and try to
make them wise by putting [on our designs] and dancing. So the white
people, in good faith, promised us, ‘We will give you the buildings so
you can place your dangerous and sacred things – the important
dreamings – inside where they will be protected from the rain.’
We decided to ask the white people to come to the opening of the new
buildings and lots of white people came in a big plane. The visitors all
put money into the parraja and came inside our building to look at the
kuruwarri, and we began to dance. We were carrying the designs:
Nampijinpa and Napanangka carrying our designs, and then
Nakamarra and Napurrurla with their designs. The visitors said the
dancing was very good. Some time later they rang us up and said,
‘Hey, if you get ready we’ll give you a grant to come to Adelaide’, they
paid for the train and we went, men and women, to Adelaide to dance.
(Granites Nampijinpa, interview 1998)
This first performance tour of the Yuendumu Warlpiri to major Australian

cities occurred in the early 1970s and was organised through the South
Australian Museum. It proved to be the first of many such trips around the
country. Through the Women’s Museum and, in later years, the Yuendumu
Women’s Centre and Warlukurlangu Art Gallery, numerous invitations to
dance Yawulyu have been received from Darwin, Alice Springs,
Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Sydney. In Judy Granites Nampijinpa’s
account of the opening of the Women’s Museum, most of the themes that
occur in the descriptions of these subsequent tours are present: the Yawulyu
are performed in the correct sequence by their traditional owners; the
performance is intended to educate white Australians and is exchanged for
a pre-negotiated fee; the audience is perceived to be appreciative and
compliments the dancers on their skills; and details of the itinerary and the
mode of transport are important aspects of the narrative.
It is impossible to do justice to the scope and range of the Yawulyu
performed in urban Australia during the past 25 years. In an attempt to give
readers some understanding of this performance tradition, we shall take a
detailed look at just one of the Yawulyu that has been toured all over the
country. Jorna Nelson Napurrurla and her sister, Peggy Poulson
Napurrurla, are kirda for a Yawulyu based on the Jukurrpa of the
caterpillar, the big yam, and the little yam. Their Yawulyu concerns a battle
between the little yam (ngarlajiyi) people from Wapurtarli and the big yam
(yarla) people from Yumurrpa, which ends when the leaders of the two
armies, realising that further carnage is pointless, agree to a peace. It is this
resolution, together with the possibilities of healing that emerge after the
battle, that lies at the core of the Jukurrpa. The point of reconciliation
between the two leaders is told here by Liddy Nelson Nakamarra, who, as
a father’s sister, shares this dreaming with her classificatory nieces, the
Napurrurlas:
Then the two fathers of their people, those two, the two elders sat down
to fight each other, the two most important men, Ngardilpi and
Wapurtarli, big yam and little yam.
Plate 8 Warlpiri women painting up for performance, 1998. Photo repro-
duced with the permission of Dolly Daniels Nampijinpa. Photo
credit: Kate Ferry.
Threateningly they sat down. Savagely they wounded each other,

savagely they wounded each other.
At the same time many of the others killed each other, many, many of
the other people killed each other in this way, in this way at that time.
Many others continued to defend themselves by warding off the
blows, they warded off the blows.
The two drew close to each other in order to make peace. They are the
two who still stand there, one to the south, one to the north. They truly
still stand there. . . . That is a very sacred place. In fact, it is a secret
place.
(cited in Rockman Napaljarri and Cataldi 1994: 109)
In the account of their performance tour of five major Australian cities,

Jorna Nelson Napurrurla explained that they took with them ‘that very big
country, that very big dreaming in which they fought each other’, and that
they carried the big yam, the little yam, and the caterpillar ‘like relatives’.22
She emphasised that Napurrurla and Nakamarra are the only people
entitled to carry these dreamings. In response to questions concerning the
performances she replied that the audiences particularly liked the little
yam dance, and that ‘we were very happy and we didn’t get nervous. The
white people didn’t make us frightened. We danced very strongly, we kept
our kuruwarri designs very strongly . . . and we will go on dancing like this
forever.’
Despite the overriding importance of place in Warlpiri culture, the
Napurrurlas do not perceive it as contradictory to perform Yawulyu outside
their country.23 They believe that they carry their Jukurrpa to the urban
centres of Australia and that their land travels metonymically with them.
Performing to non-indigenous Australians is a statement of cultural
assertion, not a debasement or corruption of culture, but the efficacy of the
ritual may shift according to place. When the big yam and little yam is
performed in Warlpiri country, the power of the kuruwarri enters the earth
and makes the plants grow. Peggy Poulson Napurrurla explains:
We sing the song and the designs. . . . It goes in and from underneath it
comes back up. The plant grows, it appears as the plant, little yam
plant with baby leaves, the little yam and the little green shoots – then
the plant and everything grows up and the same for the big yam. We
recognise the whole thing. We recognise the whole dreaming.
In an urban context, the power of the ritual shifts and is felt within the
people. Wendy Nungarrayi, who is kurdungurlu for the Napurrurlas,
explains: ‘as a result of the dreaming, after the dance, as the designs wear
off on the body, it is good for people and makes them happy . . . they feel
happy.’ ‘Yes that’s right,’ echoes Peggy, ‘they become happy, the people
who belong to the designs and the dreamings become happy.’
The decision to perform the battle of the big yam and little yam is never
made by the Napurrurlas in isolation. The choice of Yawulyu may be pre-
determined by the composition of the touring group, but the precise
elements of the performance must be negotiated, as Oldfield Napaljarri
explains: ‘the kurdungurlu tell the kirda what they can and can’t dance in
any given situation.’ Jukurrpa frame the Yawulyu, but the precise dance
sequences, songs, and designs are metonymic to the story, and it is possible
to select different elements for each performance. This selection process is
based on the nature of the event and the composition of the audience: the
Yawulyu contain many elements that can be viewed by the uninitiated, but
the sacred and powerful elements must be removed before the Yawulyu can
be performed in front of kardiya.
A clear instance of this process of selective censorship is evident in the
description by Lucy Kennedy Napaljarri, a classificatory mother to the
Napurrurlas, of a Sydney performance of a Yawulyu based on the Ngarlu
Jukurrpa. As a major owner of this Jukurrpa, Lucy Kennedy Napaljarri
describes it as ‘a very big story. It’s not a lukewarm story this one, it is [a]
very important one and belongs to my grandfathers and my father’s sisters.
My aunties taught me, and we learnt it with our ears in the Warlpiri way.’
In the story, a man seduces a woman from the east by singing ‘a love song
while spinning hair and the hair spins out from the spindle and follows the
woman’ and draws her back to him. The seduction described in the story
involves a liaison between incompatible skin partners and acts as a
warning against sexual transgression. The love song, or yilpinji, that
accompanies the Ngarlu Yawulyu is considered extremely powerful, and,
while men may watch the dance from a distance, to hear the song would
‘make them feel bad in their stomachs’. For this reason the yilpinji was not
sung at an open-air performance in Sydney.
Despite the exclusion of sacred or powerful elements from the Yawulyu,
the majority of the women we interviewed were adamant that the
performances they give in Australian cities are essentially the same as
those given within a traditional context. According to Kay Ross Napaljarri,

the dancers ‘hold’ the landscape,
when they get into the dreaming, and they are singing. The actual
country may be invisible, but they can still see it. They hear it in the
ears, in the singing, and in the paint . . . the paint takes them towards
their country.
On a personal level, the Warlpiri clearly enjoy the experience of touring

and seeing other people’s country. Dolly Daniels Nampijinpa explains:
‘I’m a proud woman when I travel. I felt well in my spirit. It made me
happy. I liked seeing different places.’ In Lajamanu, where there is less
opportunity to travel, the prospect of touring is even more welcome: ‘We
are very keen to go to places,’ explains Liddy Nelson Nakamarra. ‘We’re
very keen to travel taking the dances. If white people talk to us, and invite
us, we are happy to go.’ Maisie Napangardi expresses a strong desire to see
kardiya and yapa (Warlpiri) working together and sharing cultures:
We are very happy to show you everything, and maybe you will be
happy too, when this happens. We will all be together: if we show you
these things then we will become one. We are quite happy to show our
things to Aboriginal and white people, we say to people if you want to
show us your things we will show you ours.
The attitude of Maisie Napangardi is not typical and the women in

Yuendumu are more reserved. They emphasise the importance of cultural
exchange as a means of educating kardiya and share their knowledge in the
hope that non-indigenous Australians will respect and understand their
history and become, as Ross Napaljarri phrased it, ‘more pleasant – more
friendly’. But do they? It is time to turn to the other half of the intercultural
exchange in the Australian cities and explore the symbolic meanings
attributed to the Warlpiri performances by non-indigenous audiences.
Urban symbols
The Warlpiri women are clearly aware of the symbolic value of their
performances and negotiate their fees accordingly. The contexts within
which they perform ensure that the audience is respectful, appreciative,

and invests the Yawulyu with symbolic significance, even if it is at variance
with traditional meanings. Our interest in the symbolic value of the
Warlpiri performance is in terms of the overriding contextualisation of
these performances as signs that legitimise the state. Warlpiri women are
invited to open things. Between them, the women we interviewed in
Lajamanu and Yuendumu had performed at the openings of buildings or
exhibitions connected with the following state institutions: Araluen Arts
Centre and Yirara College in Alice Springs; the Parliament House,
Northern Territory University, the Art Gallery, and the New Court House
in Darwin; Tandanya Arts Centre and the South Australian Museum in
Adelaide; and the Museum of Sydney. The concept of opening an
important site is not foreign to the Warlpiri: they describe the process of all
ceremonies as the opening of the Jukurrpa. The irony is that the Warlpiri,
who have never reified their culture by building edifices, provide the
ceremonies that legitimise the physical symbols of the culture that has
appropriated their land.
The positioning of the Yawulyu as rituals to mark moments of civic pride
and community celebration places the Warlpiri in the role of celebrants
who bless or consecrate symbols of nationhood. They provide these
institutions with a sense of history and invest them with legitimacy as the
cultural, legal, and political representatives of the people. In a country in
which the founding principle of colonisation is still so contested and the
process of reconciliation has hardly begun, the inclusion of Yawulyu within
civic ceremony creates an illusion of social harmony. In addition, it
provides a picture of an uninterrupted history, in which the Warlpiri
women are cast as representatives of the past while the opening of the civic
building indicates progress and the future. Within this narrative, it is
possible for the Warlpiri women and the Yawulyu to stand for a common
ancestral past for the non-indigenous multicultural population. This sense
of a historical continuum is only possible in a country in which the popular
imaginary contains associative paths, established by psychoanalytic and
evolutionary theory, linking the indigenous population with the evolution
of the human species (Freud 1938: 15). In his analysis of the most recent
manifestations of cultural ‘ventriloquism’, Lattas suggests that Aboriginal
imagery has been used by the state as a symbol of unity to ward off
anxieties associated with multiculturalism and its potential for ‘ethnic and
linguistic divisions created by immigration’ (Lattas 1990: 60).
The real contradiction exists not between the performers and the
audience, but between the performers and the state. The Warlpiri are
trapped within this double bind: in their efforts to educate non-indigenous
Australians, they inadvertently legitimise a state that is denying them land
rights, and by denying them these rights, it denies them the collective rights
to the autonomy of their culture.
Yawulyu are not just performed for kardiya; they are also performed
outside the commodification of the marketplace, through a system of
cultural exchange between indigenous clans. The importance of these
intercultural sites lies in their contemporary relevance as a living ritual
practice by and for women. They maintain a pedagogic function, but hold
none of the restrictions or dangers we have identified in the translocations
of ritual performances to the urban centres. In this context of ritual
exchange, in a sex-segregated environment, elements of the Yawulyu that
would never be shown in the urban centres become part of the
performance. The sharing of sacred and important ritual knowledge
among indigenous women is the key function of the meetings. It is for this
reason that it is not possible for us to provide readers with any information
about the organisation or nature of these events. Certain practices still exist
outside the boundaries of the postmodern marketplace. Ritual
performances may be threatened with reification through the process of
commodification, but the traditions themselves cannot be reduced to
museum artefacts: they are dynamic and changing phenomena.
CONCLUSION
Clear parallels exist in the stated objectives of the ritual performers that we
have considered in this chapter. The Warlpiri women and the company of
Korean shaman led by Kim Kum hwa share a pedagogic intention with
respect to their urban Australian audiences: they perform with the clear
purpose of educating audiences to respect and appreciate the richness of
their cultures and belief systems. They also perceive their audiences as
influential. If Kim Kum hwa is to succeed in raising the status of
shamanism as a formal religion in Korea, she needs an international

profile; if the Warlpiri are to succeed in their wider political struggle for
self-determination, they need the support of non-indigenous Australians.
Although the desire to educate is predominant, these performers are aware
of the financial value of their rituals and negotiate fees that reflect not only
the symbolic but also the spiritual value of the Kut and Yawulyu. When
conflict does occur between the performers and the tour organisers, it is
frequently linked to financial disputes. The Warlpiri include in their worst
touring experiences confusions over contractual arrangements, and some
of the older members of Kim Kum hwa’s company complained that their
Australian performance fees undervalued the spiritual efficacy of the Kut.
There is a clear disjunction between the intentions of the artists and the
audience expectations, yet for both parties the actual performance is
perceived as satisfactory. It is this contradiction that lies at the heart of this
intercultural site. On the one hand, it appears that an intercultural
performance can operate at a satisfactory level even when the meanings
derived by the one culture have little to do with the meanings invested by
the other. On the other hand, it is possible that a subtle shift in these
divergent perspectives occurs during the ritual because of the nature of live
performance. In a sense, the strategies of the Warlpiri and the Korean
shaman are predicated on this assumption: if they familiarise audiences
with the realities of their cultural and spiritual practices, they can
undermine the more damaging projections that tie them into an imaginary
binary relation with Australian urban culture. It is comparatively easy for
a void or lack to be filled by an unfamiliar and exotic ‘other’ – all that is
required is a simple act of projection - but familiarity erodes the ability of
the exotic ‘other’ to carry these imaginary constructions. By familiarising
audiences with the realities of the Kut and Yawulyu, it may be possible to
increase respect for these cultural practices. But this is a dangerous game:
the adaptations necessary to cater for the needs of the urban Australian
audience involve the commodification of spiritual practice. If the
performance is to be accessible to a general audience with little or no
knowledge of the traditional ritual context, it must be edited to emphasise
spectacle and must conform to numerous time and venue constraints.
These demands threaten to compromise ritual practice, yet the Korean
shaman and the Warlpiri women vehemently deny that this has occurred.
They consider themselves to be in total control of the adaptation process
and place their confidence in their gods or ancestors: as long as they

perform with sincerity and maintain their spiritual energy, they believe that
the essential core of the ritual remains strong.
We have argued that the Kut was marketed to Australian audiences as a
postmodern product that could fill an imaginary spiritual lack for the price
of a theatre ticket. Framed by this expectation and mode of consumption,
it is hardly surprising that the reviews reflected some dissatisfaction with
the experience. The spiritual content of the Kut was manifest in the
physical ordeals enacted by the shaman, but these performance elements
were reported as if they were fairground spectacles. On an intersubjective
level, the shaman remained an exoticised ‘other’ engaging in an
incomprehensible rite. Individuals within the audience may have
increased their understanding of Korean shamanism by witnessing the
performance, but their relation to the event remained culturally
voyeuristic. The identity space inhabited by the audience was reaffirmed
in its difference, rather than altered by this encounter with a translocated
ritual.
In contrast, a shift in subjectivity does seem to accompany performances
of Yawulyu. These indigenous rituals are consumed outside the
conventional venues associated with live performance in Australia, and
are framed by moments of civic pride. They are re-inscribed by the social
context to act as a symbol of national unity. To this extent the Yawulyu fit
within our genre of ‘performances in the service of the state’ because the
audience identity space shifts to embrace a national imaginary in which the
indigenous population function as common ancestors. It is clearly not the
intention of the performers that the Yawulyu function as a building block
for the corporate cultural identity of Australian citizens, but they cannot
control this process of ventriloquism that results in their symbolic
incorporation.
In our next two chapters, we move away from the larger issues relating
to theatre (narrative and ritual) to explore tropes more directly associated
with performance: space and bodies. Chapter 3 addresses space in the form
of theatre space as well as the more metaphoric and public cultural space.
We explore a different register of loss that is frequently ascribed to the
postcolonial subject: the loss of space, land, and territory that finds both a
literal and symbolic expression in the concept of home. From such
constructions of space we begin to draw conclusions regarding the
structuring of personal identity spaces.
Chapter 3
Layering space
Staging and remembering ‘home’
A culture never repeats itself perfectly away from home.

(Young 1995: 174)
[M]odern drama at first employs, as one of its foundational discourses, a

vague, culturally determined symbology of home, replete with all those
powerful and empowering associations to space as are organized by the
notion of belonging.
(Chaudhuri 1995: xii)
I was homesick with nowhere to go. . . . The place that I missed

sometimes seemed like a memory of childhood, though it was not a
childish place. It was a place of mutuality, companionship, creativity,
sensuousness, easiness in the body, curiosity in what new things might
be making in the world, hope from that curiosity, safety, and love.
(Pratt 1984: 24)
In Chapters 1 and 2 we considered the ways in which public and private

spaces associated with motherhood and loss provide a useful model for
analysing intercultural translations and adaptations of narrative and ritual.
This chapter focuses on the specific materiality of space in theatre. Our aim
here is to define the public/private dichotomy in terms of real space and
imaginary space, especially in the context of ‘home’ space: both the
private home and the more ‘public’ home of geo-political space to which
one feels allied. While the construction of identity spaces has been central
to the first two chapters, the exploration in this chapter focuses on a
different approach to identity formation, based on several interpretations
of ‘home’. Charting geo-political and personal home spaces in theatre is
the objective of this chapter, rather than providing an economic or feminist

subversion of ‘home’ as a restrictive domain for women. In their
explorations of these spaces, the plays that we consider in this chapter
provide a journey back to a place that was once ‘home’ (for both the
protagonists and the playwrights), as well as travelling forward to forge a
new home that incorporates several intercultural spatial spheres.
‘Home’ is, of course, an immense category, so we have limited its
parameters to postcolonial homecomings in/to Africa. As we illustrate
later in this chapter, postcoloniality is one of the most intercultural of sites
in social, cultural, and geo-political discourses, even if the substantial
power imbalances that colonialism generated cause the intercultural
nature of postcoloniality to remain largely unacknowledged. Many of the
strategies that former colonies choose to counteract the effects of
colonialism include distinctly intercultural techniques, such as the use of
cultural hybridities and the rupturing of boundaries (such as those of
geography, politics, and identity). Our focus on Africa in this chapter not
only helps to restrict our analysis further, but also reinforces the legacy that
Africa holds in colonial and intercultural histories. Explorations of
‘darkest Africa’ – and the continent’s subsequent ‘settlement’ – were
ostensible triumphs of European imperialism. Africa remains one of the
sites that have been particularly popular among European practitioners
seeking intercultural material (whether on the basis of a committed
interchange or an appropriative exchange).1 We look at plays specifically
located in Africa in which women return from another continent or from
another part of Africa, and in which the space of the maternal body is
correlated with theatrical space and with the return home: The Dilemma of
a Ghost (1965) by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo; You Have Come Back
(1988) by Algerian playwright Fatima GallaireBourega; and Have You
Seen Zandile? (1986) by the South African artists Gcina Mhlope, Maralin
Vanrenen, and Thembi Mtshali. Each play considers some of the difficult
historical and current political realities for women in Africa and in the
African diaspora.
This chapter works towards an account of the spatialisation of personal/
cultural memory in an intercultural context. We investigate three main
types of space: location space (or the play’s setting), theatre space
(architecture and production design), and geo-political space (determined
by narrative). As we shall see, however, these spatial dimensions are
insufficient for an analysis of intercultural space. As a result, we also
Layering space 89
consider the place of spaces that have no physical location but nevertheless
determine one’s surroundings and even one’s identity. To that end, we
move from real space (geo-political and architectural) to an imaginary
spatial construct (triggered by metaphor or metonymy). This chapter is
itself a journey through the layers of space articulated by the language and
the performance of these plays. We attempt to offer a more deliberate
analysis of the ways in which space determines the nature of intercultural
encounters and the ways in which space can be manipulated in intercultural
performance. First, we must address the composition of space itself.
CONSTRUCTIONS OF SPACE
The construction of space in culture (and theatre) helps to determine social

systems of meaning and representation. In one of the most basic and
insightful arguments about spatiality, Michel de Certeau asserts that
‘[s]patial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of
social life’ (de Certeau 1984: 96).2 One need only consider the effect of
various architectural designs – including the architecture of theatre
buildings – to understand how the organisation of space governs social
existence. To demonstrate the particularities and types of space, Edward
Soja breaks down spatiality into a tripartite interrelationship which
provides a formula for understanding the components of space: social,
physical, and mental (Soja 1989: 120). These components helpfully
delineate the more specific uses of theatrical space wherein theatre as
social space encompasses both the physicality of the theatre building and
the mental spaces by which the audience structures meaning. Such mental
spaces are constructed by means of metonymic associations primarily
from the language of the text and, secondarily, from associations generated
by the performance text.
Space is frequently considered to be elusive and even empty, making it
extremely difficult to define with any finality. We can, however, consider
how space structures social reality and meaning, particularly where the
meanings that it constructs reflect a dominant ideology. It is more difficult
to perceive how alternative or marginal ideological formations are
excluded through spatial determinants. Developing this perceptual sense
is part of the project of contemporary feminist and postcolonial theories –
to name just two – which highlight the socially constructed ways in which
space restricts women and/or colonised subjects.
Ironically, while space may be structured in such a way as to exclude
women, it has also come to be associated with women. Space’s definitional
association with women has resulted partly from the general hegemonic
perception that space is passive and less dynamic than the ostensibly
masculine action in or on space, and partly from the creative maternal
potential of the womb, as a reproductive space within women’s bodies.3
Sue Best explains the recurring metaphor thus:
The female body delivers a conception of bounded mappable space,

space which can still be understood as a totality even if it is internally
fractured or carved up. Recourse to the female body in this example
seems to deliver and secure the idea of space as still a bounded entity,
still a sort of container.
(Best 1995: 184)
The enclosed maternal body thus overlaps with the enclosed material
theatre space which is also frequently depicted as a container. Our analysis
combines these two notions of enclosure: spaces identified with women
merge with theatrical space (the space that is generated by the imagination
of the playwright, the concepts of the designers and directors, and the
spatial associations of the audience) and with theatre space (the theatre
building and its location in a social context).
While they share a common cultural delimitation of space, at the very
point of sharing a representation of enclosure, maternal space and
theatrical space also raise questions about the dominant symbols
associated with the maternal body as enclosing. In the maternal body, such
boundaries are problematic in a different way. Best points to the dilemma
in using a metaphorised female body to signify space.
[F]eminizing space seems to suggest, on the one hand, the production

of a safe, familiar, clearly defined entity, which, because it is female,
should be appropriately docile or able to be dominated. But, on the
other hand, this very same production also underscores an anxiety
about this ‘entity’ and the precariousness of its boundedness.
(ibid.: 183)
Layering space 91
The ‘precariousness of its boundedness’ does not diminish its metaphoric

value: rather, the anxiety associated with its use can serve to destabilise the
docility apparently attached to the image of women.
This imbrication of the space of the body with the space of the theatre
offers a potential intercultural meeting point for women from different
cultures who come together in a theatre building. This is not to say that the
space of the maternal body (or how that space is represented) will mean the
same thing to all women, regardless of their cultural backgrounds.
Certainly definitions of theatre space – and the accounting for time and
space within that building – also vary widely from culture to culture.
Rather, it is to say that at an intercultural meeting point, women from two
different cultures at least are likely to have an understanding of how the
maternal space intersects with the theatrical space in their own cultures.
From this point of encounter, each culture can begin to understand how the
other culture structures personal and public space: this is a first step
towards working within the spatial dynamic of another’s culture.4
The next four sections discuss the intersecting real, imaginative,
symbolic, and ‘theatre’ approaches to space, using You Have Come Back,
The Dilemma of a Ghost, and Have You Seen Zandile? as illustrations. In
focusing on these specific spaces, this analysis attempts to offer a
phenomenological understanding of space in intercultural performance in
order to reinforce how spatial dynamics can structure the intercultural
encounter.
Real space: colonial displacements

and postcolonial homecomings
Real space in the theatre, the space commonly associated with a
performance’s setting, its socio-political context, and its author’s/
company’s context, is the principal way in which audiences understand
performance in the context of the outside world.
Geo-political space and its ‘imaginary’ effects

One of the most important real spaces underlying the plays considered here
is the complex socio-political ‘real space’ of decolonisation. The
postcolonial contestation of territorialisation is itself an intersecting and
overlaying spatial concept, as Robert Young has described (Young 1995:

173–4).5 Colonialism has always been about intercultural exchange,
although the imposition of colonial rule over a population hardly creates
the basis for an equitable exchange. Colonialism’s cross-cultural
encounter frequently resulted in a cultural double-cross, with the colonised
culture duped or forced into relinquishing to the colonisers their cultural
autonomy and political self-determination. Postcolonialism, defined as
any type of resistance to colonialism that colonised peoples have mounted,
is circumscribed by a specific contest for literal and metaphoric space.
Postcolonialism’s direct strategy of redressing colonial spatial
organisation – the ‘discovery’, mapping, bordering, and carving-up of the
world from about the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries – provides
an alternative to marked, bounded, defined colonial space. This site of
intercultural tension is central in the ongoing negotiation between an
invading culture and a pre-existing culture.6
The postcolonial context we are concerned with here is the return to
Africa popularised by the ‘roots’ metaphor (primarily associated with the
African-American diaspora), in which descendants of African slaves
return to Africa to search for their ancestral roots. There have been
numerous ‘back to Africa’ movements in the US, the Caribbean, and
elsewhere, which have variously promulgated the importance of returning
to Africa permanently as a means of correcting the disruption and
destruction caused by the colonial spatial and political enterprise.
Frequently, such movements disintegrate when they mount literal returns
to Africa only to find that the continent (whether as a whole or a more
specific location within Africa) proves not to be the (impossible) idyllic
homeland.
Intercultural plays that generate an encounter between an African
country and another location invariably confront the all-pervasive western
cultural imaginary that figures ‘Africa’ as the ‘dark continent’, the
repository of the primitive and the dangerous, and/or the originary space
from which homo sapiens as a species is thought to have emerged. The
Orientalist imaginary of Africa provided – as any cultural imaginary does
– all the possible signifiers for European deployment or consumption,
regardless of their stereotypic qualities or even their veracity. For example,
early twentieth-century theatre artists ‘translated’ the popularity of
‘primitive’ African art and images into an originary moment for
contemporary intercultural theatre. The African continent is, of course,
Layering space 93
composed of numerous discrete countries, cultures, and languages,

rendering a reading of a unified ‘Africa’ virtually impossible.7 Afro-
American or Afro-Caribbean movements to reclaim the idea and
imaginative space of ‘Africa’ must also acknowledge the effects of such
mythification of the continent.
One of the enduring legacies of Africa’s function as an imaginary space
from which westerners mine symbolic signifiers is the figure of Mother
Africa, encapsulating an idealised version of women as culturally
regenerative but passive. The plays that we assess here retain a sense of the
rich images of the matrilineal tradition, but they contest the validity of
‘Mother Africa’, the overarching category that attempts to define women
according to a static and idealistic model.8 The artists we examine here
attempt to re-work creative space through a female line. This is, however,
quite a different activity from creating often limited and stereo-typed
symbols of a nation or assuming that women act as agents of the land or as
mother earth figures. While The Dilemma of a Ghost addresses the
‘Mother Africa’ image most overtly, Have You Seen Zandile? also focuses
on mother figures – including the struggle between competing mothers.
You Have Come Back takes place in Algeria, where, not surprisingly, the
role of mothers in the strict Islamic world of this play differs from their
representations in the other two plays. In all the plays, women endeavour
to re-assess motherhood and national space in female-centred contexts.
One of the effects of this re-assessment is that they also raise questions
about the ways in which restricted space is regulated.
The plays
We briefly outline the plays’ narratives and the political contexts of their
home spaces here.
Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost concerns the return of American
descendants of slaves to Africa. Eulalie Rush marries Ato Yawson, a
Ghanaian student studying in New York, and returns with him to Ghana
when they graduate. Her naïve expectations of Africa are not met, and the
expectations that Ato’s family has of both young people are also
unfulfilled. The play takes place over the course of about a year at the
family’s rural clan house which the couple visits for festivals and holidays
from their apartment in Accra. After a year passes and no children are
produced, the family decides to perform a ceremony on Eulalie’s stomach
to ensure fertility, ignorant of the fact that the couple has been practising
birth control. Ato finally reveals this news to his stunned family, who
(bearing in mind that the play is set in the 1960s) cannot believe that a
couple could possibly control fertility, let alone wish to. Both the family
and Eulalie are shocked by the inadequacy of Ato’s explanations and his
lack of concern. The play concludes with the possibility of a reconciliation
between Eulalie and her mother-in-law, once they both realise that they
must work around, not through, Ato. As the title suggests, the play is in the
mode of a Ghanaian ‘dilemma play’ which offers several different
perspectives on a particular issue, leaving it up to the audience to ‘solve’
the dilemma for themselves.
Gallaire-Bourega’s You Have Come Back addresses the legacy of
religious and sexist bigotry that has followed Algeria’s 1962 independence
from France. As a country on the northern edge of Africa, Algeria has been
more heavily influenced by other cultures and religions than central and
southern African nations. Independent Algeria has been dogged by
conflict between secular and Islamic forces,9 and Gallaire-Bourega’s play
is firmly positioned within a secular discourse. The play uses this political
backdrop to highlight the disjunction between birth and adopted cultures.
It begins as another text working in the standard ‘return-home’ genre:
having moved from the periphery to the imperial centre, the post-colonial
artist visits home for the first time in years. Lella returns from France to
visit her country of birth shortly after her father’s death. Bearing heavy
suitcases and wearing western dress, Lella has long since left Algeria,
making a happy life in France with her non-Islamic, French husband. Lella
and the younger women who welcome her recall old times when they were
children. Then the elder women enter the courtyard and pronounce a harsh
judgement on Lella for abandoning her religion. Lella does not heed the
warnings that a number of sympathetic people try to give her; as a
consequence, she and these few supporters are brutally beaten to death by
the community’s female elders. Acting on behalf of the men in the
community, the female elders carry out these murders to honour her
father’s last wish for her death because of her apparent betrayal of her
religion. Lella’s father’s wish is sweetened by his will, which stipulates
that his fortune will be left to the community once this dying wish is
realised. The play concludes with order apparently restored as the
muezzin’s call to prayer is heard: the home culture rejects the attempted
intercultural encounter.
Layering space 95
Have You Seen Zandile? is a play for two actors which considers the
spatial manifestations of a variety of social divisions within the cultures
that formed apartheid South Africa. The play describes a conflict between
several South African women about who will care for a young girl,
Zandile. The rift occurs when they disagree about where and by whom
Zandile ought to be raised: her mother in rural Transkei or her beloved
grandmother near the distant coastal city of Durban. Each ‘mother’ feels
that she has the rightful claim to the girl. The play begins with Zandile
living happily with her grandmother, Gogo. She is abducted at age 8 by her
mother, whom she hardly knows, and is forced to move to the Transkei
where she is prevented from contacting her grandmother who has no idea
where she is. In the Transkei, where she has to learn farming techniques to
till the poor soil that her mother tends, her future lies in her mother’s hands,
and her mother is preparing to marry her to a traditional, local boy who will
demand Zandile’s subservience. Years later, the adult Zandile manages to
return to Durban only to find that her grandmother, Gogo, has died. Gogo
has kept for Zandile all the gifts that she would have given her, including a
collection of dresses in increasingly large sizes. The play closes with
Zandile weeping over the gifts. We consider this play intercultural because
the two ‘cultures’ in which Zandile lives are vastly different. Apartheid
only recognised culture in terms of colour: white, coloured, and black.
Like colonialism before it, apartheid made a crude division which ignored
the complexity of the cultural diversity within South Africa and this
complexity is exemplified by the two divergent cultural location spaces
and their differing habitus in which Zandile resides. Interestingly, the play
also stages a reversal of the conventional play structure wherein the older
generation upholds traditions and the younger generation embraces
modernity: here, Zandile’s grandmother lives in the city, while her mother
farms in a ‘traditional’ mode.
For an analysis of the spatial dynamics in these plays, these plot outlines
are, as such, insufficient. An account of the plays’ locations space(s) is
necessary to demonstrate how – initially – intercultural space is
constructed in the plays.
Location space
Each play foregrounds the staging of an interculturated journey to a
memory space. We set out a brief description of the location space in each
text before demonstrating how these worlds intersect with one another and
with the operations of the theatrical building. In each case, location space
constructs a sense of physical restriction and confinement that intersects
with the space of imaginary plenitude and the socio-political context of the
plays’ narratives.
In Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, the location space of the play is the
courtyard of the new wing in the large clan home. This courtyard is a
communal family space but Eulalie can only occupy the space when she is
alone. She seems unable to access the communality of the space which, to
her, is as imprisoning as her misguided impressions of Africa and her
already fragile marriage to Ato. The courtyard location reinforces the
historical confusions that Eulalie represents to her in-laws. While Eulalie
finds it impossible to be in the courtyard with the family because she
doesn’t understand their language or their ways, they too find it difficult to
interact spatially with her: Eulalie’s African-American heritage represents
to them the return of the repressed in relation to the slave trade of previous
centuries.
The location space of Gallaire-Bourega’s You Have Come Back is also
created via a courtyard, a deceptively simple space: the play takes place
entirely in the courtyard of Lella’s family home, but this courtyard operates
differently from the courtyard in The Dilemma of a Ghost. This walled,
interior space is the traditional sphere of women. The courtyard’s female
space is ultimately controlled by misogynistic men, but Lella remembers
this space as a safe retreat exclusively for the use of women. The courtyard
is a highly social, female space, but, with its high walls, it also acts as an
imprisoning space: when she returns to the world within the courtyard,
Lella is metaphorically imprisoned by the religious culture of Algeria.
Other types of prisons appear to operate in Have You Seen Zandile? The
play sets up audience expectations that the circumstances of apartheid will
pit white against black, but both the worlds of this play are ‘black worlds’.
Such investigations of African customs and values are rare in apartheid
South African theatre, which characteristically constructed apartheid as
the main (and sometimes the only) antagonist. Apartheid is responsible for
Zandile’s situation because of the travel restrictions and the living/
working arrangements that it erected in order to control blacks by
controlling their movements. The play does not, however, operate only in
Layering space 97
terms of apartheid. The actual location space counterpoints two places: the
more urban Durban and rural Transkei, both of which are depicted with
only the barest of props comprised of suitcases and boxes. When Zandile
is taken by her mother, the place where her grandmother remains is
transformed into a memory space in Zandile’s mind, and the two characters
try to reconnect almost telepathically.
The location spaces contextualise the action, establishing a basis for the
‘real space’ worlds essential to the plays’ narratives. You Have Come Back
and The Dilemma of a Ghost stipulate a closed social space by means of a
fixed location. The courtyard for both plays denotes an enclosed area, but
one that can be ‘realised’ theatrically in a variety of ways that are open
either to extreme naturalism or a more abstract conceptualisation. Have
You Seen Zandile? differs from this model. The minimal props and the
direct address to the audience provide a very limited spatial illusion and
allow the presence of the theatre building to be always readily apparent.
The play relies on the ability of the audience to create spatial locations
metonymically through the two actors’ bodies; this points to the
importance of ‘non-real spaces’ layering with ‘real spaces’. In addition to
‘real spaces’, the audience creates what we call memory spaces by
generating images from the language of the text. We turn next to a more
detailed analysis of such memory spaces so that we can situate an account
of the plays’ uses of imaginary spaces.
Memory space
Since, as de Certeau maintains, humans tend to think in spatial terms, the

imaginative facility for spatial generation is activated within the theatre
experience by numerous associative mechanisms. Imaginary spaces are
created in the minds of the audience through associations of language
(including the body language of the actor), sound, and music. This reliance
on real space and an imaginary spatial dimension is clearer in an account
of postcolonial home-comings and displacements.
As Una Chaudhuri (1995) outlines in her study of space in contemporary
American and British theatre, a preoccupation with home and
homelessness is a part of the late twentieth-century condition. The
definition of home and the consequences of home-lessness in postcolonial
contexts are, however, often substantially exacerbated. Despite their
attempts to recover a pre-contact space, many postcolonial writers are

prevented from living in the spaces in which they or their ancestors were
born. If they are able to return to their ancestral homeland, they are
generally faced with a conflict between at least two competing identity
spaces: the ancestral culture and the contemporary culture in which they
now reside. This conflict can play itself out within the realm of personal
subjectivity. The restricted access to the space of ‘home’ can also have
repercussions for the creative process: in the attempt to write a space for
oneself, postcolonial writers – like those we consider here – frequently turn
to an imaginary space between ‘home’ and homelessness. This imaginary
space has the potential to be significantly empowering in stage practice
when such artists make spaces – or create new spatial dynamics – from the
intercultural amalgamations of postcolonial space. This intruding, multi-
layered space often takes the shape of memory space.
For an even more particular analysis of memory spaces in the context of
‘home’, we draw on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964).
Bachelard explores the place to which we all desire to return, the space that
contains memories of home. His theory of home, ‘topoanalysis’, explains
that most people’s lives are spent, at one level, attempting to recover the
shape, smell, or feel of rooms that they first knew as a child, or even the
comfort of the womb.10 This attempt to recapture the essence of childhood
space is both physical and psychological: one may not find a house or space
that actually does resemble the space of home, but one may eventually be
able to re-create that safe, protected, secret shell for oneself. Memory
space, or space that sparks memories of the past, is ‘space that has been
seized upon by the imagination [and which] cannot remain indifferent
space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor’ (Bachelard
1964: xxxvi). This combination of fixed space and memory space creates
what Bachelard calls ‘the dramatic tension between the aerial and the
terrestrial’ (ibid.: 22). Home and space, then, are physical locations as well
as psychological dimensions. Home space is able to be represented
physically, even if the space being remembered is not itself real but rather
generated by a feeling or sensation. It is literal in that it is tied to the literal
spaces of those locations we have known and lived in. Bachelard’s space
is also crowded: it is complicated by other spaces (even other memory
spaces), many of which impact upon home space. Such a memory of home
Layering space 99
inevitably becomes romanticised and can never be reproduced exactly as

it was, which is precisely Bachelard’s point. This failure to reproduce
completely memory space does not stop memory space operating as a
crucial perspective from which we view our worlds.
How does this occur in the theatre? In the plays that we have chosen, each
playwright uses this search for a memory space as a crucial part of the
narrative: the longing for a lost ‘home’, in the sense of a physical dwelling,
a national or cultural site, and a psychic location of safety and comfort. One
of the most important and recurrent personal and social spaces is the re-
emergence of an imaginary perception of ‘home’, a place that may be
accessible only by means of memory. It is sometimes such imaginary
spaces which provide the sharpest redefinition of personal and social
space. The playwrights explore the spatial contexts of two cultures, usually
attempting to find a space from which to mount a reconciliation – of sorts
– of times, spaces, cultures, and/or homes. Memory space in each of the
plays is figured slightly differently. At times it exists literally in the
location space(s) of the plays, while at other times (e.g. in You Have Come
Back) it is more metaphorically rendered.
Lella’s early childhood memories of home, of life in the courtyard, and
of her long dead mother are happy ones in You Have Come Back. The recent
death of her father makes a return to this world possible because Lella
could not return while he was alive. Lella recalls her memory space easily,
once she returns to the courtyard of her childhood, which her mind fills
with sweet smells and with laughter. For Lella’s memory spaces, the walls
of the courtyard present no encumbrance: everything she needs is within
these walls. She wants a life that continues to hold laughter, but one of the
elders is anxious to destroy this space by proclaiming, ‘Love? Joy? What
do these have to do with life? Life is misfortune and oppression, constraint,
servility, and despair. . . . We do not speak the same language. You have
abandoned our tongue and adopted the foreigners’ (Gallaire-Bourega
1988: 204). Lella’s pleasure at returning to the memory space of her home
blinds her to the dangers that the courtyard now holds.
Like Lella, Eulalie has expectations of a pleasant memory space which
is substantially compromised. In The Dilemma of a Ghost, Eulalie’s
memory space of her own childhood is presented as a place where she felt
that she belonged. This space is dominated by memories of her dead
mother who supported her intellectual endeavours. It is staged spatially by

means of the courtyard in the new wing of the clan house where ceremonies
are held and where Eulalie spends most of her time. She does not, however,
join the family for ceremonies in the courtyard: whenever they are present,
she is conspicuously absent. Her presence in the courtyard is primarily
connected to the sense of belonging she experienced with her own mother
and that she expects to feel in her idealised view of ‘Africa’. Eulalie
believes that she can recover this nurturing memory space in the physical
location of Africa, the place she believes to be her primordial home and the
place to which she has a historical connection through her slave ancestors.
Since her own mother is dead, she asks her husband if his mother can ‘be
sort of my Ma too?’ (Aidoo 1965: 3). She assumes that the memory space
occupied by her dead mother can be augmented by a new, living
relationship with Ato’s mother, but the two women speak different
languages and seem unable to interact on any level. She is, of course,
disappointed with the reality of ‘Africa’. As the play proceeds, she fills out
her courtyard with more and more cigarette smoke, Coca-Cola, and
whiskey – all frowned upon by Ato’s family – in a desperate attempt to
transform the space into her memory space. By the end of the play, Esi Kom
sees that she must create a maternal space for her daughter-in-law that can
incorporate Eulalie’s memory space of her dead mother as well as offer her
a way of living in the present. Esi Kom deploys a symbolic space to
ameliorate Eulalie’s adjustment problems, as we describe later in the
chapter.
Memory space is frequently connected to a dead or distant loved one. The
memory space that Zandile desires is associated with Gogo in Have You
Seen Zandile? She is unable to return literally to her grandmother, but she
is able to retain some of the characteristics and abilities that they share,
specifically Gogo’s storytelling ability, a skill that is passed on to her
granddaughter. Zandile’s failure to be reunited with her grandmother must
be seen in light of her success at retaining a memory of her grandmother
and a way of deploying her grandmother’s knowledge and talents in a new
way. The transformational nature of this memory and of the denial of
access suggests ways of working around prohibitions to find a means of
self-expression. By learning the techniques of praise songs, Zandile also
learns to conjure the image of Gogo, as contained within the stage
directions: ‘on the other side the spot light shines on Gogo, who comes in
Layering space 101
with some presents for Zandile, wrapped in colourful paper and she
thoughtfully packs them in a suitcase’ (Mhlope et al. 1988: 64). When
Zandile belatedly finds where Gogo had been living prior to her death, she
is given Gogo’s suitcase which becomes the tangible representation of
memory space that is central to Zandile’s life. She attempts to re-capture
home via letters and stories but it is not until she holds her grandmother’s
suitcase that she can firmly lay claim to the memory space by means of this
tangible and symbolic object.
The narrative of these plays is substantially affected by the ways in which
the memory space manifests itself physically and symbolically. The
memory space that is at the core of each of these plays is more than merely
a location of childhood remembrance. The women in these plays are
attempting to return to that which they have lost. The central characters
seem determined to merge – however roughly or inconclusively – the two
cultures and ‘homes’ into a single, containable space. The playwrights are
also engaged in a project of reclamation as they consciously try to generate
the recombinative space of a hybrid, intercultural community. The
playwrights fill this breach by drawing on the possibility of creating a
chora.
Chora
We are using Elizabeth Grosz’s rendering of chora which recovers one
form of positive, recombinative spatial location for women (Grosz
1995).11 While men also construct memory spaces, chora in Grosz’s
assessment is specific to women. It also questions male definitions of
space and femininity. Grosz isolates chora as an opportunity to
return women to those places from which they have been dis- or re-
placed or expelled, to occupy those positions – especially those which
are not acknowledged as positions – partly in order to show men’s
invasion and occupancy of the whole of space, of space as their own
and thus the constriction of spaces available to women, and partly in
order to be able to experiment with and produce the possibility of
occupying, dwelling or living in new spaces, which in their turn help
generate new perspectives, new bodies, new ways of inhabiting.
(ibid.: 124, our emphasis)
Spatiality is at its core. Chora is creative, regenerative space, but not

necessarily the reproductive space of the womb. It is ‘the space in which
place is made possible, the chasm for the passage of spaceless Forms [sic]
into a spatialized reality, a dimensionless tunnel opening itself to
spatialization, obliterating itself to make others possible and actual’ (ibid.:
116). Chora is an imaginary construction and is within the symbolic realm
that is accessed by writers in their creation of imaginary worlds.
While Grosz does not refer to theatre, her characterisation of chora offers
a provocative opportunity for recognising the ways in which space can be
staged: the discovery and staging of a productive space that helps define
identities between and across cultures. Conceptually, chora can act as the
synthesis of the theatrical, memory, and locational spaces within these
plays, even as it is sought outside the body, but in association with maternal
space.12 The combinative potential in chora thus renders it an ideal tool for
establishing contact in the intercultural encounter.
There are a number of ways in which this chora can be achieved. The
courtyard of Lella’s memory provides a chora that is ultimately thwarted
in You Have Come Back, because it is violated by outside forces. Now that
her father can no longer invade the women’s space in the courtyard, Lella
returns, expecting to find in her courtyard a space where she can safely
interact with women. The influence of her father has, however, extended
far beyond the grave as the courtyard transforms to become an imprisoning
space. Any creativity and happiness that could possibly emerge from this
space is curtailed by the elders’ determination to control women at every
point. Lella repeatedly attempts to explain that there is life outside the
confines of this metaphoric house and its restrictive religion, but the
courtyard of her desire is in a different place than the courtyard she
currently inhabits in Algeria, where the women’s lives and bodies are
completely circumscribed by the men. The play is dominated by women,
initially suggesting a matriarchal structure, but Lella’s dead father and the
male elder who appears briefly at the end of the play firmly control the
social context and frame the narrative. Any sense of chora that Lella feels
she might be able to generate is refused by the sexual and cultural
repression and by the brutal murders that conclude the play. The two
cultural spaces in this play cannot mix, despite Lella’s best intentions.
Even dialogue between the two cultures is impossible: Lella’s attempt to
re-work creative space through a female location results in her death. The
Layering space 103
remaining women also have no possibility of a metaphoric creative space,

only a purely literal reproductive function. The restrictions of the
community extend to a form of communal control of women’s bodies:
most of the young women with whom Lella exchanges memories are
mothers, but those women who have been unable to bear children have
been divorced and/or rejected. Gallaire-Bourega implies that any
alternative is refused by the Islamic patriarchy, whilst deviations from the
restrictive norm are monitored by the female elders of the community. The
area once designated as a women’s area is now circumscribed by men.
Zandile’s attempts to create a chora are also thwarted. She has little
chance of transforming the signifier of her memory space – Gogo’s
suitcase – into a chora. The suitcase is also a metaphor for the womb,
particularly because it represents the traits (as well as the clothes and gifts)
that Gogo tries to pass on to Zandile. As in The Dilemma of a Ghost, the
clash between women is essentially over reproduction and who ought to
raise the child. Lulama, Zandile’s mother, had an unplanned pregnancy by
a secret lover. Married to someone else, Lulama could not take her child
home. Zandile’s paternal grandmother, Gogo, was left to raise the child.
Lulama’s only choice is to take Zandile by force, after her husband leaves
her. The older women in the play cannot even lay claim to the space of their
wombs, which are controlled by their husbands; much as the land and the
rights to travel are controlled by the apartheid government. By examining
the nature of the lives of several women in the context of apartheid, Have
You Seen Zandile? demonstrates concretely the problems that arise when
women are forced to act as agents of the land or as ‘mother earth’ figures.
The suitcase stands as a variable symbol that encompasses the magnitude
of apartheid by simultaneously referring to the displaced person,
restrictions on travel, and the control of reproduction through the womb.
This state control means that the space of the suitcase and the space of the
womb can never be a chora: both spaces are too circumscribed by
prohibitions to be a liberated space under apartheid. Zandile’s spatial
world is reduced to the suitcase.13 Zandile’s access to the past through
storytelling may prove useful, but any sense of chora eludes her at the end
of the play.
Like Lella in You Have Come Back, Eulalie confuses her memory space
with a chora in The Dilemma of a Ghost. She assumes that she will be able
to make a new home in Africa that will contain her memory space and offer
her a place where she can belong. She fails to recognise that Ato’s family
has expectations and preconceived ideas of her as well. Keen to preserve
their traditions as they choose to remember them, they are not willing to
embrace Eulalie who represents a history they would like to forget: Ato’s
grandmother, Nana, calls slavery the ‘Unmentionable’ (Aidoo 1965: 14),
and Eulalie’s slave ancestors seem to be a liability to the family and its
reputation. Yet for Eulalie, this slave-history connection to ‘Africa’ is what
ought to make it understandable to her.
Eulalie’s confusion between memory space and chora is brought to a
head over reproduction. This women-centred community that she initially
idealises creates a variety of problems for her when the family’s sphere of
influence focuses on the space of Eulalie’s body: since she has not
conceived a child after a year, the extended family feels that it is up to them
to assist her by applying a herbal remedy to her stomach. Eulalie considers
her body and her fertility to be her own business. For the community-
oriented clan, however, Eulalie’s apparent infertility is their business too.
The contest over space extends well beyond the courtyard to the
comparable enclosed space of Eulalie’s womb.
Both Eulalie and her mother-in-law, Esi Kom, come to realise that
whatever else divides them, the major barrier between them is Ato. When
they remove this obstacle, the play suggests that they will be able to learn
to occupy the same space at the same time. This reconciliation will
inevitably be fraught, but Esi Kom decides that she must begin it and that
it is necessary to incorporate Eulalie’s mother in this reconciliation as well.
She explains to her son:
And we must be careful with your wife

You tell us her mother is dead.
If she had any tenderness,
Her ghost must be keeping watch over
All which happen to her.
(Aidoo 1965: 50)
Aidoo resists the temptation to provide a space of reconciliation where

all the women are united, in favour of individuated characters whose
personal and social space has the potential to intersect usefully; in doing
Layering space 105
so she offers a possible solution in the link between the two women from
divergent cultures who can cohabit the same space. Esi Kom and Eulalie
thus aspire to a chora at the play’s conclusion. Their readiness to bridge the
divide that separates them spatially and culturally suggests a more
productive future.
All three plays use a genre in their dramaturgy that involves a variety of
individuated women, many of whom attempt to control their own lives in
a manner that is counter to the traditions of one of the two cultures to which
they have a claim. Each play attempts to recover (or adapt or even generate)
a creative space and, in doing so, formulates a stage space that is heavily
layered with multiple physical and psychic levels. The elusiveness of
chora, the ultimate memory space, does not diminish the effort to reconcile
divergent spaces in Have You Seen Zandile? and You Have Come Back.
More importantly, the plays do achieve a type of chora for the playwrights
who find in writing and producing theatre their elusive creative space.
Each play constructs a memory space based on the playwrights’ own lives:
through these plays, chora becomes not just a physical location but also an
equally tangible creativity manifest in the play itself. On one level, this
helps mitigate the tragedy of You Have Come Back: Lella is unable to
change her circumstances, but Gallaire-Bourega has expressed her dissent
from the tenets of Algerian politics.
It is possible to see chora as a common, basic spatial experience through
which women from a variety of cultures can meet. The imaginary, creative
space is linked to sexuality, but not just to reproduction. In many parts of
Africa, the maternal body frequently symbolises fertility, community, and
an idealised female figure.14 Yet as these plays illustrate, the construction
of the maternal body in plays by women disrupts the idealism of this role:
they refuse to situate motherhood and fertility as chora itself. While the
representation of sex and the sexual(ised) body is not the same in every
culture, the plays we have discussed here deploy enclosed spaces
associated with the female body to stage a search for a further possible way
to spatialise the intercultural interactions between women.
Even more significantly, the search for a chora in these plays offers a way
of combining space and female bodies in a manner that does not replicate
the outdated and patriarchal view of women as passive vessels of space in
opposition to men who act in/on space. In an attempt to redefine women’s
relationship to space, Sue Best argues that the combination of women and
space evolves new and multiple meanings for each, rather than limiting
either to predetermined, contained representations.15 Because chora is
spatial but not restricted to the womb, it offers manifold ways of
spatialising women and women’s desires.
Theatre space
So far in this chapter, we have been considering theatrical space, as

opposed to theatre space, because theatrical space acts metonymically for
other, extra-theatrical spatial arrangements. However, we must also take
into account the literal rendering of space in theatre and how the memory
or symbolic spaces operate on the real stage. Developing de Certeau’s
concept that space determines the structures of social life, Michel Foucault
explains that space actually controls us. His famous examples of state-
controlled sites of containment underscore space’s surveillance function
(prisons, sanatoria, or similar sites). While attendance at a theatre
production generally involves an audience watching actors, both
performers and audience are controlled by spatial sites of power which
operate differently, depending on the type of theatre, its conventions, the
performers, and the play.16 The location of the audience (geographical, as
well as distance from stage, or interactive possibilities with the actors and
the stage) can affect the audience’s subject positioning. Theatre space, like
any space, exists in a particular physical and metaphysical place within the
social sphere.
This is perhaps easiest to see in the context of South African theatre space
during apartheid. The stage where Have You Seen Zandile? first played
helps complicate the ostensibly simple apartheid world in a way that
mirrors the narrative. The play was first performed in 1986 at the Market
Theatre in Johannesburg, which then operated without any form of
government support and often presented plays that were critical of
apartheid. More importantly, the Market Theatre provided an opportunity
for blacks and whites to sit in the same theatre, an inter-mixing of races
specifically prohibited by apartheid. As a result, the Market had the
potential to generate a very special sense of unity in the audience: sitting in
the theatre could itself be a political statement. That Have You Seen
Zandile? also expresses a rural–urban binary rather than ‘just’ a black–
Layering space 107
white dichotomy compounds its political significance. The main space

holds about 450 people in raked, bench seating around almost three sides
of an unembellished thrust stage (Fuchs 1990: 44).17 The original
production of Have You Seen Zandile? has also played at the Edinburgh
Festival, London, and Switzerland while an American production was
mounted in Chicago. When the play is performed in these different
countries, it does not necessarily retain the social and spatial meaning that
the Market Theatre provided in the first production: it accrues new spatial
references associated with the new locations to add to the constructions of
meanings through space. The performance of Mhlope’s play outside South
Africa may communicate some political and social opposition to apartheid
or to social conditions in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, but its social
effect is bound to be educative rather than specifically resistant.
For You Have Come Back, theatre space communicates on a slightly
broader level. The implications of a performance’s geographical location
can be enormous, as Fatima Gallaire-Bourega’s You Have Come Back
demonstrates. Given the persecution that many Algerian writers and artists
experience, this play cannot actually be performed in Algeria. Its
performance in other parts of the world serves to inform audiences about
current events in Algeria. You Have Come Back has been staged in New
York (as part of a women’s theatre season in 1988), in Australia (by
students in Adelaide in 1994), in Uzbekistan (organised by the Alliance
Française in 1992), and it has been broadcast on radio in Paris. The play’s
history is in alternative theatres which place the audience in opposition to
censorship. The audience’s response is already conditioned by the
knowledge that this is a banned play that cannot be shown in certain
(political) spaces.
The Dilemma of a Ghost is designed to speak specifically – but not
exclusively – to Ghanaians, and its theatre space context reinforces this
point. First performed in Legon, Ghana, in the Open-Air Theatre at the
University of Ghana in 1964, The Dilemma of a Ghost was written to raise
awareness in Africa about the African diaspora. Ironically, the
architectural style of its first performance location conflicts with its
message. The theatre (on the university campus that is itself designed to
imitate Oxbridge quadrangle architecture) recalls ‘a Greek amphitheatre
at the top of Legon Hill [which] offers, unfortunately, no more than a weak
imitation of the real thing. Acoustics are not adequately considered and the
sightlines are poor’ (Rubin 1997: 144). The play works to bridge the
Ghanaian culture with the diasporic American culture in a venue that
aspires ineffectually to classical European grandeur.
The location of performances of this play, particularly the structuring of
space, helps determine which of its dilemmas are foregrounded. When it is
performed in the city, Ato’s dilemma is no doubt centralised. This play
continues to be a popular teaching text in schools across western Africa to
educate Ghanaians strategically about their own history and the roles that
their ancestors played in the slave trade (Wilentz 1992: 45). When the play
travels to rural schools, it actually returns to the point of origin of its
narrative setting: rural Ghana. In this context of rural performance, the
figures of Ato and Eulalie become as foreign to the audience as they are to
Ato’s family. Here the audience’s subject position shifts with regard to the
actual location of the play in the real time of the performance. In this
situation, the audience is likely to share the same confusion over the
behaviour of Ato and Eulalie that Ato’s mother experiences. When this
play is performed in the US or other countries with large diasporic
communities, it takes on a third dilemma function: beyond that of simply
identifying with Eulalie, this third dilemma creates an opportunity for the
audience to recognise the similarities and the significant intercultural
differences between diasporic subjects and the subjects who remained in
Africa.
The narratives of these plays work differently depending on the real-time
performance, the plays’ location in specific theatres or specific cultural/
political contexts, and the subject positions that such performances
predetermine. We have not discussed the particular design implications of
the plays or their productions: rather, we have raised some of the
intersecting spatial questions that must be considered in intercultural
theatre productions. Chaudhuri’s perception of the polytopian nature of
space (Chaudhuri 1995: 138) is especially noteworthy here, given the
numerous spatial dimensions that interact with one another in each play.
We have seen how the real space of the narrative interacts with memory
space, which can produce the space of a chora. This is not to say that all
intercultural plays prefigure home, memory spaces, and chora: rather, we
offer in these plays a point of agreement and intersection amid the
challenges of staging intercultural theatre. Such complex layers of space
represent only one of the puzzles for intercultural performance.
Layering space 109
We now move to an account of bodies in space, and particularly to the

ways in which bodies become ‘layered’ within the multiple dimensions of
space to signal intercultural difference. We outline three specific types of
intercultural bodies which, like the layers of space, help provide points of
intersection across cultures for intercultural performers at the same time as
expanding possible subjective identity spaces.
Chapter 4
Intercultural bodies
Meetings in the flesh
[N]omadic consciousness consists in not taking any kind of identity as

permanent. The nomad is only passing through; s/he makes those
necessarily situated connections that can help her/him survive, but s/he
never takes on fully the limits of one national, fixed identity. The nomad
has no passport – or has too many of them.
This chapter is concerned with meetings in the flesh: bodies as sites of the
intercultural encounter. We begin our investigations with cultural
taxonomies, move into hybrid worlds, and finally trace the pathways of
nomads. There are three bodies that weave through this text – the
subjective body of the performer, the artificial performing body, and the
body of the audience. We do not intend to re-visit the plethora of recent
writings on the body, but the basic premise underlying our approach falls
within Rosi Braidotti’s definition of the new form of ‘corporeal
materialism’:
the body is seen as the inter-face, a threshold, a field of intersection of

material and symbolic forces; it is a surface where multiple codes of
power and knowledge are inscribed; it is a construction that
transforms and capitalises on energies of a heterogeneous and
discontinuous nature. The body is not an essence and therefore not an
anatomical destiny: it is one’s primary location in the world, one’s
primary situation in reality.
Intercultural bodies 111
The body of the performer and the performing body interrelate to present
a surface where ‘multiple codes’ are inscribed. This doubling is perceived
as a binary like those of sex and gender, and race and culture: the body of
the performer is the natural element while the performing body is the
artificial or imposed term. But where does the performing body begin and
the body of the performer end? How clearly does the audience’s body read
this doubling in the foreign body? Can an actor acquire multiple
performing bodies that represent different cultures? In an effort to untangle
these questions before re-entangling them in a variety of women’s
intercultural performances, we begin with our definitions of the three
bodies under scrutiny.
The body of the performer is the subjective body of corporeal
materialism located in a specific historical time and geographical space,
embodying the ethics and beliefs of a particular place. It has been subjected
to social coercion, legal inscriptions, sexual and economic exchange, and
carries its past in its habits, gestures, and demeanour. More importantly for
our purposes, this body is sexually differentiated. We are not arguing that
the body of the female performer holds some essence of universal
womanhood, but we are asserting that every society organises differences
between the sexes into structures of signification. These structures may
order perception in culturally specific and power-impregnated ways,
hence the corporeal reality of the sexed body is always present. Each of the
female bodies in this chapter is differentiated by its particular ethos: its
unique political, social, and cultural placing (Diprose 1994). Yet in one
respect all these bodies are the same: they have all been positioned as other
to privileged male identities within their societies. All too frequently the
bodies of female performers serve the needs of these privileged male
identities. In this chapter we explore the work of artists who defy the rigid
boundaries that mark their particular cultural configuration as Woman.
They use their performing bodies to explore what is excluded, the elements
that cannot fit within these rigid boundaries. They traverse culturally
defined gender structures and work interculturally.
It is a truism to say that the performing body is a body of artifice. Every
genre or tradition of performance involves the codification of body
language and vocalisation, and these codes coalesce into performance
conventions. These conventions extend from the familiar iconic
representations that dominate naturalistic genres to the obscure
abstractions of highly symbolic theatrical forms. Performance genres are

frequently classified through physical and vocal codes, but they cannot be
reduced to these indices because every act of performance also requires
that the performer heighten or alter her state of consciousness. These inner
states are acquired through the study and practice of techniques designed
to shape and concentrate thought processes, emotion, and energies. The
construction of an artificial performing body can involve immense rigour
and discipline, but it can never escape the corporeal reality of the body of
the performer. Consequently, the distinction between these two bodies is
always blurred, and the precise nature of the double act is never clear even
when the body is wrapped in the powerful signifiers of costume, make-up,
or mask. In intercultural performance these doublings find new
expressions.
By convention the body of the audience is generally referred to in the
singular, although it is made up of separate individuals. To shape their
performances, actors use the feelings, sounds, and sensations that emanate
from the collective body of the audience. This is not to imply that all the
members of an audience have an identical response, but that time and place
tie a live audience together, so its members will always share some
responses based on their common ethos. Probable readings unite the
majority of the spectators and form the basis of the relationship between
the audience and the performer. Audience members watching an
intercultural production tend to share an awareness of the unfamiliar:
strange gestural and emotional expressions, alien performance energies,
vocalisations, decorative codes, spatial relationships, or the slowing or
speeding of perceptual time. When confronted with a foreign body, they
are likely to indulge their scopophilic drives, but they will draw on more
complex mechanisms to decode this body if the narrative or emotional
trajectory of the performance demands an empathetic relationship.
As these brief definitions imply, every performance involves a complex
interrelational dynamic between bodies. To avoid being overwhelmed by
possibilities, we shall confine our discussions to three genres of women’s
performance. The first genre we refer to as taxonomic, because it seeks
clearly to demarcate the boundaries between cultures; the second as
hybrid, because two cultures in some way merge together; and the third as
nomadic, because boundaries of identity are transgressed. We consider the
bodily assumptions that mark each of these genres. The body of the
performer and the performing body merge in the taxonomic genre to create
a reified cultural essence that can be identified and categorised by the

audience. The hybrid genre is a mass of contradictions in both production
and reception: artificial performing bodies from diverse backgrounds are
juxtaposed, and qualities of two or more cultures mix and merge as cultural
signifiers jump from one body to another. Finally, amongst the nomads, we
encounter an intercultural site that capitalises on the physical
communication between the audience and performer to challenge
radically the boundaries of identity. Our investigations draw on production
histories, rehearsal processes, performance analyses, training systems,
and the subjective experiences of intercultural artists.
TAXONOMIES
Our analysis of taxonomic theatre begins with Robert Young’s assertion

that it is impossible for a western audience to ‘read’ the ‘raced’ body,
without using the classification system that is deeply imbedded in western
discourse (Young 1995). ‘Race’ was synonymous with lineage until the
eighteenth century, when it assumed its current meaning as a system of
natural categorisation. This semantic shift reflected the desire of European
imperialists to categorise the ‘other’ in such a way as to justify colonial
rule. The ‘other’ became the negative image of the colonising self and
fuelled the obsessive cataloguing and classifying of supposed difference
between races that accompanied colonial expansion.1 In the nineteenth
century, gender became a key term within this system of racial
differentiation: a masculinist Aryan race with a conquering intellect was
contrasted with a wide variety of feminised brown and yellow races that
were intuitive and passive. Young argues that classificatory tables of racial
difference reveal a deep anxiety that the impregnation of the feminised
‘others’ would result in the degeneration of the ‘white race’. He
demonstrates that these fears of miscegenation resulted in the obsessive
naming of racial groups, and cites as an example the 1873 table of
‘Peruvian Mongrelity’ which included the following categories: mulatto,
mestiza, chino, cuarteron, creole, chino-blanco, quintero, zambo,
quintera, and chino-cola (Young 1995: 176).
A similar obsession with the classification of performing (as opposed to
racial) bodies characterises the theatrical taxonomic ‘masterpieces’2 of the
late twentieth century. The intensification of the global arts markets and
the proliferation of international festivals produced a vogue for
extravaganzas with multicultural casts. These intercultural productions
resembled theatrical versions of the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal
Palace, a modern day Expo, or a Coca-Cola advertisement in which the
richness and diversity of humanity is displayed in a panoply of coloured
bodies and national costumes. In the theatrical expression of this global
diversity, the performance technologies of the world were placed side by
side: the Indian Kathakali dancer with the New York method actor, the
Tokyo Kabuki onnagata with the Ghanaian court dancer. Rigid boundaries
isolated the different performing bodies and framed them as supposedly
pure and authentic cultural essences. Like safe sex, this safe theatre 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.3
Inevitably this taxonomic genre spread to women’s intercultural
performance. In Australia a number of productions were created for the
national touring circuit. One of the most successful works, Salt Fire Water,
was produced by the Top End Girls in Darwin, and first performed at the
Space Theatre in Adelaide on 7 July 1994, in conjunction with the Third
International Women Playwrights’ Conference. This production had a
strong connection with an earlier work, Akwanso Flies South, which
toured Australia in 1988–9. Venetia Gillot, the assistant director on
Akwanso, was a key figure in the creation of the Top End Girls; Robyn
Archer, the director of Akwanso, booked Salt Fire Water for her 1995
Canberra Festival.
A number of common factors link these two works, not least of which
was the desire to build enduring bonds between women of different races
and cultures. This utopian vision was enhanced by the pre-publicity,
particularly of Salt Fire Water, which emphasised the cultural diversity of
the cast. The culturally marked bodies of the performers were used to
attract an audience, instead of the more conventional marketing ploy of
publicising the unique performing skills of the company. It could be argued
that this emphasis on the bodies of the performers and their corporeal
realities was justified by the content of the productions. Salt Fire Water
and Akwanso Flies South were both created through improvisation: the
performance texts were shaped out of the cast members’ experiences as
indigenous or immigrant Australians. The Akwanso Flies South cast of
four black women included an indigenous Australian, a Ghanaian, a
Jamaican, and a North American.4 The pre-publicity for Salt Fire Water
listed the cast as follows: two indigenous Australians, one white
Australian of Irish extraction, one Papua New Guinean, a Filippina, an
East Timorese, and a Mauritian (via South Africa). The project originally
included a Maori woman whose family moved in the process of the
project’s development and an Indonesian dancer who left the company for
political reasons three days before the first performance.5
The women found sharing their life histories, in the creative
development stages of both projects, enjoyable and re-affirming. It was the
second stage that proved more difficult, when the women had to decide on
the performance techniques they would use to represent their personal
histories to an audience. There had been an assumption in both projects that
diversity, or cultural identity, would be the overriding factor in the creation
and delineation of the performing bodies. In the early stages of Salt Fire
Water the women shared cultural knowledge through dances, story-telling,
and traditional performance. Implied in this approach was the presumption
that cultural identity could be meaningfully condensed into a series of
physical gestures, dance steps, sound patterns, and costuming decisions.
In Salt Fire Water the performers constructed costumes based on three
elements: the wrapping of cloth around the body in the form of a sarong,
skirt, or malong; colour-coding according to symbolic associations – green
for Irish, red for Aboriginal, etc; and additional jewellery, scarves, and
body paint with traditional or contemporary cultural significance,
including shell and seed necklaces, beadwork belts, earrings, and bangles.
The dramatic structure of both works further highlighted the cultural
differences of the performing bodies. In Salt Fire Water the linking
metaphor was the arrival of the seven women in Australia, their meetings
with the indigenous people, symbolic greetings, and exchanging of gifts
that denoted their cultural origin. Akwanso Flies South began with the
Aboriginal performer Rhoda Roberts alone on the stage, performing an
emu dance. The three remaining cast members were introduced to the
audience in quick succession and their signatures were defined by
paradigmatic dance steps and percussion, instantly recognisable to the
Plate 9 Top End Girls, Adelaide, 1994. Photo reproduced with the permission of
Venetia Gillot.
audience as from ‘the Caribbean’, ‘Africa’, or ‘New York’. During the

performance, these signatures were highlighted, combined, and structured
into a choreographic whole. Life stories and cultural histories were told
through dance, song, and direct address: they ranged from the history of
slavery to an ironic look at a return to Mother Africa; and from the stolen
generation of Australian Aboriginal children to the experience of black
nurses in England.
Venetia Gillot maintained in an interview in 1997 that all the women in

Salt Fire Water were ‘in control of how they were represented’ but this did
not prevent them from feeling overwhelmed by the difficulties of
rendering their subjective experience and cultural background into
performance. All the participants had a strong sense of personal and
political identity but were lost when it came to shaping this identity into a
performing body. Their inexperience as performers and the lack of funded
rehearsal time encouraged them to resort to cliché, even when the project
was designed to prevent this from happening. While none of the women
claimed just’ one cultural affiliation, most of the women attempted to
represent an impossible, ‘authentic’ version of one facet of their cultural
identities. Gillot explained in the 1997 interview that Alison Mills felt that
she had to represent an ‘Archetypal Aborigine on stage. . . . Aly fell into the
trap of delivering [to the audience] exactly what they wanted. She sat there
in full traditional paint when she’s an urban woman.’ Mills substituted the
complexity of her lived reality with a simplistic and predictable role
intended for others: ultimately she was forced into the condition Jean-Paul
Sartre defined as ‘bad faith’. To contextualise her decision, it is useful to
listen to her sister, June Mills, discussing the predicament of many urban
indigenous Australians:
We are the walking wounded, and each time you fail to recognise us
and accept us as Aboriginal, no matter how white we are, no matter
how blonde-haired, blue-eyed we are, no matter how we dress, no
matter where we live, you are deepening the wound, and you are
assisting in our eradication.
(Mills 1994)
Gillot would have liked to have seen the work develop to the point where
one woman would tell her story using the performance techniques of
another’s culture. As it was, they melded stories but not performance
traditions. Gillot concluded that Salt Fire Water was a multicultural as
opposed to an inter- or intra-cultural work, to use the distinctions outlined
by Patrice Pavis (1996b). She explained that it was multicultural because
the performers ‘still remain[ed] enclosed within our own culture and our
own performance piece[s]. . . . We just sat our work side by side’ (interview
1997). The cast of Salt Fire Water had hoped to stage a clash of cultures,
and the mermaid dance of the Balinese dancer, Desak Putu Warti, was
deliberately rehearsed to ‘clash’ with Alison Mills’s representation of
Aboriginality, but Warti was forced to withdraw from the project. The
background to her decision to leave the production provides fascinating
insights into the doubling of the body of the performer and the performing
body, and raises major questions about probable readings in taxonomic
theatre.
Three days before the first performance of Salt Fire Water, Warti was
contacted informally by a staff member of the Indonesian Consulate and,
Gillot reports, told that to appear on the stage with the East Timorese actor
– Maria Alice Casimiro – would place her in a position of ‘high risk’
(interview 1997). Despite the fact that the production was being rehearsed
and performed in Australia, Warti felt she had no choice but to leave the
company. The attitude of the Consulate reflected the embarrassment of the
Jakarta Government over the growing international condemnation of the
(then) Indonesian military occupation of East Timor.6 It was not the
performing bodies or the representation of culture in Salt Fire Water that
the Consulate wished to influence, but the freedom of association of the
bodies of the performers. The (then) Suharto Government considered even
the placement of an Indonesian on stage next to an East Timorese to be an
act of political subversion. The implication was that the audience would
read the contiguity of these ‘real’ bodies as an open challenge to the Jakarta
administration and as an incitement to protest. If Warti had ignored the
informal warning and insisted on performing with Casimiro, would the
audience have responded in this way?
To answer this hypothetical question, we must return to Young’s
assertion that it is impossible for a western audience to ‘read’ the ‘raced’
body, without using the classification system that is deeply imbedded in
western discourse. While racial classifications remain a mechanism for
justifying global power relations, any taxonomic theatre designed for
western audiences is in danger of triggering a neo-imperialist gaze. This
gaze encourages the audience to indulge in the cataloguing and
categorising of the other in order to re-affirm the superiority and centrality
of the self. However hard performers try to escape this gaze, any decision
to assign fixed cultural essences to their performing bodies will make
evasion difficult. Once this gaze has been triggered within an audience, the
body of the performer and the performing body can collapse into a single
entity, which is read for cultural and racial generalisations.
In naturalistic theatre the doubling of the body of the performer and the
performing body blurs the actor/character divide but still produces the
illusion of a unique individual; in taxonomic theatre this doubling reduces
the body of the performer and the performing body to a single cultural
paradigm. The skills of the performers, their command of aesthetic
conventions, and their physical idiolects all merge and are read as
symptomatic of a generalised racial or cultural category. As Peter Brook
has observed, ‘Why should an actor have to come on stage as a symbol of
his people? Once he does so, there’s no chance of his being perceived as an
individual’ (cited in D. Williams 1996: 73). By means of this process of
recognition and labelling, the audience engages in the policing and
patrolling of the boundaries that separate the self and its other, an activity
that characterises all dominant groups. If this is an accurate description of
the probable audience response to taxonomic theatre, it is unlikely that
sufficient empathy can be generated in the body of the audience to reach
the level of subversive protest that the Indonesian Consulate imagined
possible with Salt Fire Water.
A subversive potential does lie dormant within women’s taxonomic
theatre, but it was not the one envisaged by the Indonesian Consulate.
Rather it exists in the aporia of the taxonomic genre: miscegenation.
Whilst classificatory tables of racial difference seek to impose order and
fixed boundaries, the reproductive power of the female body can
undermine these structures by producing children who do not fit the
classificatory tables. This might imply that a taxonomic theatre could
subvert the neo-imperialist gaze by introducing an unruly maternal body
with the potential for anarchic reproduction. This subversive figure
remained an unrealised possibility in Salt Fire Water, except in a parodic
form during the South African laundry sequence, when a group of workers
confront the impossible task of sorting the whites from the coloureds. In a
literal sense, the unruly maternal body disrupts taxonomic systems by its
potential to produce hybrid offspring; in a theatrical sense this same
disruption can occur in symbolic worlds through the creation of hybrid
performing bodies. Once the rigid cultural delineation that characterises
the taxonomic genre begins to break down, new possibilities of
intercultural performance are unleashed. Hybridity has long been
associated with the operations of cultural or racial exchange7 and it is to
hybridity, our second intercultural body site, that we now turn.
HYBRIDITIES
In response to his own question – ‘What is hybridisation?’ – Mikhail

Bakhtin answered:
It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single

utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two
different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an
epoch, of social differentiation, or by some other factor.
(cited in Young 1995: 20)
In our investigation, social languages become performing bodies, their

encounters occur within theatrical utterances, and the factors that separate
them are sexually and racially determined. When reapplied to
performance, the concept of hybridity does, however, have substantial
risks. Popularised in the last part of the twentieth century as a way of
positively re-reading the miscegenation and cultural intermingling
resulting from postcolonial and diasporic encounters, it is frequently
criticised for its idealising, or essentialising, or even assimilating
tendencies.8 Yet, as Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo explain, hybridity is
about more than merely identifying two separate cultures in one entity. For
hybridity to remain a productive form, the two parts must generate an
energy that is almost chemical in its recombinative effects:
[T]he concept of hybridity stresses the productive nature of cultural

integration as positive contamination. . . . [I]t is not a simple fusion of
differences but rather a volatile interaction characterised by conflict
between and within the constitutive cultures of a colonised society.
(Gilbert and Lo 1997: 7)
In search of these volatile interactions as they occur within the body, our
focus shifts from intercultural performances within Australia to the
intercultural relationship between Australia and Japan, thus linking a
national identity of multiculturalism to a national identity of mono-
culturalism. Yet, despite the projected image of Japan as a homogenous
society, its contemporary culture is the product of a highly conscious form
of hybridity incorporating elements from Europe, America, and Asia. It is
not surprising, therefore, that our discussion is largely focused on Japan.

We shall begin with the rehearsals for Masterkey, an Australian/Japanese
production, adapted and directed by the visual artist, Mary Moore, from
the thriller Oi Naru Genei by Masako Togawa.9 Following this
investigation into the production process of an intercultural work, we will
look at sexual and racial cross-dressing in the famous Takarazuka Revue.
Our discussions will lean heavily on visual considerations, particularly
costume codes, in the creation and reading of hybrid performing bodies.
Masterkey
Masterkey falls within the category of experimental intercultural women’s

performance created for international performing arts festivals: it was
commissioned through the 1998 Adelaide and Perth Festivals, and
additional investment was provided by the Australia Council, the Sydney
Cultural Olympics, and the Sydney Myer Foundation. The mixed-media
production used video, object animation, soundscape, and a dramatic text
to enact a conventional thriller narrative. In the prologue a man and woman
are seen burying a child in the basement bathhouse of the apartment block;
simultaneously, a news report is heard about the kidnapping of a child. The
mother’s search for her lost child brings her to the apartment block
occupied by single women working in central Tokyo. She has learned that
her son’s schoolteacher, a resident in the complex, may have a connection
with the kidnappers. The mother enlists the help of a friend and together
they trace the mystery of the missing child only to discover that the body
in the bathhouse is the schoolteacher’s own deformed child. In the final
images of the piece it becomes evident that the mother is a present-day
Madame Butterfly. Her husband, a major in the US military, left her soon
after the disappearance of her son; it is clear that he now lives in America
and that the child is with him.
The artistic intention of this production was to create a hybrid
performance world, in which a range of culturally determined performing
bodies could collaborate to tell a story using a variety of different gestural
and expressive performance techniques. Our analysis of this production is
located within the pre-production period and the rehearsal room, and
therefore does not involve the body of an audience. Instead, it is concerned
with the problems of cultural interaction that Homi Bhabha suggests
emerge ‘at the significant boundaries of cultures, where meanings and
values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated. Culture only emerges as

a problem, or a problematic, at the point at which there is a loss of meaning
in the contestation and articulation of everyday life’ (Bhabha 1994b: 34).
The ‘loss of meanings’ that emerged during the rehearsal period, and the
subsequent negotiations to resolve potential conflicts, are the focus of this
discussion.
The female performing bodies that entered the ‘everyday life’ of the
Masterkey rehearsal room were expert in a variety of performance
technologies involving different approaches to interiority and exteriority,
emotion, vocalisation, and gesture. The oldest of the Japanese performers,
Tomiko Takai, was a butoh dancer who had danced with Tatsumi Hijikata;
the youngest had been a member of the contemporary butoh company
Dairakudakan. The remaining two Japanese performers were shingeki
actors in their sixties who practised a variant of the Stanislavski system.
The Australian actors similarly spanned three generations: the oldest were
trained in an English-based Stanislavski tradition, the middle generation
were influenced by Brechtian alternative performance modes developed
in Australia in the 1970s, and the youngest were experienced in the
physical theatre of the 1990s.
The pre-production period focused on the creation of a performance
space that would allow these diverse performing bodies to interact, while
not denying them their different modes of expression. Masterkey was set
in the early 1950s in a western-style apartment block for single women,
based on the Otsuka Women’s Apartments in Tokyo.10 A key design factor
was the similarity in the accommodation provided for Japanese and
western women entering the industrialised workforce in the first half of the
twentieth century. It was this spatial link that provided the performing
bodies with a common physical starting point in the rehearsals. As director,
Moore wanted to provide each actor with a private space, part Japanese and
part western, which could be wrapped around her like the exoskeleton of a
crustacean. Her design solution was the wardrobe, an item of furniture
which Gaston Bachelard connects with the intimacy of the poetic
imagination:
Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers and chests
with their false bottoms are veritable organs of secret psychological
life. Indeed, without these ‘objects’ and a few others in equally high
favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are
hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us, and for us, they
have a quality of intimacy.
(Bachelard 1964: 23)
The Foucauldian strategy of concentrating on the body/space created for
this new class of professional women had considerable success. The
aesthetic hybridity of the interiors was accepted by both the Japanese and
Australian actors. In the first rehearsals, the actors explored physical
patterns of work and rest within the restrictions and isolation of their
rooms/wardrobes, and embodied the characters through this creation of
physical habitus. This containment was expressed in all the diverse
performance codes of the performing bodies, but these differences were
read as signifiers of individual character, rather than culturally designated
performance styles. The wardrobes acted as a unifying extension of the
performing body, the personalised interiors reflected the lives of the
characters; in a sense they acted as prosthetics connected to the performing
body, animating and defining its parameters. Framed by this spatial
conceit, the performing bodies were provided with an exterior uniformity
that could embrace extreme differences of physical expression within the
spatial interiors.
In contrast, there was another element of the visual hybridity that was to
prove more controversial. The conflict evolved around the costumes,
emerging several months before rehearsal began, and was still unresolved
in the final discussions after the Adelaide season had finished. During the
pre-production period, the shingeki actors were particularly keen to see the
costume drawings, given that their work practice included active
participation in the definition of their physical image. The costume
drawings were sent to Japan and the following questions were received by
return post: How much adaptation of Japanese clothing was intended?
How important was the historical period? How wealthy should the
characters appear to be? Michiko Aoki, one of the cast who was also acting
as the Japanese producer, offered to provide more costume research
material and added: ‘We have seen many productions with exotic
costumes by foreigners claiming that they know Japan. We all wish that
this does not happen in our project’ (personal correspondence to M.
Moore, 15 December 1997).
In response, Moore explained her costume designs were not intended to
reproduce a naturalistic or realistic world; instead they were meant to
reflect the intercultural nature of the production.
Plate 10 Costume designs from Masterkey, Adelaide, 1998. Photo reproduced with the permission of Mary Moore.
All the main characters were dressed in a hybrid version of western/

Japanese costume, which drew on the clothing of post-war Tokyo, without
attempting to be an accurate historical reproduction. The silhouettes were
intended to integrate the wrapped form of the kimono and the western
tailored jacket and pencil skirt. The colour scheme was tied to the wooden
wardrobes, which were the physical extensions of the characters.
In the second response from Tokyo, significant boundaries emerged.
Aoki wrote:
Fifty years ago, during 1945 to 1955, Tomiko was 14–25 years old and
I was 12–22 years old. It is already history to the younger generation,
but for us it was an unforgettable experience and we still remember it
as yesterday. After the Second World War, for 10 years or more, we
had many difficulties: shortage of food, house, clothes, and the
Americans brought great changes to many Japanese customs.
(personal correspondence to M. Moore, 17 December 1997)
While stressing that the production was non-naturalistic, Moore

(together with the members of the Australian team who were involved in
the pre-production period) acknowledged in reply that they lacked a full
understanding of the post-war period in Japan. They reiterated that the
adaptation had followed the huis clos nature of the thriller, which
contained little reference to the wider social context. At this point it
became clear that everyone was swimming in a sea of lost meanings, trying
to understand the problematic relationship between embodiment and
identity. The language of theatre was proving inadequate; it was clearly
understood by all parties that they were not involved in a realistic or
naturalistic production and that the costumes did not need to be authentic
replicas of 1950s Tokyo clothing. Although the problem had surfaced as a
concern about the embodiment of character through costume, the real
issues concerned the bodies of the performers and their corporeal realities
solidified through memory.
The youngest members of the Masterkey team shared generational time
and some geographical space: Yumi Umiumare and Verity Rice spoke each
other’s languages and lived and worked in each other’s countries. The
hybridity expressed in the production fitted their corporeal realities, but
the oldest members of the company – Miriel Lenore, Audine Leith,
Tomiko Takai, and Michiko Aoki – had been alive during the war, and the
socio-historical contexts and symbolic structures that had forged their

identities were totally different. Underlying the discussions about the
costumes was a much deeper ambiguity about the imposed cultural
hybridity of the Japanese post-war era. Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan
had assimilated many aspects of European culture, but the post-war period
saw the uncontrolled imposition of western culture through the American
occupation. Ironically, funding for the Masterkey project had come from
the Hybrid Committee of the Australia Council.11
The discussions over the costumes and the resistance to an imposed
hybridity brought to the surface the deep ambivalence to hybridisation that
was lurking in the original text. The initial transgression that drives
Togawa’s thriller is miscegenation. Thus the text can be interpreted as
placing a taboo on miscegenation through the narrative doubling of the
hybrid child and the deformed child, which creates an associative path
linking the mixed marriage with the birth deformities of the post-
Hiroshima/Nagasaki era. The older Japanese actors in Masterkey were in
a double bind: their performing bodies had consciously embraced the
intercultural nature of the production, but the debate over costumes
revealed their ambivalent feelings about imposed hybrid identities.
Eventually the conflict over the costumes was resolved by giving the
Japanese performers total control over their body image, though in reality
they made only minor changes to the original designs. In retrospect, the
artists working on the project concluded that the pre-production work on
Masterkey had focused too exclusively on the performing body and the
embodiment of performance technologies. Efforts had been made to find
parallels in the Stanislavskian techniques used by the older actors and to
trace the links between butoh and European expressionist dance. Too little
time had been spent addressing the performers’ personal and ethical
relationship to historical time and geographical space. Of course it was
silently acknowledged that the participants over 60 years old had lived
through the Second World War, but this shared history was barely
discussed. Whenever this subject emerged, whether in discussion about
particular textual meanings or the relative positioning of women in the two
cultures, the company drifted towards those significant boundaries where,
to paraphrase Bhabha, meaning is lost (1994b: 34). Hybrid performing
bodies triggered past memories in Masterkey, but the personal histories of
the bodies of the performers were repressed to facilitate the successful
creation of an intercultural work. For the younger generation of artists

living and working outside of their birth cultures, the aesthetic hybridity of
the production reflected their corporeal realities, but for the older
generation, it silenced memory and experience.
Takarazuka Revue
Following this theme of repression, we move outside the rehearsal room to

examine the hybrid performing bodies of the Takarazuka Revue and their
ability to release repression, not only in the bodies of the performers, but
in the body of the audience. The Revue is arguably the largest and most
popular women’s performance company in the world. Kobayashi Ichizo –
railway magnate, entrepreneur, and cabinet minister – established the
company in 1913. The management and the artistic control of the company
have always been in the hands of men; but the performers, with the
exception of a brief period in the late 1930s, have always been women.
There are a number of histories of the Takarazuka Revue, the most
illuminating of which, by Jennifer Robertson, situates the company within
an analysis of Japanese popular culture (Robertson 1998). We do not
intend to re-visit these histories; our interest lies in the particular form of
the racially and sexually hybrid performing bodies that mark the
company’s present-day success.
Cross-gendering and ‘cross-ethnicking’, to use Robertson’s term, have
been the trademark of the Takarazuka since its inception. In the 1920s and
1930s, when the Revue attracted mixed male and female audiences, this
‘cross-ethnicking’ fed imperialist fantasies of the Great East Asia Co-
Prosperity Sphere.12 Since the 1960s, the majority of the ‘cross-ethnic’
roles have occurred in western or ‘red-haired plays’ in which the male
impersonators, or otokoyaku, play occidental men. Assumptions about
western masculinity, rather than Japanese masculinity, inform these
performances; they are based not on the observation of European or
American men, but on physical and emotional gestures codified by
western film stars. Although the Takarazuka male impersonators are
trained within a Stanislavskian acting system which stresses the use of
observation and verisimilitude, their major referents are the performing
bodies of James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Clark Gable, Elvis Presley, Marlon
Brando, Maurice Chevalier, and Alain Delon. In the creation of their

occidental male characters, they merge racial and sexual stereotypes into
complex codes of costuming, physical gestures, and vocal qualities. Over
many years, these codes have been fixed by the Takarazuka actors into a
series of kata or steps, a term used throughout the performing arts in Japan
to indicate a physical repertoire out of which individual performances can
be constructed.
The standard elements of the kata for the occidental otokoyaku are an
open body with a wide stance, square shoulders, with the chin held slightly
down. Strong hand gestures are used with fists or open palm and extended
thumb stretched away from the fingers. The walk has a long stride and at
moments of extreme emotional tension, the body literally falls into a run.
The vocal delivery relies on an artificially lowered larynx, slight
huskiness, and maximum chest reverberation. The standard costuming,
which is based on the three-piece suit, frockcoat, or tailcoat, is beautifully
cut to create the illusion of wide (as opposed to padded) shoulders, a
waistcoat which disguises and flattens the chest, and high-waisted trousers
and heeled boots to increase the leg length. Romantic characters effect a
pose with hand on hip, elbow wide, holding back the jacket, thus
exaggerating the narrow hip, and wide shoulder silhouette. The standard
haircut involves a front quiff to add height with the remaining hair slicked
back to the nape of the neck; younger characters may have auburn or
blonde hair, whilst older characters tend to have dark hair with grey
highlights; and hats are used even if they obscure part of the face. Facial
hair is used occasionally, but make-up is used to apply moustaches,
sideburns, heavy eyebrows, a hard hairline delineating the temples, as well
as a pronounced bone line to emphasise the nose.
In addition to these costuming and physical codes, there are a number of
elements that confuse the cross-gender and cross-race illusion. The most
interesting is that the front fly or zip line in the cut of the trouser is omitted;
with the marking of both the breasts and the genitals removed from the
clothing, the performing body becomes pre-pubescent or anatomically
sexless. On the other hand, the most interesting additions to the otokoyaku
are the false eyelashes, use of heavy red lipstick, and visible high heels
which, if read through Hollywood iconography, signify female desire. The
double readings generated by these anomalies may account for responses
which characterise the otokoyaku as either totally sexless, or chusei, the

third gender idealised for its beauty.
The kata and costuming we have described create the illusion of the
aestheticised hybrid body, and all the members of the Takarazuka Revue
who specialise in occidental male roles use these signifiers. But if we are
to separate out the stars from the chorus players, we must consider two
further performance qualities employed by the otokoyaku: charisma and
iroke, erotic appeal. In other words, we must consider how the otokoyaku
practise the art of seduction. According to Baudrillard, seduction relies not
on nature but artifice; it thrives on illusions, disguises, and masks:
Is it to seduce, or to be seduced that is seductive? But to be seduced is

the best way to seduce. It is an endless refrain. There is no active or
passive mode in seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior;
seduction plays on both sides, and there is no frontier separating them.
(Baudrillard 1990: 81)
The otokoyaku must seduce the audience and be the object of its desire,
while at the same time embodying an active desiring subjectivity on the
stage. Just as the kata for the occidental otokoyaku is drawn from the
performing bodies of Hollywood stars, so is an art of seduction which
relies heavily on narcissistic desire, following the Freudian principle that
self-love attracts the love of others.
Narcissism for the performer involves the active display of the
performing body, which invites scopophilia and the ability to take
conscious pleasure in exhibitionism. This body is available to the gaze; it
holds this gaze and indulges it at moments of heightened dramatic tension,
but at the same time it remains active and dynamic as it shares emotions
and intimacies with the audience. In the Takarazuka Revue, this
narcissistic desiring performing body, masked in the kata and costume of
the otokoyaku, interacts with the audience: visually in the display of its
physical features, literally in direct address, and empathetically through
emotional states. If the trick of passive display and dramatic action is to
work, a plot line providing strong goals, obstacles, and traumatic events
must be provided.
To find suitable vehicles for the occidental otokoyaku, the Takarazuka
writers have mined the western canon for romantic tragedies: their
repertoire includes adaptations of Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, La
Traviata, Romeo and Juliet, Carmen, Manon Lescaut, Turandot, Tristan

and Isolde, The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, and
East of Eden. These stories provide otokoyaku with characters who yearn
for impossible loves, are forced outside the social order, express violent
sadistic feelings only to be tortured by remorse, and grieve over the dead
bodies of lovers and friends. In addition they give the performer an
opportunity to improvise on the standard kata and incorporate more
idiosyncratic elements from the gestural repertoire of the western film
stars associated with the roles. In the Takarazuka version of East of Eden,
the otokoyaku plays James Dean, not Steinbeck’s character; when the
Revue presents Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler disappears within the
impersonation of Clark Gable.
Successful Takarazuka productions play to over one million people. The
most popular productions in the repertoire are the romantic narratives and
the musical revues; the average audience member may have seen as many
as 20 previous shows. It is beyond dispute that the major attractions of the
Revue are the company’s male impersonators. To understand the lure of
the otokoyaku, we must take a closer look at the body of the Takarazuka
audience. Data collected in 1987 by Zeke Berlin suggest that 90 per cent
of the audience are women under 30, four-fifths of whom are unmarried;
these findings are contested by Robertson who places the average age at
over 30 and the majority as married (Berlin 1988; Robertson 1998). For
western critics of the Takarazuka Revue the first and overriding
impression of the company is the uniqueness of its audience. It is difficult
to sit in a 3,000-seat theatre packed with women watching the Takarazuka
performers and not find the atmosphere electric. Robertson describes the
‘mostly female audience whose intense absorption . . . made the
auditorium sizzle with eroticized energy’ (Robertson 1998: 3). Lorie Brau
(1990: 90) describes an ‘adoring’ audience with their ‘beloved’ stars and
observes that ‘female homoeroticism may be the essence of some
spectators’ pleasure in the theatre’. She details the flirtatiousness of the
otokoyaku and their practice, during the performance, of winking at
particularly devoted fans. Berlin (1988: x) refers to ‘the fervour of the
audience’s reaction’: he is interested in the response of the young women
in the first five rows of the auditorium who ‘exhibit an intensity of
involvement and fervency that is extraordinary’ (ibid.: 150). In the late
1970s, he reports, they would ‘wriggle in their seats’, ‘appear to swoon’,
Plate 11 Gone with the Wind, Takarazuka Revue, Kobe, 1988. Photo reproduced with
the permission of Takarazuka Revue.
and scream when the otokoyaku appeared on the ‘silver bridge’ or ginkyou,
the walkway that crosses through the stalls of the auditorium (ibid.: 165).
There is little doubt that the Takarazuka Revue operates as a theatre of
desire, but there is a great deal of argument about the nature of this desire.
In the officially sanctioned accounts provided by the Company, the
infatuation or adoration of the fans is depicted as an adolescent
phenomenon, like an attack of the measles. Older women in the audience,
it is asserted, introduce their daughters to this harmless and innocent
entertainment to provide them with a safe vehicle for erotic feelings. In
contrast, Robertson argues that the eroticism is not restricted to adolescent
girls or unmarried women and fits within a more general pattern of desire
for the androgynous body that appears in various guises in popular
Japanese culture. Our own observations would support this assertion,
because the body of the audience as a whole contributes to the charged
atmosphere of the performance. The catalyst for this pleasurable release of
energy is the otokoyaku. But how does this catalyst work? The
combination of seduction, narrative, kata, and costume are the tools of the
otokoyaku, but why is all this artifice necessary to release the erotic energy
of the audience? To answer this final question, we must turn away from the
body of the audience and the performing body and look at the off-stage
corporeal reality of the body of the performer, particularly the way this
body is represented by the Takarazuka publicity machine and Revue’s
critics.
It would be hard to imagine a profile of a performer more at odds with the
image of the otokoyaku. The company emphasises that these young
women are virginal and unmarried, they come from wealthy families, and
undergo a two-year training that has more in common with a military
academy than a fame school. It is frequently asserted that the otokoyaku,
by increasing their understanding of men, are training to be good wives and
mothers. The performers do not choose whether they will play men or
women in the Revue; instead they are assigned their on-stage gender by the
company management in the second year of their studies. Even when the
otokoyaku become leading performers, they have little or no voice in the
artistic running of the company. In every way these young women who
express an active desire on stage are depicted off-stage as passive,
dependent, and the embodiment of the Takarazuka motto: Be Pure, Be
Right, Be Beautiful. If this image of passive femininity is in any way
symptomatic of traditional gender divisions in Japan, it can be inferred that
in the past, the expression of active desiring positions by the female body
has been subjected to repression. If this is the case, then the female body of
the performer must undergo a complex layering of disguise or masking
before it can overcome social taboos. As the taboos lift, so the layers can
be removed.
The cross-gender mask allows the performer to inhabit an active male
desire, but it is the cross-racial mask that allows her access to the sexual
excess that is so frequently invested in the racial ‘other’. The eroticisation
of the racial ‘other’ is a familiar trope within western forms of
representation and, as we have argued, is tied in western discourse to the
genealogy of racial classification. Hence it should come as no surprise to
find that an equivalent process exists in Japan for the displacing of sexual
pleasure on to the occidental ‘other’. Popular Japanese culture abounds
with eroticised images of occidental men and women in cartoons,
pornography, and advertising: ample proof of the eroticisation of the
western body can be found in the advertisements on any Tokyo subway.
The Hollywood male stars that provide the raw material for the otokoyaku
are invested with an eroticism usually reserved in Anglo-Saxon cultures
for the ‘Latin lover’. There is no doubt that the cross-dressing of the
otokoyaku is in itself erotic, but we would argue that the additional element
of the cross-racial disguise adds a sexuality expelled from the culture and
displaced on to the imaginary of a romantic foreigner.13
Critiques of the Takarazuka Revue contain endless discussions about
whether the audience perceives the star otokoyaku as a lesbian, an
androgen, or a heterosexual woman transgressing gender boundaries, but
it is never suggested that members of the audience believe themselves to
be watching an occidental man. The presence of the female body of the
performer beneath these gender and racial masks is never denied. The
performer and the audience gain their pleasure from the undeniable fact
that it is a sexually differentiated female body that is actively engaged in
the expression of desire. Ultimately the hybrid performing body of the
otokoyaku is merely an intercultural fabrication which functions as a
conduit; it brings together the female body of the performer and the female
body of the audience to join in the illicit pleasure of occupying countless
variations of desiring subjectivities.
The otokoyaku gives pleasure by the release of repression, but the rigid
sex and race binaries that underlie her/his construction are never shaken.
In order to find a performing body that can challenge these binaries, we

must investigate registers of performance that go beyond the purely visual,
and focus on a group of artists whose performing bodies embrace a cultural
nomadism.
THE NOMADS
Conventional notions of spectatorship have dominated our thinking within

this chapter. All of our examples of taxonomic or hybrid theatre have
assumed that the audience is seeing rather than feeling the presence of the
performer’s body. In the final section of this chapter we move away from
this exclusively visual reading of the performing body to explore
interculturalism as it exists within the corporeal presence of the solo artists.
The solo performers Yoko Ashikawa, Tomiko Takai, and Pol Pelletier
transgress corporeal boundaries in their fluid movements between cultural
and gender paradigms.
To escape the tyranny of the visual, we must assert the possibility that the
female performing body can exceed its metaphoric function within the
phallic economy. This function is graphically described by Braidotti
(1991: 157): ‘Woman is other – excluded, alienated, denied, a blank screen
onto which man projects his anguish terror of death, his contempt for, and
fear of, all that is pre-rational and corporeal.’ Useful though such an
understanding of the symbolic representation of the female body has been
to feminist performance theorists – particularly with regard to its function
as a fetish to ward off castration anxiety – it is ultimately self-defeating for
the feminist practitioner. Subjected to the visual tyranny of the
psychoanalytic model, the only strategy of resistance for the female
performing body has been to look back, to address the audience directly.
Rebecca Schneider has taken this version of the ‘laughing Medusa’, the
explicit sighted female body, to its logical conclusion by claiming the
power of double sight for the female performer:
If one could see while being at the same time positioned as seen, there
would be no fear of being blinded when seen, no fear of losing
authority in locating oneself. If the feminine could wield prerogatives
of vision there would be no threat in feminization. Put another way,

there would be no reason to fear ‘castration’. If women can see as well
as be seen, then castration anxiety – fear of loss of the prerogatives of
vision as linked to gender-marked prerogatives – becomes patently
absurd.
(Schneider 1997: 83)
Important though this strategy of defiance is, it still exists within a visual
economy of representation derived from film theory, and therefore lacks
an extensive investigation of the differences that exist between spectators’
perceptions of projected images and audiences’ perceptions of living
performing bodies. Audience members not only see, but sense and feel the
presence of the body. Describing a satisfying theatrical experience they
will say that they were ‘touched’, ‘moved’, or even ‘electrified’ by the
performer. There is a kinaesthetic dimension to live performance that
integrates body-to-body awareness.
In searching for a model to explain this kinaesthetic relationship, we are
drawn to the writings of Deleuze and Guattari and their concept of desiring
machines. Whereas Freud tied desire to a phallic, and therefore visual,
economy through the story of Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari free desire
from this familial plot and allow it to traverse all forms of production. In
their model, desire is no longer internal to the subject, nor is it directed
exclusively to an object. Desiring-production occurs as part of all social
activity, when any part of the body connects with any other part, inside or
outside, and it can be measured by a flow, whether it is of matter, or
information. The parts of two separate bodies are as connected as two parts
of the same body; a body is no longer hermetically sealed within its largest
organ, the skin. The fixed boundaries of corporeal presence are
undermined. Words flow from the mouth to the ear, milk flows from the
breast to the mouth; both of these movements from one body to another
constitute a desiring machine. When this model is applied to the theatre,
flows become sensations, as well as words and information. Of course,
there is an inscribed surface of the body that is read visually, but in addition
there are sounds, affects, and the invisible, but palpable, energies and
intensities. Tomiko Takai, one of our three nomad performers, describes
the relationship between the audience and the performer as a ‘united space’
in which ‘one breathes out, and the other breathes in’ (interview 1998).
By configuring theatre as a desiring machine, which links audience body

parts to parts of the doubled performer/performing body, we can examine
the composition of the flow that moves between them. If this flow is
organised through lines of rigid stratification, the meaning that is created
is homogeneous and will coalesce into fixed identities for all the body parts
that make up the machine. But Deleuze suggests that by avoiding this
ordered stratification, the flow can move along escape lines or lines of
transgression and can open up multiple and heterogeneous meanings and
identifications. Within this concept of escape lines to the multiple lies the
possibility of envisaging a theatre desiring machine that can fragment and
blur sex and race boundaries of fixed corporeality and open up a
multiplicity of positions. But before we can adopt this model, we need to
heed a warning from Rosi Braidotti:
Can there be a ‘multiple sexuality’ without sexual difference? What is

the point of multiplicity if women are absorbed into a new neutral
model that grants them no specificity? The fundamental issue in
women’s demand for sexual difference is the need for everyone,
woman or man, to express a non-phallocratic sexuality. . . . [W]omen
have a profoundly different relation to their bodies than do men: a bio-
cultural difference, or a socio-symbolic one, which has yet to be
assessed positively.
In positing the possibility of a theatrical desiring machine that can create

‘escape lines’ to traverse fixed gender or cultural boundaries, we do not
intend to suggest that there is a universal body on the stage or in the
auditorium. Like Braidotti, we are aware of the dangers of creating
idealistic and utopian models that deny the specificity of corporeal reality.
In theorising the body as a site of intercultural performance, even at the
point where the boundaries of fixed identity are at their most permeable,
we must never lose sight of the sexually differentiated and culturally
specific nature of the bodies in question. To do so would result in the
theorising of a universal performing body, and a universal audience body,
cut loose from the materiality of the flesh.
To pursue the possibility of escape lines while heeding this warning, we
stay in Japan, but move away from the character-based dramas that have
dominated this chapter to look at a form of pure physical expression,

Ankoku Butoh.14
The female butoh body
At first glance it may appear bizarre to include the female butoh body in an
account of interculturalism, particularly as this dance form is usually
defined as uniquely Japanese. Yet the genealogy and practice of butoh is
profoundly intercultural. Butoh was born out of a post-war resistance to the
enforced ‘Americanisation’ of Japan which affected every aspect of the
culture: industry and technology, popular culture, the political system,
even traditional art forms. Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, the butoh
founders, were inspired by western avant-garde artists who were hostile to
bourgeois morality and industrial modernity.15 Moreover, in Japan, the
success of butoh has been tied to the globalisation of the performing arts
markets.16 To date there are companies, run by Japanese and non-Japanese
butoh dancers, in countries as diverse as Argentina, Australia, Canada,
England, France, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the
United States.17
The most intriguing intercultural aspect of Ankoku Butoh is its practice
of metamorphosis, a technique that can be described as the engine of this
performance ‘desiring machine’. Hijikata, who invented this technique,
directed and choreographed the early works of Yoko Ashikawa and
Tomiko Takai. Before we can consider the solo performances of these two
women, we need to ask why the performing body that Hijikata created, and
in particular the female performing body, was perceived by critics as
‘beyond cultural fixations and social meanings’ (Ko Murobushi cited in
Kuniyoshi 1997). And if this body did transcend cultural fixations, what
can it tell us about the possible shape of an intercultural body and its
reception by an audience? To answer these questions, we must retrace the
steps that led Hijikata from the art of metamorphosis, to the feminine inside
his own body, and finally, to the body of the female performer.
Hijikata believed that the performing body was capable of transforming
itself into any organic or non-organic matter because ‘there is a small
universe in the body’ (cited in Takai, interview 1998). This did not mean
that the dancer only observed, imitated, or mimed animate or inanimate
objects; rather the dancer imagined the specific nature of matter – its inner
essence – and allowed this to permeate the performing body.18 It can be
argued that this transformation technique is predicated on a
phenomenological account of reality. Certainly Hijikata believed that ‘if
we, humans, learn to see things from the perspective of an animal, an
insect, or even an inanimate object, the road trodden everyday is alive [so]
. . . we should value everything’ (Viala and Masson-Sekine 1988: 60). The
butoh dancer thinks, feels, and moves her way into the creation of a
performing body that encapsulates the essence of the observed object. Yet
it is not the moment at which the transformation is completed that was of
importance to Hijikata, but the indeterminacy of the performing body as it
flowed between the embodiment of two distinct states. His stated aim was
the fragmentation of time and being, and he achieved this by presenting his
audience with a series of physical transformations without causal
connections or a linear narrative.
Through the process of metamorphosis, Hijikata sought to undermine
the basis of individualism and the rational subjectivity he associated with
western philosophy and imposed modernity. He attempted to eradicate a
fixed and unified subject position by constantly transforming his
performing body. To some extent his theories paralleled those of the
European avant-garde: like the German expressionists, he was drawn to
the ecstatic, dreams, and the surreal in his attack on rational subjectivity. In
the early choreography for his own and other male bodies, the dance is
violent and homoerotic; the sado-masochism attempts to break the mould
of the male body. In these performances Hijikata punished his own flesh in
an attempt to obliterate its existence; to eradicate the unified male subject,
the body itself had to be destroyed. In relation to this work, Takai reports
Hijikata as saying that Christ, with his suffering and humiliation, was his
‘greatest rival’ (interview 1998).
In flight from the discredited construction of masculinity that typified the
war years, and the imposition of western individualism that characterised
the Occupation, Hijikata turned first to a pre-modern construction of
masculinity encapsulated in the writings of Yukio Mishima. From this
homoerotic world of poet warriors, Hijikata turned increasingly to the
marginalised figures of Japanese history: the criminals, the diseased and
deformed, the burakumin underclass responsible for every abject task, the
blind shaman musicians, the geishas, and the actors known as kawara
mono or riverside beggars. This search for the body of an ‘other’ which
could express his aesthetic ultimately led Hijikata to the female body and
to the feminine within himself. He believed men were ‘prisoners of the
logical world’ whereas women were ‘born with the ability to experience
the illogical part of reality and are consequently capable of incarnating the
illogical side of dance’ (cited in Viala and Masson-Sekine 1988: 84). From
the mid-1960s, Hijikata began to grow his hair, in memory of his eldest
sister who had been sold into prostitution when he was still a child. He
wrote:
I keep one of my sisters alive in my body when I am absorbed in

creating a butoh piece, [and] she tears off the darkness of my body and
eats more than is necessary of it – when she stands up in my body, I sit
down impulsively.
(ibid.: 73)
This strong female identification is repeated in Ohno’s work:
When you are in your mother’s womb, your mother is moulding and
shaping your feelings. When you are born, you become an individual
with an independent existence. When she dies, you are again subject
to her sub-conscious influences.
(cited in Philp 1986: 63)
In their collaborations Hijikata encouraged Ohno to assume a female
performing body: he directed Admiring La Argentina, Ohno’s most
famous solo work inspired by memories of the Spanish flamenco dancer,
Antonia Merce; and after reading Genet’s novel, Notre Dame des Fleurs,
he told Ohno ‘you will be Divine, you will be a transvestite’ (cited in Viala
and Masson-Sekine 1988: 34). From this initial fascination with the
feminine inside his own body, and the creation of female performing
bodies to clothe the male dancer, Hijikata became convinced that it was the
female body of the performer that could best express his art of
metamorphosis.
In the mid-1960s Hijikata began exploring the choreographic limits of
flexibility in the female body with a small group of dancers including Yoko
Ashikawa and Tomiko Takai. Together they developed a series of kata,
many of which are still present in Takai’s choreography: warau hana, the
smiling flower; kanzashi o sasu, placing an ornament in the hair; senkoh
no kemuri, the wafting smoke of incense; han-nya, the demon mask; and
hangan bishoh, the female demon’s smile. The kata gave butoh form, but
were never allowed to become fixed or repetitive. Takai remembers
Hijikata telling the dancers:
Forms exist so that we can forget them. . . . We should shed our skins
like snakes, to emerge from what we have learned. Everything should
become our own creation, not just a repetition of what we have been
taught.
(interview 1998)
A number of extraordinary female performers emerged from Hijikata’s
studio in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Emotion and Metaphysics, or
Keijijyogaku, presented by Takai in 1967, was one of the first works by a
female butoh dancer directed by Hijikata. This title, chosen by Hijikata,
was used by Takai for eight of the solo works she choreographed in the next
30 years. Takai wrote:
My search in dance is to catch that momentary vacuum in the body

after the wind passes through it. I select a season, and take the clouds,
the rain, and the snow into my body. The smile of an old woman, who
has erased passion, becomes a stone or dew. . . . I want to float like the
seed of a dandelion. How do I dance? I cannot choose ‘how’ anymore.
The choice never comes. All that is visible in the light I have left are
the worn-out soles of my feet.
(personal correspondence to the authors, 25 September 1998)
A year after the performance of Keijijyogaku in 1967, Hijikata directed
Ashikawa in Cat – a dance to pinch a fish, a dance to eat rice from a
cauldron. In Ashikawa’s performing body, Hijikata found the perfect
vehicle for his art of metamorphosis. The critical literature on butoh
suggests that their collaboration reached its peak in Ashikawa’s solo work
performed as part of the ‘Ma-Space/Time’ exhibition at the Autumn
Festival in Paris in 1977. The critical response was overwhelming and it
appears that the impact of the performance was profoundly visceral:
Alone on stage, accompanied by silence or the music of a koto, she

changes substance – now flower, now stone, now water – endlessly
creating a multiple and polymorphic body in a mysterious ceremony
Plate 12 Tomiko Takai in Nobana No Tsuyu, Adelaide, 1999. Photo credit: David Wil-
son.
never to be forgotten by the few spectators fortunate enough to have

witnessed it.
(Viala and Masson-Sekine 1988: 88)
The French critic Alain Jouffroy wrote of the same performance:
Ashikawa’s powers of communication are so intense that spectators

felt their bodies tremble, and tears flowed unsummoned. Everything
explodes at once. The ruling character of the exhibition – discipline,
brevity, and mild reserve – flees in the face of explosion, shudders of
fear, the blinking of eyes suddenly exposed to burning sunlight, the
palpitations of the heart in the grip of an oppressive emptiness.
Everyone present experiences the real feeling of aloneness, and
isolation such as they have never felt before.
(Jouffroy in Kuniyoshi 1997)
Ashikawa asks her audience to enter a flow in which her performing body
defies signifying boundaries. She is not demonstrating that these bodily
boundaries are constructed by assuming a number of fixed identities
during the course of an evening; instead her body is in a state of constant
flux. Her body moves seamlessly through categories that are usually
presented as fixed and stable. Inscription traverses the body’s surface,
while the energies and intensities of the performing body give it a depth of
field. If the audience registers the body’s journey through time and space
and these constantly changing states, it is as if the body is moving in and
out of focus. In the most extreme version of this shape-changing art,
Ashikawa provokes just enough associative connections to risk the
audience locating her in a fixed identity, before her body blurs and sets off
on a different path. She says of her dance:
Butoh is not something you can do casually. The body must be in a

constant state of change. I want the body to be reduced to a single core
of spirit, to disappear, to be beautiful even in contortion. I believe you
must be very harsh, very disciplined in finding the body’s ideal
expression.
(cited in Butoh 1993)
Butoh is credited with giving back ‘nomadic happiness to the body’

(Murobushi cited in Kuniyoshi 1997), and Hijikata believed that his dance
could break up the principle of individuation. In order to achieve shifting

perspectives, it is conceivable that the butoh performer uses the perceptual
system that has been theorised by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-
Ponty as the postural schema. Merleau-Ponty (1968) argued that we have
an internalised sense of bodily alignment to our environment that orients
us to surrounding material objects. This postural schema is a perceptual
rather than a visual image that we hold of our physical reality: it is built up
through our awareness of our own muscularity, motor capacities, and
energies, and it draws on our sensory responses to stimuli and our physical
understanding of emotional states. We interpret the actions and intentions
of other bodies through our knowledge of our own corporeal reality. In
other words, we read the intensities, intentions, energies, and traces on the
other body by replaying them imaginatively within our own, and through
this imagined physical mimesis we interpret the other’s actions. The butoh
dancer uses an equivalent system to engage in the art of metamorphosis;
the body of the performer reflects, observes, almost meditates on the
animate or inanimate objects that are, quite literally, the subject-matter of
her representation. The body of the performer must imagine her way into
the representation, and then use her performing body to sense the pathway
that will allow her to transform into the next embodied state.
To follow this metamorphosis from one form of matter to another, the
audience cannot rely on a narrative or an iconic system of representation.
If members of the audience wish to engage kinaesthetically with the
performance, they have no choice but to employ their postural schema to
interpret the body on the stage. By observing the energies, traces,
emotions, and physical contortions on the performing body, and replaying
them imaginatively through their own postural schema, members of the
audience can experience the dancer’s journey from state to state along the
pathways of indeterminacy. The intense physiological reaction to
Ashikawa’s work would indicate that at a visceral level, audience
members disturb their own corporeal boundaries by physically reading her
performing body. In Ashikawa’s performances, conventional visual
spectatorship breaks down as the performing body begins to create ‘escape
lines’ or ‘lines of transgression’ through the process of metamorphosis.
The body of the audience, or rather the bodies that make up the audience,
read the performance through the energies and physical states that they
sense emanating from the performing body. Through this physical
mimesis, the bodies in the audience and the doubled performer/

performing bodies on the stage become multiple parts in a Deleuzian
desiring machine.
However, the danger in advocating a visceral reading that spans cultural
difference is that the spectre of the amorphous universal body appears. To
rescue us from this possibility, we shall return to the corporeal reality of the
body of the performer. Hijikata and Ashikawa created an art of
metamorphosis, but they never denied the specificity of the body of the
performer. The kata developed in Hijikata’s studio were based precisely on
the anatomical specificity of the female body; these movements were
grounded in the muscle and bone structure. The reality of the body of the
performer is always present within a specific cultural habitus, even though
the performing body is in a state of constant flux. Hijikata sought to release
in his dance the deep consciousness of the body that can only come from a
corporeal reality tied to both time and place. The bodies that fascinated him
belonged to the rural poor of Akita, a northern province on the island of
Honshu, where he had spent his childhood. The most obvious
characteristics of this body were the ganimata or bow-legged walk, and the
namba movement, apparently symptomatic of rice-planting cultures, in
which the arm and leg of the same side of the body move together. This was
the raw material or culturally specific flesh that Hijikata was moulding, but
the forms he gave it were inspired by diverse sources. These were the
images that became the raw materials for the choreographic patterns. In
Hijikata’s studio, they created a dance form based on the specificity of the
Japanese female body out of artistic influences that were thoroughly
intercultural. Takai still possesses some of the scrapbooks that Hijikata
assembled when he was working on the kata for the female performing
body: they are filled with reproductions of paintings of bodies, animals,
and landscapes by an extraordinary range of artists including Bacon,
Picasso, Turner, Brueghel, Klimt, de Kooning, and Goya. The objective
may have been to undermine the rigid boundaries that delineated identity
in both the audience and the performer, but neither Hijikata nor his dancers
ever denied the materiality of female Japanese bodies or their cultural
habitus (Takai, interview 1998).
For readers who are dubious about any female performing body
constructed or inspired by male artists, it must be said that Hijikata was not
a feminist: in fact Frida Kahlo is the only female western artist who appears
in his scrapbooks. Hijikata’s revolt against modernity acknowledged the
sexually differentiated body, but his approach was deeply impregnated by

the contradictions surrounding gender identity in post-war Japan. He
rejected the constructions of masculinity associated with the defeat of
militarism and the Occupation, but his working relationships with
Ashikawa and Takai were still patriarchal. Takai describes with some
humour life at Hijikata’s studio, where she and Ashikawa were expected
not only to dance but also to cook and clean. In order to find a resolutely
feminist performing body, which employs an intercultural process to
create a theatrical desiring machine, we must leave post-war Japan and
find a performing body forged out of the second wave of the women’s
movement in the west.
Pol Pelletier
Pol Pelletier is a French-Canadian solo performer and playwright; she was

a co-founder of the Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes in Montréal, and
worked as the director of the company from 1979 to 1985. In many ways
her work echoes the butoh experience: she has created a theatre desiring
machine which binds the performing body to the body of the audience
through a ‘carnal, psycho-physical link’.19 Her work is predicated on the
notion of the transformation of the performing body, but she employs an
intercultural body practice which never denies the corporeal reality of her
French-Canadian identity. Like Hijikata, Pelletier believes that the body
holds a deep consciousness of its genetic past: ‘You cannot leave your
culture. Your culture is how you move. You carry your ancestors with you.’
Transformation into the performing body involves the abandonment of the
everyday body. However, in this altered state ‘you have access to your own
culture, and to your own culture’s collective unconscious’. In defining her
cultural habitus, Pelletier includes her identity as a feminist and as a theatre
practitioner. Joie, one of her major solo works,
[tells] the story, in the feminine voice, of 10 years in the life of a

woman of the theatre. . . . The theatrical dream which I lived
throughout the 1970s was characterised by the following elements:
faith in a better world, a fierce desire to change life and people.
(Pelletier cited in 3IWPC 1994a: 41)
At the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference, Pelletier’s

presentation included a demonstration of her transformation into the
‘performing body’: the body she believes is necessary for ‘seducing,
fascinating, and truly connecting with other human beings’. She explained
that she reaches this altered state through an intercultural body practice that
combines techniques from Bali, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, North
America, and Taiwan. Her work has been significantly influenced by
Eugenio Barba’s anthropological observations regarding the physical
dynamics of performance. Her performing body has a flexible and
sensitive spine, achieves a state of excitement or danger through a lack of
equilibrium or psychic imbalance, is always pulled by two or more
opposing forces, and expends high levels of energy. She practises a form
of Indian meditation to silence the ‘chattering in her head’ and to discipline
her mind to exist in the actual moment of performance. Pelletier formalised
these physical and psychological dynamics of performance into a training
system, and established a ‘Dojo pour acteurs’ in Montréal. In choosing this
title for her training school, she acknowledged the Japanese influences in
her work and asserted the need for an actor training programme that was as
physically and mentally rigorous as the Dojo for Zen meditation and
martial arts. Her objective is to assist actors to achieve a physical
transformation into a hyper-conscious state: ‘I tell actors – if people do not
fall in love with you, you’re not doing your job right.’
Although Pelletier has never studied butoh, one of the key examples she
uses when describing the state of hyper-consciousness in the performing
body is Kazuo Ohno:
I don’t think anyone who sees Kazuo Ohno has a doubt about the
existence of the soul or the link to the cosmos. This man is 94 and he
plays a woman – he is a woman. You sit there and cry watching him.
It’s not necessarily sad . . . he plays a little girl, he’s running, with his
wrinkled knees, he plays a baby . . . the absolute essence of being a
baby or child. . . . It’s a total connection to the roots of life.
Pelletier admires Ohno because of the link or tie he creates with his
audience. If there is one element that she strives for in all her solo work,
it is the creation of a tangible connection between her performing body
and the body of the audience: ‘I’m talking, there’s an audience, I’m
Plate 13 Pol Pelletier in Joie, Montréal, Canada, 1993. Photo credit: Fabienne Sallin.
literally going out there, I’m literally, literally touching them.’ She
describes her theatrical desiring machine as a ‘pure energetic thing’ that
connects each member of the audience and causes them to ‘vibrate in
unison’. She visualises threads coming out of her body, she can feel these
threads connecting back to her, and she ‘can see the energy’: ‘This is not
cerebral stuff but a joined physical and psychic energy.’ Pelletier never
implies that there is a universal body of the audience. She has toured
Australia, Europe, and South America, and finds the physical dynamics of
audiences, and theatre venues, culturally specific. In Paris, she performed
to an initially unresponsive audience of 300 people and used so much
energy to reach the audience that she claims she cracked the cement wall
at the back of the theatre:
I’m a very strong person, but I’ve never done that. The energy, the
whole theatre was full of it, and after an hour on stage, a wall
crumbled. Only then did they start communicating with me. And I
thought, come on! . . . The next day, it was exactly the same, it was like
lifting a car.
Just as Pelletier recognises the cultural specificity of her audiences, she

never disguises her French-Canadian corporeal reality. Her
interculturalism is invisible to the naked eye. It exists, not in the layering
of cultural signifiers on the performing body, but in performance methods
drawn from non-western training systems that she uses to focus her
physical energy and propel her performing body into heightened states.
This technique of visceral communication creates a desiring machine
through which the energy dynamic of the performance can be experienced
by the audience in the form of bodily sensation.
Our investigations into the solo work of Pelletier, Takai, and Ashikawa
have taken us a long way from the global arts markets, where intercultural
performing bodies are recognised either as personifying authentic cultural
essences in taxonomic systems, or as visible hybrids created out of the
layering and combining of disparate cultural signs and symbols. We have
argued that in taxonomic theatres the body of the performer and the
performing body are merged, and that the process of recognition and
identification of cultural difference encourages the body of the audience to
solidify the boundaries that delineate self from other. Rigid boundaries of
cultural difference begin to break down in the productions we have
identified as aesthetic hybrids, but in unpredictable ways. Theatre artists
from all cultures find enlarging their repertoire of theatrical signification
stimulating and many indulge in the pleasures of intercultural bricolage. It
is impossible to summarise all the probable audience readings of aesthetic
hybridities, but some general points are worth making. The processes of
identification and recognition that mark taxonomic theatre are still at work
in the hybrid genre, yet combinations of disparate elements within the
single performing body can challenge notions of cultural authenticity. A
further distinction can be made between the readings of organic hybridity
that reflect the corporeal realities of the bodies of many bicultural
performers and the artificial hybrid performing bodies created by
monocultural artists. The former will probably be read as a postcolonial or
a migrant arts practice, the latter as fantasy creations constructed from non-
contiguous semiological material. These fantasy beings can serve many
functions. In the Takarazuka Revue, for example, the otokoyaku is
designed to stimulate an erotic response in the body of the audience, but
her ability to create new desiring subject positions is predicated upon the
sex and race binaries specific to her cultural habitus.
Finally, in moving beyond hybridities, we have suggested that the
performing body can still be described as an intercultural site even when it
lacks visible traces of an intercultural performance practice. Nomad
performing bodies unsettle the fixed boundaries of their audience through
techniques of transformation and metamorphosis. In a Deleuzian sense,
they establish desiring machines that connect the doubled performer/
performing body to the body of the audience. In describing their desiring
machines, our nomad performers speak of a single organism breathing, of
touching and being touched by the body of the audience, of connecting
threads that link at psychic and physical levels. The construction of these
machines has been intercultural, and the machines have drawn on
performance and arts practices from across the world. They share a
common objective to undermine the rigid boundaries that define the body
of the audience, and to open up a kinaesthetic relationship that can
challenge fixed corporeal boundaries. Yet at no point do these nomadic
bodies deny their own corporeal materialism either in terms of their
sexually differentiated bodies or their personal ethos. Through their

exploration of diverse body states, they offer the body of the audience
access to multiple identities and a fascinating journey through a labyrinth
of indeterminacy. By suggesting that an intercultural performing body can
be defined through kinaesthetic as opposed to visual or linguistic
communication, we hope to open up new theoretical avenues for the body
as a site for intercultural women’s performance.
Chapter 5
Intercultural markets
The female body and censorship
The hallmark of commoditization is exchange. But exchange opens the

way to trafficking, and trafficking in human attributes carries with it a
special opprobrium.
(Kopytoff 1986: 85)
The world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They

create a framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed.
They open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused. The
entertainment industry facilitates this by elevating people to the level of
commodities. They submit to being manipulated while enjoying their
alienation from themselves and others.
(Benjamin 1978: 152)
The boundaries and issues of interculturalism and multiculturalism can

only be considered today within the context of the specific geopolitics of
the cultures involved. A multicultural festival may be considered
‘successful’ in Los Angeles because of the particular cultural and
political environment of that region. A cultural festival in Sharjah
[United Arab Emirates] will not be accorded the same ‘freedom’. This is
a sobering reality for the third-world theatre scholar and practitioner.
(George 1994: 148)
Although most assessments of theatre are preoccupied with aesthetics and,

increasingly, the political implications of aesthetic choices, we have found
it necessary to broaden our perspective from the creation of performance
to its distribution in a global context. The distribution of theatre is subject
to the economic rules that apply to any commodity, particularly the laws of
international economic exchange in a globalised world. While many

critics do recognise that the available resources to produce new theatre
determine the type and scale of theatre produced, and many performers
involved in the making of theatre necessarily heed the dual roles of
production and distribution, few extend that economic argument to its
social relations. The practicalities of packaging and marketing theatre can
profoundly alter the potentially delicate collaborative work accomplished
in the rehearsal room. This chapter focuses on interculturalism’s markets
and the difficulties a number of women performers have faced in their
attempts to engage with those markets, which have traditionally been
controlled by men. Inevitably, then, a question of agency arises when
women performers sell their art. The question becomes particularly urgent
when the explicit female body – or the body that consciously and
conspicuously displays itself in performance as female – enters the market.
The explicit body in performance disrupts accepted behaviour models for
women, both on and off the stage.
We are using Rebecca Schneider’s concept of the explicit body, a body
which ‘in representation is foremost a site of social markings, physical
parts, and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, sexuality – all of
which bear ghosts of historical meaning, markings delineating social
hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege’ (Schneider 1997: 2). Schneider
reads in explicit body performance ‘an effort to make apparent the link
between ways of seeing the body and ways of structuring desire according
to the logic of commodity capitalism’ (ibid.: 5). She ‘look[s] at the ways in
which perspectival vision and commodity fetishism are played back across
the body as stage’ (ibid.: 6–7). We might ask why the explicit female body
is a site of social anxiety when, as Lynda Nead argues, ‘[t]he framed image
of the female [nude] body . . . is an icon of western culture’ (Nead 1992: 1).
The very fact that this image is ‘framed’ as an icon of High Art codes the
nude as a means of maintaining patriarchal authority over women. Yet
Nead explains that there is a potential danger associated with the female
nude:
The female nude marks both the internal limit of art and the external
limit of obscenity. . . . It is the internal structural link that holds art and
obscenity and an entire system of meaning together. And whilst the
Intercultural markets 153
female nude can behave well, it involves a risk and threatens to

destabilize the very foundations of our sense of order.
(ibid.: 25)
The explicit performing body recognises this structural link, and its
performance actively attempts to destabilise a sense of order that denies a
complex and empowering subjectivity for women. The regulations
associated with High Art do, however, continue to intervene in the
presentation of explicit body performance, particularly in the international
marketplace.
We are especially interested in the contradiction between women with
control over their performances and women without such control. In our
consideration of the large international arts market that engages in the trade
of women’s performing bodies well beyond arts festivals, we draw some
parallels between women who use explicit body practices in their artwork
and women who are instructed to use explicit body practices in their
performance. The difference is determined by who conceives and controls
the performance and its cultural context.
International performance tends to be marked by two opposing poles
which are two key distribution networks used by performing artists
globally: ‘high culture’ (best known in terms of international arts festivals
comprising events like chamber music, classical ballet, theatre produced
by national companies, and many examples of contemporary art) and an
entertainment ‘underworld’ at the opposite end of the spectrum (the
domain of dancers, strippers, nightclub performers, and, at the extreme,
trafficked women whose entry to the world of performance is by means of
illegally procured dancers’ visas). The entertainment underworld can be
seen to work in much the same way as the trade in high art, as we
demonstrate later in this chapter in the discussion of trafficked performers.
Our main interest is in international arts festivals, which can mark the
epitome of women’s intercultural performance, and, more practically,
provide access to funding for expensive performance genres which
involve collaboration by artists from different countries. Intercultural
theatre is a lucrative drawcard for international arts festivals, particularly
when one of the intercultural partners can claim an ‘exotic’ background.
But before we consider how such a market works, we must clarify the three
different cultural contexts in which these festivals – and the performances
within them – are situated. Each is inflected with specific gender attitudes
which determine the representational freedom of women performers. The
simplest is the cultural milieu or social sphere in which a festival is located.

This includes the (often large) proportion of a festival city’s population that
may not participate directly in the festival but can affect and be affected by
the workings of the festival. The second is the particular dominant cultural
heritage of the country holding the festival. This cultural context tends to
be defined by national borders and/or ethnic categories. As an entity, it
tends to be celebrated at festivals. The distinction we are making between
the first and second contexts is between a general social order on the one
hand and a specific ethnic/racial identification on the other. While the
population in both locations may overlap substantially, the operations of
each of these two contexts (especially in relation to the third context) can
be quite divergent. The third context is ‘high culture’ or art forms
perceived to be artistically superior to more populist genres like cinema or
standup comedy or performances at fringe festivals. Each of these cultural
contexts can be termed ‘culture’, and each plays a significant role in the
social and aesthetic framing of arts festivals. We refer to the first as cultural
milieu, the second as culture, and the third as Culture.
The intersection of these three cultural contexts is not always
straightforward, and a performance’s interplay within these contexts can
result in aesthetic and/or legal difficulties for artists, artistic directors, and
audiences. Interventionary censorship and/or regulation can also be the
result, raising questions concerning levels of control that women have over
their performing bodies, how they use them in representation, how these
representations are sold, and the varying forms of censorship they
encounter. An ill-defined panoply of regulations and representational
dilemmas shapes the artistic product distributed in the entertainment
market. The regulations, which tend to stipulate what can and cannot be
performed, are not necessarily transparent. This lack of transparency
disguises possible differences in the agency allowed to the male and
female body. The regulations can be set by the laws of the country in which
the art is performed, or by what appear to be nebulous social rules of taste
and decency.
Following a discussion of the operation of arts festivals generally, we
argue that festivals’ socio-political setting continues to have a significant
impact on the framing, marketing, and distribution of the female
performing body in the international arts market. The first two examples
are the arrest of actors from the Ilotopie group and Annie Sprinkle’s
constant flirtation with censorship. We develop this argument further
through a discussion of the opposite end of the performing spectrum,

trafficked performers who work in the underworld of international
performance and whose artists’ visas keep them just within the bounds of
national and international law. Finally, we consider the intersection of all
three cultural contexts in the marketing of an image of the Virgin Mary to
advertise the 1998 Adelaide Festival.
ARTS FESTIVALS: CELEBRATING OR

REDISTRIBUTING CULTURE?
Social structures like the museum and the exhibition have been extensively
studied by historians and cultural analysts, but the comparable structure of
the arts festival remains largely outside theoretical attention. We cannot
offer an economic analysis of arts festivals in this chapter, but we can
provide a sense of their regulatory and representational significance for
intercultural performance. Arts festivals, which combine local and
international performances to excite and entertain a given audience, have
the ability to compress time and geography, leaving patrons to take
advantage of as many performances as ticket-prices (often high), time, and
endurance allow. The public relations machines surrounding arts festivals
promise entertainment, excitement, and evenings that audiences will not
forget. Contemporary arts festivals bring performances from a variety of
countries to one place, introducing audiences to different cultural
artefacts, while artists from a range of cultures meet and may be involved
in productions with each other. Usually, at least one large mainstage
performance in any given arts festival will produce the relatively standard
intercultural format of actors from different cultures performing together.
The origin of festivals lies with commerce, in the centuries-old tradition
of touring theatrical productions. Most European theatre traditions began
with travelling troupes, but from the eighteenth century onwards, touring
developed a political dimension and operated as an extension of
colonisation: the centre toured to the colonies, replicating the metropolis
touring to the provinces, and, in the process, articulated the colonial
power’s theatrical and behavioural standards. In today’s labour-intensive
theatre industry, where the time and effort exerted in the creation of work
must be recouped by maximising audiences, artists move to the peripheries
in search of new audiences once they have exhausted the audience base at
their centre, rather like their antecedents. The costs of production can be
amortised through syndicating the artistic product over two or three
festivals. The publicity and marketing machines connected to these events
attract far wider coverage than a one-off marketing campaign can ever
achieve.
The best-known festivals include Edinburgh and Avignon, both of which
began shortly after the Second World War with a view to uniting European
countries post-war. Edinburgh in particular was chosen because its civic
buildings were not bombed during the war. Avignon’s location outside
Paris also reinforces a non-metropolitan ethos. Edinburgh attracts
audiences of 300,000, while Avignon maintains a smaller profile with
audiences of over 100,000. Arts festivals of all types proliferate around the
world these days, but some of the key festivals include Adelaide (100,000),
Hong Kong (100,000), Singapore (70,000), and Tokyo (90,000), each
varying in numbers of productions and lengths of runs. Most festivals are
funded by a combination of government subsidy, corporate sponsorship,
and ticket sales, the proportions differing from country to country.
Governments recognise that festivals bring to their cities/ states/
countries artists and tourists who will spend money not just on theatre
tickets but also on accommodation, restaurants, associated exhibitions and
tourist venues, souvenir shopping, and, in all likelihood, follow-on
tourism. Festivals have the potential to generate considerable revenue for
local economies and, as a result, the often large public subsidy makes good
political sense. The continued success of a country’s or region’s tourism
industry can depend heavily on such festivals, and the effects of these
economic considerations are often apparent in festivals’ merchandising
and promoting of associated events. Performance groups who tour
overseas to arts festivals are also frequently invested with promotional
duties: they often wear the ambassadorial and tourism mantles of their
home countries. Other important factors that differ from country to country
include the breakdown between government funding for festivals and
funding for other arts ventures (and the competition between these varied
groups), and the elaborate funding formulae that may determine which
productions tour from city to city within a country, and which productions
tour overseas. Most festivals rely heavily on government subsidy because
box-office returns alone cannot support the cost of production and
distribution.
Corporate sponsorship is also essential to festivals, and sponsors vie to

display their logos in association with prestigious productions. Even the
names of many festivals recognise major corporate sponsors, such as The
Telstra Adelaide Festival and The Standard Bank National Arts Festival in
Grahamstown, South Africa.1 While few people would admit that such
sponsorship affects the artistic choices in any festival, these economic
considerations determine how much money is available in the first place,
and, therefore, the scale of the productions which will be booked, for how
long, and from how far away. The larger arts festivals tend to be
competitive marketing and re-distribution enterprises. The variety of
regulations that governments and corporate sponsorship in effect place on
festivals (whether acknowledged or not) influences the definitions of
‘culture’ that festivals promulgate.
Arts festivals are often assumed to be celebrations of culture (and
Culture). Festivals isolate, frame, translate, and market culture as
exoticised difference by producing, re-distributing, and selling
performance. Ivan Karp (1991a: 283) maintains that festivals contest the
‘ownership of culture and how it is defined’. The ‘living’ quality to art in
festivals – in which performances are composed of live actors, unlike
cinema or painting, for instance – contributes to the myth that performers
embody culture.
On the stage, culture as difference quickly becomes a commodity that
operates slightly differently from the tourist souvenir, or any tangible
consumer item. A culturally identified commodity product in performance
sometimes comes to be recognised as a metonym for a culture. While a
representation can ‘stand for’ that which it denotes in a metaphoric
fashion, it can also ‘stand in for’, or occlude, that which it might otherwise
denote, metonymically. For example, wayang kulit outside Bali comes to
mean ‘Balinese performance’ to the virtual exclusion of any other type of
performance. Kathakali dance, one of numerous Indian dance techniques
and one specifically associated with a particular region in India, frequently
comes to represent ‘Indian’ dance or performance to non-Indians. In both
instances, the cultural ‘essence’ of the other tends to be extracted for
western consumption. This ‘check-mark’ approach to cultures on stage
recalls the taxonomic performing body that we described in the previous
chapter. In the context of the international festival, such a taxonomic
exercise often obscures any awareness of cultural specificity or identity
politics. This inevitable commodification process reduces culture to an

ever-shrinking signified that begins to resemble a sound-bite. Once such a
sound-bite becomes circulated widely enough, it takes on the role of
‘culture’ in a variation on Baudrillard’s (1988: 166) simulacrum. If it
becomes unalterably associated with a culture, to the exclusion of other
markers of the culture, its commodification is complete until the process
begins again, shifting and again shrinking the ‘meaning’ of a culture to a
new marketable entity that possesses novelty value.
There is a factor of recognition associated with these ‘exotic’ signs: once
recognised, they are ‘understood’, but they are thereby emptied of any
signification as difference. While the signs that mark a culture in a form of
‘international sign language’ are useful to a degree, they become
meaningless very quickly.2 There is no room for the negotiation of identity
politics in this cultural sign language, even though all the performers
inevitably occupy multiple subject positions. Arts festivals tend to tour
productions around the world to maximise investment and amortise risk,
resulting in audiences being fed a relatively common diet of theatre that
appears to have a global seal of approval. Festivals’ manipulation of art and
culture culminates, for Adorno, in the generation of a cultural shell.
Festivals, he argues,
are all embraced and controlled by a single comprehensive

organization. . . . Administrative reason which takes control of them
and rationalizes them banishes festivity from them. This results in an
intensification into the grotesque which cannot escape the notice of
the more sensitive nerves present at these so-called cultural offerings
– even at those of the avant-garde. In an effort to preserve a feeling of
contrast to contemporary streamlining, culture is still permitted to
drive about in a type of gypsy wagon; the gypsy wagons, however, roll
about secretly in a monstrous hall, a fact which they do not themselves
notice.
(Adorno 1991: 102)
While Adorno’s depiction of festivals is very bleak, artists are generally

obliged to continue to perform in them for economic reasons: the labour-
intensive nature of live performance makes mass markets, touring, and
subsidy necessary to survival. Festivals continue to thrive, if at the expense
of local art that is not (yet) part of an international touring circuit. Most arts
festivals set out to present intercultural performance as a showcase of how

cultures might intersect and interact, but the underlying financially driven
structure of any festival and the resulting commodification of its art forms
generally compromise the best intentions to promote interculturalism.
The performances in the international markets that we describe in the
following sections demonstrate a clash between at least two of the cultural
contexts on the one hand, and explicit body performance on the other. Our
efforts to determine the nature of these clashes assist us in delineating the
parameters of arts festivals and international performance, and
particularly how they affect the production, marketing, and distribution of
women’s intercultural performance. The analysis that follows begins with
the problems of distributing and framing explicit female body
performance in the international market, which is necessarily
intercultural. We continue to add different specific cultural contexts and
performative sites that embody the argument that women performing in
the international market are constantly at risk of sanction.
FRAMING PERFORMANCE IN AN
INTERNATIONAL MARKET
Ilotopie and Annie Sprinkle
Both performances outlined in this section conflicted with the cultural

milieu of the festivals in which they performed, challenging cultural
assumptions about the female body. Furthermore, both involved women
artists choosing to employ explicit body practices, Ilotopie, a French
company composed of five men and one woman, was not prepared for their
reception in Adelaide. The troupe brought their street theatre performance,
Les Gens de Couleurs [Coloured People], to the Adelaide Festival in 1992,
following a successful season at the Perth Festival several weeks earlier.
Their eye-catching work frequently uses brightly coloured body paint or
foam, drawing attention to the performing body. For this performance, the
actors, who had performed around the world, were completely covered in
very thick, brightly coloured body paint and wore only G-strings. In their
performance, they walked through various public areas in central
Adelaide, enacting a sedate, silent piece for approximately 90 minutes in
which they left human ‘traces’ such as handprints and footprints to foster
reconsiderations of humanity and peace after the performance was

completed.
At their first performance in the Adelaide city centre, the female artist,
Myriam Prijent, was arrested for ‘behaving in an offensive manner in
public’ (The Advertiser 1992a: 1) because she was bare-breasted. One of
the men in the company, Raymond Blard, was also arrested for hindering
police, resisting arrest, and damaging police clothing; the latter charge
arose from the transfer of some of Blard’s body paint to police uniforms in
the process of his arrest. Blard was arrested because of his alleged actions,
while Prijent was arrested solely for the display of her body. The police,
who asserted that unnamed members of the public had complained about
the troupe, disregarded the fully clothed stage manager equipped with a
walkie-talkie who tried unsuccessfully to intervene in the arrests.
Communication between the festival and the police was thus made
virtually impossible. As to prior warning, Rob Brookman, the artistic
director of the Festival in 1992, exclaimed following the arrests that he did
not feel such a warning was necessary, because ‘I did not, in my wildest
imaginings, think this [the arrests] could happen’ (ibid.). Members of the
company had only encountered difficulty with the law once before, at a
performance in Canada, where they were arrested on charges of indecent
behaviour and found not guilty. In Adelaide, the charges were dropped the
following day. Concerns regarding whether other performances at the
Festival might also be censored were raised by Festival guest performers.
The law regarding the prohibition of bare breasts in Adelaide is only
selectively enforced. It is imperative in Aboriginal women’s performances
and ceremonies that the women expose their ochre-painted breasts, which
are arguably less concealed by paint than were Prijent’s breasts. Aboriginal
women are not arrested, nor are they required to be more fully dressed
when they perform in Adelaide (which is a common enough occurrence).
The law for Aboriginal women who are performing seems to apply
differently to non-Aboriginal women performing bare-breasted: the white
western woman who tries to take to the public, global arena in such a way
is censored for being obscene. The intercultural dilemma is that the display
of Aboriginal women’s breasts in public is seen to be acceptable, whereas
Prijent’s exposed body is offensive, when both are circumscribed by the
boundaries of performance.
The location of the performance is the crux of this example: the clash is
between the cultural milieu (the Adelaide city centre) and Cultural space
(a theatre or enclosed performance location that charged an admission fee)
over the representation of Prijent’s explicit body. If Prijent had been
performing in a space labelled ‘Cultural’, the police would probably not
have arrested her because her performance involved a relatively passive
display of her body that could be reinscribed in Culture as maintaining a
conventional social (patriarchal) order. Her performance outside the frame
of a theatre was more likely to be read as disruptive to the social order. Had
she appeared in other cultural milieu spaces but not been performing, the
response would likely also have differed. If she had been sunbathing on an
Adelaide beach, she probably would also have avoided police intervention
because the codes that threaten a patriarchal social order that are associated
with explicit body practice do not necessarily apply to a performer when
she is not performing the explicit body. That Aboriginal women
performers (and nursing mothers for that matter) generally don’t attract the
attention of the police suggests that they signify a different, non-
threatening relation to public space, Culture, and performance. Ilotopie’s
performative breaching of the boundaries of Cultural space was construed
as breaching legal boundaries as well, specifically with regard to the
display of the female body.
Annie Sprinkle’s performances are more explicit than Ilotopie’s, and
Sprinkle recognises that she must take very careful precautions to ensure
that her work is not censored, even if it is performed in a theatre. Known
around the world for her forthright demonstrations of sexual pleasure,
Sprinkle has toured Post Porn Modernism at international arts festivals for
close to ten years, including Adelaide in 1996. The performance is
probably best known for the scene entitled ‘Public Cervix Announcement’
in which Sprinkle inserts a speculum in her vagina on stage in front of the
audience and invites audience members to come to the edge of the stage to
see her cervix, with the aid of flashlights provided by attendants. The final
scene is also notorious: Sprinkle simulates an orgasm on stage in what she
calls a moment of collective ritual cleansing during which the audience
‘joins in’ by shaking paper-cup rattles. Schneider explains that Sprinkle’s
ritual masturbation is ‘designed to transcend “sex-negativity” and offer a
healing, spiritual union through mutual “sex-positivity” – a mutuality
achieved, ironically, in a display of auto-eroticism’ (Schneider 1997: 58).
Sprinkle maintains that her work is intended to educate audience

members about sexuality by being very frank about her own body, her
experiences as a prostitute, and the pleasure humans can derive from their
own bodies. For Schneider, the nexus between art and pornography is the
most important aspect of Sprinkle’s performance:
It is the politicized link she is making explicit between sexuality,

vulnerability, and power that is ‘hardly able to be seen’ – out of the
bounds of vision for a society habituated to maintaining ‘perspective’
by maintaining distinctions between sexuality and politics, nature and
culture, or porn and art.
(ibid.: 77)
Sprinkle’s work is no doubt controversial in its public exposure of the

interiority of the female body and in its self-conscious collision between
pornography, the apparent taboos concerning the prostitute as feminist
artist, and ‘art’ itself. In doing so, Sprinkle takes the clash over space
further. She performs in a theatre, yet she exposes the interior and exterior
of her body in a way that confronts conventional notions of performance
spectacle. In Sprinkle’s case, the naming of her performance as ‘art’ (in the
context of High Art or Culture) challenges the norms of female
representation.
Sprinkle recognises that her performances can cause offence and, in
order to circumvent any accusations of censorship and any accidental
affront to members of the cultural milieu, she issues substantial
explanatory notes to the presenters in the technical specifications about her
work well in advance so that she is not misrepresented and that no audience
members are unpleasantly surprised. In order to avoid censorship and
minimise the disruption to her touring programme, she issues detailed
instructions to each venue about exactly what is entailed in her
performances, and exactly which responsibilities promoters and
producers must accept for the performances to be executed. Her publicists
discuss it carefully with the presenters at every location. She makes it clear
that her shows are not intended to titillate: people who are expecting to be
sexually aroused will be disappointed. She also advises that very
conservative people ought not to attend the performance to avoid any
offence they may take (Scobie, inter-view 1998). The whole production is
highly managed well before Sprinkle arrives in town. This management of
Sprinkle’s work – and specifically the representation and display of her

body – shifts the marketing of the performance from ‘mere’ entertainment
for redistribution to a tightly controlled object divorced even from
Sprinkle’s own highly exposed body. The management surrounding the
performance of Post Porn Modernism subordinates the performative and/
or artistic dimensions to her work.
The notoriety associated with Sprinkle’s performances also attracts
more attention than the performances themselves. There is the opportunity
for local conservative elements to attempt to prevent the presentation of
Sprinkle’s work, which is frequently dismissed in outrage – generally by
members of the public who have responded to media provocations about
the more controversial aspects of her work. Likewise, the media are
implicated in misrepresenting Sprinkle and inciting disapproval
everywhere she plays, regardless of how clear her technical specifications
are.
There is always the possibility that Sprinkle relishes this notoriety, in the
context of all publicity being good publicity. However, both Sprinkle and
Ilotopie illustrate that attempts by women to control their representations
in performance are subject to authorities outside the sphere of their artistry.
These women are free to perform in so far as arts festivals require a
product, but they are not entirely free to work as they wish, because their
work defies normative values in the conventional display of the female
body.
Not all women performers are able to control the representation and
nature of the display in which they engage, even to this extent. Our next
section moves from the highly visible arts market to the black market in
order to address a group of performers whose work is rarely discussed in
the context of art, and is almost completely hidden from international
attention.
Trafficked women
Ilotopie and Sprinkle are examples of the power of the cultural milieu to
intervene in the construction of the high Culture that arts festivals tend to
signify when the explicit female body is perceived to be inappropriately
placed. The next example reverses the situation: female dancers who are
trafficked around the world on dancers’ visas enact a display that is
perceived to be appropriately placed, out of general view in ‘red light’
districts and for sale to ‘consenting adults’. The performers manage to

avoid the very censorship that entraps other performers in the intercultural
arts world because they are thought to be in their appropriate cultural
milieu. Their display abides by the rules governing the cultural milieu,
including the reinforcement of established power relations between the
sexes, particularly when the employer controls the performer’s every
action, even to the point of owning her body. The mechanisms of the
international performance market provide the channels for Culture to
collude with the cultural milieu to contain the representational frame of
these women and their bodies. We do not intend to trivialise the plight of
these performers (who are almost always tricked into prostitution under
the guise of being recruited as folk-dancers); rather, we intend to provoke
discussions about the regulatory parameters for women performing in
intercultural markets, and the commodification of both cultures and
humans.
The trafficked women3 are trapped in (usually) western countries by
multiple (false) identities, poverty, legal loopholes, and uninterested
media. They are generally overlooked by social and legal agencies because
technically they comply with the legalities outlined for touring
international performing artists.4 To the extent that it is used by women
artists, the global arts market could be described as the legitimate wing of
a widespread international trade in women that can be more lucrative than
trafficking in arms or drugs, and considerably less risky for the traffickers
(Skrobanek, cited in Circle against Sex Trafficking 1997: 3).
If Wagner’s Brünnhilde or Shakespeare’s Portia are at the top of a
western artistic hierarchy, the dancer recruited through the black market
with a dancer’s performance visa holds a position (often unwillingly) at the
opposing end of the market. While the intercultural international trade
continues to buy and sell intercultural products in a global marketplace,
there is a growing business involving the international movement of many
more performers than are currently involved in the major arts festivals. The
international market in trafficking in women deploys the same language
and channels as the international arts markets dealing in ‘legitimate’
intercultural performance since the trafficked women are hired as dancers
and travel around the world on performers’ visas.
The typical trafficked woman is poor. She is invariably told that she is
being employed to perform either folk-dance or ballet. The audition
frequently consists of no more than an inspection of her naked body.
Characteristically, the young artist travels on a fake passport under a new

‘stage name’ (arranged to facilitate the preparation of fake travel papers).
Once she arrives at her destination, her passport is confiscated, she is told
that the type of dance now required is striptease, that prostitution is also
essential, and that her first three months’ salary will be withheld to
reimburse the costs of her travel to the destination. She may not know what
country she is in, she may not speak the language, and she will not know
whom to contact for help. If she has arrived with fake travel documents,
even her own country’s embassy cannot (or will not) repatriate her. She is
thus completely reliant on her employer. There have been at least four
recognised waves of trafficking in women: the first from Asia (mostly Thai
and Filipina women); the second from South America (particularly
Dominicans and Colombians); the third from Africa (predominantly
Ghanaians and Nigerians); and the fourth, the most recent, from Central
and Eastern Europe (Migration Information Programme 1995: 7).
One large artists’ talent agency, Stage International from Rotterdam,
managed 12 clubs in Holland, Belgium, and Spain, and imported over
3,000 women between 1986 and 1992: ‘Stage used the method which was
applied in the whole of Europe: the alien ladies were receiving legal work
permits as “artists”, the same documents that Prince and Madonna have to
obtain to perform’ (de Stoop 1994: 7). In fact, in Switzerland, gogo-
dancing is ‘the only profession for women from the Third World’ that
qualifies for a visa application (ibid.: 52). In Japan, Filipinas (the most
common ethnic group represented among the trafficked dancers) require a
valid ‘artist’s record book’ (ARB), for which they must demonstrate dance
training (Philippine Daily Inquirer 1997: 13).
In most countries around the world, the laws pertaining to trafficked
women are extremely inadequate to protect women who escape from the
system, to prosecute the traffickers, and to prevent other women from
being trafficked. The International Organisation for Migration report on
Trafficking and Prostitution (May 1995) acknowledges that the full scale
of the problem is difficult to ascertain because very few women report their
situation to police. When they are brought to the attention of the
authorities, few women are willing to press charges for fear of reprisals
against their families. Furthermore, ‘[s]entences against traffickers are
light, and there are few successful convictions. Partly this is because many
countries deport victims immediately, thereby losing valuable witnesses’

(Migration Information Programme 1995: 2). Trafficking in humans is
generally seen as a low priority by law enforcement agencies.5 An
exception is Belgium, which amended its laws so that women on artists’
visas were required to collect their visas in person and were given a booklet
outlining the conditions of the visa as well as their rights. This amendment
alone virtually stopped the requests for artists’ visas in Belgium (ibid.: 23),
and The Netherlands and Switzerland have since attempted to follow suit.
Culture and cultural difference also play a significant part in the explicit
body performances that trafficked women are forced to enact. While club
dancers may, to some extent, control their representations when they
perform in their own nation state, they lose that agency – and indeed
agency over their very lives – when they are trafficked to another country
and forced to play the role of the cultural other. Their performing bodies
that are on display to their audiences as culturally exotic are no longer their
own. The intercultural exchange of women who are perceived to be
‘exotic’ continues to attract the attention of traffickers (the women’s
naïvety and poverty notwithstanding) because cultural exoticism –
whatever its particular signifier may be – is consumed at a high rate in
Europe, other western nations, and Japan.6 The international trade in
women recruited as dancers represents the worst-case scenario for
commodification in performance: humans can become reified into units of
culturally exotic commodity value only. They are ‘expendable’
commodities and are easily replaced (often by a compatriot). The farthest-
reaching commodification of culture thus takes place under the guise of
cultural exchange, and Kopytoff’s caution concerning the trafficking in
humans that we have used as an epigraph to this chapter is ignored. There
seems to be little concern for any of the opprobrium associated with the
trafficking in humans when the economic return is so favourable. In fact,
some traffickers rationalise their activities in humanitarian terms: the
manager of a Dutch club told de Stoop ‘I have ten Dominican girls. I
consider this as development aid’ (de Stoop 1994: 50). A Dominican
trafficker in women maintained ‘Thanks to me, hundreds of girls presently
have a better life and I will continue to send them over there [to Europe] as
long as the government maintains its policy of hunger and misery’ (ibid.:
50).
If we look at the widespread silence associated with trafficking in
women’s bodies, as contrasted to the media outrage associated with
women artists employing ‘explicit body’ practices in their ‘High Art’
performances, it would appear that the work of Sprinkle and Ilotopie is

seen as far more threatening to the social fabric than the widespread
trafficking of women under the guise of performance. If women control
and use these practices within the arena of Culture, they are censored. If
they are instructed to use these practices within the designated ‘red light’
districts, then the display is condoned even if the commodification
involves human trafficking. It is not only who owns and controls the living
body of the female performer, but who also controls the female image. The
next section returns to the arts festival, and to an image of a woman –
possibly the most famous female image in the western world – which
provoked a clash between Culture, the copyrighting of culture, and an
international festival’s cultural milieu.
The 1998 Adelaide Festival poster
The 1998 Adelaide Festival poster was met with anti-feminism and
homophobia couched in language denouncing intercultural insensitivity.
Robyn Archer, a well-known Australian performer and the first female
artistic director of the Adelaide Festival, featured an image of the Virgin
Mary to celebrate her festival’s themes which included ‘spiritual’
performance and ‘sacred’ music. The Greek Orthodox Church took
exception to the use of the image, claiming that it belonged to them only.
The leaders of other religions, local radio station talk-back hosts, and a
variety of state and municipal politicians also used the controversy to their
own advantage. Several sectors of the cultural milieu maintained a right to
portray and preserve culture in a way that conflicted with the Festival and
its marketing plan. Various participants in the controversy attempted to
regulate and hierarchise the competing discourses surrounding the
marketing of the arts, cultural diversity, and women’s opportunities to
portray themselves in art.
The image any festival uses to promote – and, effectively, to sell – its
events is carefully chosen based on the audience, the programmed
performances, and the nature of the festival itself. Archer selected a
female image to which she ascribed a subject position: a seated Byzantine
Virgin Mary playing a piano accordion. Almost as prevalent in western art
as the nude, iconic representations of the Virgin Mary signify attempts to
contain the place of women in the social order even more so than the nude.
Archer’s fascination with the image developed from her interest in the
Plate 14 The 1998 Telstra Adelaide Festival Poster. Designed by Robyn Archer,
George Mackintosh, and David Heacock. Photo reproduced with the per-
mission of the Adelaide Festival.
Virgin of Guadalupe from Central and South American countries, who is

associated with celebration and festivity: ‘This Virgin is not dolorosa,
she’s not pain, [and] she’s never got Jesus with her, ever’ (interview 1998).
Empowered with a subject position that does not necessarily foreground
her role as mother, this Virgin has a presence and a place without Jesus. The
vitality of the Virgin of Guadalupe epitomised the type of festival that
Archer planned.
The sacred image accrued secular signification by means of the
accordion, an instrument featured in numerous events at the 1998 Festival.
To Archer, the integrity of the image was not challenged by this computer-
generated modification: based on an understanding of postmodernism that
enables the borrowing of images from different eras and cultures, she felt
that her western background entitled her to claim the image as hers,
without any fear of charges of appropriation.7 The image was carefully
layered with references to Adelaide and Australia and ghosted figures
from other religions in the background.8
After the image’s launch and in the midst of a closely fought state
election, the poster drew the ire of the Greek Orthodox Church on the
grounds that it desecrated an icon invested with holy status, or at the very
least took it out of its context. The conflict focused on the sacred nature of
icons: prayers are said over each brush stroke as icons are painted, making
them literally divine images and therefore not just decorative images. The
Greek Orthodox Church also took exception to the removal of the Christ
child from the picture, particularly since the child was replaced by a
musical instrument. It was felt that this substitution of the child for a
musical instrument – and this instrument in particular because of its
associations with populist culture – mocked the Church. The Festival
office was inundated with letters (including many from school children,
copied from a form letter) and the media pursued the issue for weeks.
Church officials from other denominations also joined the fray.9 Some
offended parties threatened violence against Festival staff (5AN 1997b),
in addition to smashing any windows in which the image appeared (Harris
1997a: 23), although such actions did not eventuate.
Another constituency eager to discredit the poster – and, by implication,
the Festival, Archer, and the state Liberal Government’s record on
multiculturalism – was the Labor Party, particularly Labor politicians in
marginal seats with large populations of Greek-Australians. The poster
quickly became an election issue. In a radio talk-back appearance, the

Shadow Attorney-General and Opposition Spokesperson for
Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs, Michael Atkinson, urged South
Australians to boycott the Festival to register their displeasure (5AA
1997). The Arts Minister, Di Laidlaw, refused to bow to pressures within
her own party to have the image revoked.
Talk-back radio hosts also used the controversy to discredit Archer and
the other women who were associated with the poster. One station ran an
alternative poster contest with repeated suggestions for posters including
humiliating pictures of Archer and Laidlaw, the Arts Minister. The poster
launch coincided with the televising of Archer’s overtly lesbian
performance on television, The One That Got Away; this prompted several
radio stations to capitalise on homophobia among their audiences.
Archer’s sexual preference was raised as a further reason for attacking the
poster, prompting one radio host’s suggestion of a lesbian on a lance as an
alternative poster (5DN 1997b).
A compromise was eventually reached with the sector most aggrieved.
The Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church met with the Festival’s
general manager, Nicholas Heyward, and the chair of the Adelaide Festival
Board, Dr Ed Tweddell, to reach a consensus. Because of the patriarchal
nature of the Church, the Festival organisation (with Archer’s approval,
under the circumstances) decided that it would be in the best interests of a
settlement for Archer not to attend the meeting set to arrange a
compromise. The Festival refused the Church’s demand of a complete
withdrawal of the poster but consented neither to post it around the city, nor
to use it to promote the Festival, even on the brochure. It was agreed that
the image would still be available for purchase (and not distributed for
free) in the form of posters or T-shirts. The Festival’s programme
continued, otherwise generally unaffected.
Given the number of participants in this debate, it is not surprising that
there were multiple arguments competing against each other, including
feminism, cultural diversity, and postmodernity. Perhaps the most basic of
these opposing arguments was the place of postmodernism in discussions
with the traditional Greek Orthodox Church. Unlike the creation of icons,
there were no rituals performed on the secular representation that became
the poster; the absence of sacredness should thus have made the poster
acceptable in the eyes of the Greek Orthodox Church, but this argument
was rejected. The Greek Orthodox Church also refused to accept Archer’s
argument that postmodernism entitled her to take the images of her choice
from the western cultural tradition. For some, Archer acted in the worst
tradition of postmodernism and western feminism, ignoring any cultural
copyright that may exist on the particular image of Mary chosen. This clash
between postmodernity and an enduring pre-modern ethos could hardly
find an easy compromise.10
The differing perspectives on cultural diversity and how to ensure
cultural sensitivity in a multicultural environment might suggest the
importance of consultation between ethnic groups, including seeking
permission to use an image from another group. Yet must a cultural
pedigree be acknowledged this way in every instance? Archer did not
consult with the Greek Orthodox Church in the poster’s planning stages
because, she explains,
For a start, I chose the image from a book of Bulgarian icons. I hadn’t
a clue that I should talk to the Greek Orthodox Church. Even if I had,
I probably would have talked to the wrong ones. This is a church
divided in Australia. One side had no problem whatsoever with it. I
could ask a thousand questions . . . and I still might offend somebody
or some group, because in such a diverse society, it is impossible to
know [who might take offence].
(personal correspondence to authors, 19 January 1999)11
Archer preferred to take a retroactive approach in the clashes that

inevitably characterise a multicultural society: ‘People will eventually
make mistakes. . . . So what I keep focusing on is how do you resolve
inevitable conflict’ (interview 1998).
The poster controversy raises larger issues about whether culture itself
can be copyrighted. While Archer maintained a retroactive conflict-
resolution position, others insisted that culture is ‘owned’ by its
constituents. Numerous respondents to the poster controversy cited the
fatwah declared against Salman Rushdie as an example of what could have
happened to Archer had she used an Islamic image. The underlying threat
in this example referred to conservative versions of the Islamic religion but
was directed towards Archer, her art, her politics, her gender, and her
sexual preference. Many more discussants chose to compare the
controversy over Archer’s poster to what would have transpired had she
used Aboriginal spirituality instead of the image of the Virgin Mary. Even
though Aboriginality continues to be used to sell Australia and Australian
tourism, many people objecting to the image argued that had it been
Aboriginal in origin, the image would have been withdrawn. This
misleadingly assumes that the cultural sensitivities associated with
Aboriginality and Christianity are interchangeable. The connections
between cultural systems, spirituality, and mechanisms of access and
control are fraught with difficulty. The questions which arise include
whether any one person or group can control the exclusive rights to a
culture, how much knowledge associated with a culture remains in the
public domain, and how much is private?
Various indigenous cultures around the world, anxious to preserve
control over their religion, secret knowledges, etc., are increasingly
turning to copyright laws to ensure that what remains of their cultures is
sequestered from the public domain. While sympathetic to their aims,
Michael F. Brown notes the problems with this response:
Although this rationale for cultural protection seems reasonable at

first glance, upon reflection one begins to wonder where the legal
prohibition of religious ‘trivialization’ or sacrilege might lead. Would
citizens therefore be subject to civil and criminal penalty if they
trivialized any religious symbols? Would indigenous peoples
themselves be subject to reciprocal fine or arrest if they manipulated
Christian imagery for their own purposes?
(Brown 1998: 199)
The Greek Orthodox Church did object to precisely this sort of

manipulation of their Christian religious symbols. The Greek Orthodox
Church is not, however, in the same position as Aboriginal cultures: its
symbols are not at risk of commodification in quite the same way as
Aboriginal symbols that appear on T-shirts and in the promotion of
Australia overseas. The Greek Orthodox Church is part of a western
cultural model, but it has minority status in Australia. Does it then qualify
as a culture that ought to be ‘protected’ in the same way that attempts are
made to protect Aboriginal cultures? Brown insists that the multiple
agendas operating in this discussion continue to obscure – rather than
clarify – the issues. Further, these different discourses of culture and

aesthetics are unequal, yet the political election campaign deployed
‘cultural diversity’ in such a moral way that it outmaneouvred the place of
aesthetics. Cultural diversity adopted a regulatory function in this debate
because politicians, Church leaders, and artists feared being labelled
culturally insensitive or discriminatory because of the possibility of the
social and financial implications. They were not celebrating cultural
diversity because it was perceived to be a worthwhile social goal.
The cultural diversity arguments continued to collide with others,
including feminist arguments – which risked being disregarded even
though the poster depicted a woman’s image. Some of the difficulty arose
from conflicting views about the various roles assigned to the Virgin Mary,
and by implication, women generally. Many members of the Greek
Orthodox Church were upset that the Christ child had been removed from
Mary’s arms. For them, Mary is only the Mother of God: she is not a
‘woman’ in her own right. The removal of the child from the image imparts
subjectivity to the woman, suggesting that she is creative in her own right,
and that she exists independently of the child (as opposed to the image of
Our Lady of Perpetual Succour). It shifts the focus from mother to
independent woman, as well as refusing her subordination to the Christ
child. The alteration of the image from maternal fulfilment in the child to
the pleasure of self-expression through a populist instrument suggests a
different order of desire emerging.
The instrument that the Virgin is playing also offers a different
association of sexual desire, and an ambivalent desire at that. The use of
the accordion sets up a different dynamic than the saxophone and other
wind instruments which are read as phallic and the stringed instruments
which are immediately associated with the female body. The accordion is
more difficult to read as gendered, increasing the opportunity to read the
desire in the poster as sexual ambivalence. If one were to ascribe a gender
to the accordion, it would likely be female, because the instrument works
on enclosed space that is constantly opening and closing. The accordion
could, then, be seen to resemble female genitals more than male.
This image, which expresses women’s autonomy, subjectivity, and
desire, was taken out of Archer’s control once the controversy occurred.
The poster was detached from its festival referent, particularly when
church officials of different denominations took it upon themselves to
‘assess’ the image to determine whether or not the image breached both
religious laws and laws of good taste. The senior Adelaide male Church
leaders condemned it as an inappropriate image (personal correspondence
to authors, 19 January 1999). Archer found it confronting that what could
be construed as ‘women’s business was entirely in the hands of men. And
it’s a great shock to the system that that can still happen. We know that it’s
happening in Afghanistan and an enormous number of other places but we
feel safe’ (interview 1998). The poster controversy effectively censored
the feminist nature of the image. For the agents in control of the debate,
cultural sensitivity (associated closely with politicians’ desire to appease
the patriarchal representatives of minority cultures during the election
campaign) submerged feminism as well as aesthetics. The regulatory force
of culture (in its reductive form of cultural diversity) replaced the
complicated combination of identity politics, multiple subject positions,
and intercultural exchange.
In each of our examples, the autonomy of women’s subjectivity is

subordinated to the clashes of the cultural context within the workings of
the international arts and entertainment market. In an attempt to
circumvent these facets of the market that intrude upon aesthetics and
feminist subjectivity, many women have turned to international women’s
organisations that offer a less overtly consumption-based arena for the
production and distribution of theatrical work.
There are several other kinds of meeting places outside the network of
international arts markets and arts festivals, including the International
Women Playwrights’ Conference (IWPC) and the Magdalena Project.
This separatist approach may seem a radical step, yet participants tend to
find them productive fora for women’s intercultural performance. The
IWPC has met every three years since 1988 to perform, discuss, and
witness women’s international performance. Since it began in Buffalo,
New York, it has met in Toronto, Adelaide, and Galway, and incorporated
contemporary performance with more traditional methods. Forging a
strong network of women theatre workers, the IWPC presents
opportunities for women performers to watch, learn from, and interact
with performers from growing numbers of other countries. The Magdalena
Project began in 1986 in Wales, when 38 female theatre practitioners from
15 countries met to create a structure that would continue to generate new

work and foster their skills. There have been annual Magdalena festivals
and workshops in Wales, Italy, Denmark, Germany, England, Poland,
Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Norway, Belgium, and, in 1999, New Zealand.
Susan Bassnett describes the Magdalena Project as ‘a forum for debate
among women, and although participants may share a common belief in
the value of women’s work in theatre, they often share very little else’
(Bassnett 1989: 6). The Magdalena Project initiates cross-cultural and
intercultural collaborative projects in the hope that it will influence the
international theatre community. The influence is, however, likely to be
the other way: the Magdalena Project’s funding has been cut, and, without
corporate sponsorship, it is unlikely to be able to continue supporting its
international festival programme.
Those performers who play the international arts market may have more
access to funding than the Magdalena Project, but there are drawbacks:
these include the effects of the significations relating to culture,
performance, and feminist subjectivity, in addition to the effects of
contesting such significations. The performers throughout this study have
attempted to manage their own representations of feminist and cultural
subjectivity. However, when they perform in the intercultural world, they
are frequently confronted by a variety of regulations in the international
performance market which stipulate limited and homogeneous cultural,
gender, and aesthetic norms. Explicit body performance, in particular,
attempts to subvert the homogeneity of the subjectivity that patriarchal
social orders reserve for women on and off the stage, but its complex
representation of the possibilities available to the performing female body,
and women generally, frequently meet with some form of sanction. While
men performing in the international market also face many of the
challenges to cultural diversity and autonomy, women performing in the
intercultural market continue to find their work refashioned to accord with
assumptions regarding the framing, marketing, and distribution of the
female performing body.
Conclusion
This study of women’s intercultural performance has traversed the

twentieth century from the first Japanese translation of A Doll’s House in
1901 to the 1998 Adelaide Festival of Arts. Reflected in these intercultural
performances are the lived realities of women as they are refracted through
diverse political ideologies and belief systems. We have moved across six
continents to report intercultural encounters in Africa, North and South
America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. To conclude, we
will tease out the major threads that have been running through this study,
including: the emphasis on the political as well as the aesthetic; the
transmission through performance of culturally specific identity spaces;
the sexually differentiated female body in performance; and
commodification of this body within the global arts market-place.
THE POLITICAL
Ultimately, the future of women’s intercultural performance is as much a

political as an aesthetic issue. This study has repeatedly returned to
political questions that reflect not only our subject positions as western
feminist academics/practitioners, but also the nature of the intercultural
work that underpins our analysis. Through these productions we have
touched upon some of the major political conflicts of the twentieth
century: the emancipatory women’s movements in the early years of the
twentieth century, the Chinese Revolution, the position of women in the
Iranian Islamic Republic, the struggle of women in Argentina during the
Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s, the rights of indigenous peoples to self-
Conclusion 177
determination and their ancestral domain, postcolonial turmoil in Africa,

and the trade in the bodies of women. In the Introduction we suggested that
aesthetics have dominated the analyses of western-based intercultural
theatre projects, whereas political imperatives underpin analyses of
western feminist performance. Although this study has focused on
women’s, rather than specifically feminist, intercultural performance, we
have found it impossible to separate the political content of this work from
the aesthetic dimensions. Many of the productions we have considered fit
within the paradigm of ‘theatre for social change’. For the artists who
created them, the primary motivation appears to be the disruption of
established power relations. However fashionable it may be to ignore the
intentions of artists in current performance analysis, this study is
intimately tied to the motivations of the women who have created these
intercultural performances. They have used their power as artists to
challenge patriarchal family structures and struggle for equality in the eyes
of the state, and to assert the rights of women (whether colonised,
dispossessed, or ‘free’) stifled by the yoke of tradition. Even in their
intercultural activities within the global performing arts markets, these
artists have claimed the right for all women to control their sexuality and
their representations of the female body.
We have tried to avoid the universalising tendencies of western
feminism, but our investigations suggest that the very act of creating a
performance work explicitly focusing on the lived realities of women
involves an awareness that gender difference is almost always organised
into systems of power that privilege men. Every system is culturally
specific, but the intercultural performances that we have considered
appear to offer women artists, and women in the audience, the opportunity
of moving beyond the hegemony of their cultural frameworks to question
and disrupt the gender constructions that bind them. An important
mechanism in this process is the creation of new identity spaces.
IDENTITY SPACES
We have argued that culture is not an isolated concept or empty sign; rather
it is the way in which we construct our sense of self and others. Intercultural
performance, therefore, constantly re-negotiates this relationship. A
continuum exists in this process: one extreme sees the concretisation of
fixed positions through the triggering of an ethnographic or taxonomic

gaze, and the other sees the intermingling of diverse elements creating new
identity spaces. The precise nature of these negotiations depends on the
social context of the performance, the mix of cultural elements within the
production, and the underlying power relationship between the cultures
engaging in the encounter.
In Chapter 1 we suggested that intercultural performances of imported
texts enabled audiences to add new identity spaces to the repertoire of
multiple identities from which subjectivity is forged. We considered this
dynamic with regard to A Doll’s House and Antigone and demonstrated the
attraction these texts had for artists and audiences encountering the social
upheaval of modernity or the political turmoil associated with opposition
to totalitarian states. We distinguished between the functions these texts
served for their host cultures in both the public and private spheres and
explored the composition of the identity spaces created and exchanged
through these textual translations. The theme of subjectivity flowed into
the analysis of ritual translocation in Chapter 2. We argued that these
intercultural rituals have been sold in a post-industrial capitalist society as
a commodity to fill an imaginary lack of spirituality, and as a symbol on
which to build a corporate national identity. The power relationships
underlying these exchanges were weighted in favour of the consumers,
and the performances tended to concretise audience subject positions and
imaginary constructions of supremacy rather than to act as a catalyst for
changing perceptions.
Identity spaces were also the focus in the intercultural encounters that
dominated our next two chapters, but the exchanges were structurally
more complex. The spatial loss experienced by the postcolonial subject
underpinned our analysis of performance texts by African playwrights.
These intercultural encounters existed as much within the imaginary of the
playwrights as the perceptions of the audiences, and were conceptualised
spatially through the staging of the exile, the émigré, and the dispossessed
returning home. In each case, these plays involve a doubling – or layering
and overlaying – of cultural realities. The postcolonial nature of this
cultural intermingling resulted in the enactment of complex subject
positions, reflecting the ambivalence of the dramatists and their audiences
to their complex cultural heritage. From the meetings of cultures in space,
we moved to the meetings in the flesh; through taxonomies, which re-
Conclusion 179
affirmed the audience by reifying cultural difference, to the exploration of

new hybrid cultural identities, and finally to the nomadic performing
bodies that begin to undermine fixed racial and sexual identities.
Thus our theme of subjectivity began with the acquisition by women of
a rational subjectivity tied to modernity and defined as subjective freedom,
as it was played out in a variety of cultural contexts and political systems.
It then moved to an imaginary lack in this same rational subject of
modernity, and the attempts of the postmodern marketplace to satisfy this
void by packaging and marketing ritual performances. We considered the
spatial loss of the postcolonial subject in symbolic, metaphoric, and literal
terms; and finally, through the body of the performer, this study embraced
a nomadic subject who ‘never takes on fully the limits of one national,
fixed identity’ (Braidotti 1994: 36). By emphasising the intersubjective
relationship underpinning intercultural performance, we have tried to
privilege a dynamic model of culture that envisages the sense of self as
constantly shifting and always provisional, while never denying the
sexually differentiated body.
THE FEMALE BODY
The corporeal reality of the female performing body lies at the very centre
of this study and has triggered many of its interrogations: Can this body
cross cultures? How is it bought and sold? Who controls its representation?
What rights to cultural inheritance does it hold? At an aesthetic level, the
corporeal reality of the female body influences symbolic constructions. In
many of the productions we have discussed, this sexually differentiated
body is translated into a ‘female image or symbol’ that Jessica Benjamin
(1986: 83) suggests can ‘counterbalance the monopoly of the phallus in
representing desire’. In her analysis of female desire, she outlines that
‘[t]he closest we have come to an image of feminine activity is motherhood
and fertility. But the mother is not culturally articulated as a sexual subject,
one who actively desires something for herself– quite the contrary’ (ibid.:
83). Yet in this study we have repeatedly encountered a maternal figure
actively desiring ‘something for herself. She was present in the final scene
of all the translations and adaptations of A Doll’s House; and she was
present in Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa through the associative link

between the character of Antígona and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Maternal passivity is anathema to these Argentinian Mothers: they operate
on the edge of legality, deploying acceptable feminine sensitivities while
overtly challenging the political hierarchy by their subversive actions.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo create their desiring maternal subject
in a culture saturated with the cult of the Virgin, and, like Robyn Archer’s
poster, they no longer hold their children in their arms. In their place, the
Mothers carry traces symbolising hope and sorrow; in contrast Archer’s
Virgin holds a piano accordion to signify pleasure, creativity, and the self-
worth of the female artist. In Archer’s poster the possibility of maternal
desire is so explicit that it was censored.
Yet the symbolism in this study is not tied to ‘just’ the maternal. It is
equally prevalent in the variety of symbols associated with the empty space
inside the female body, as is demonstrated on the one hand by Annie
Sprinkle’s ‘Public Cervix Announcement’ and on the other by the
grandmother’s suitcase in Have You Seen Zandile? If we follow Jessica
Benjamin’s assertion that female desire is ‘a force imbued with the
authenticity of inner desire’, and ‘that what is experientially female is the
association of desire with a space, a place within the self, from which this
force can emerge’ (ibid.: 97), then this linking of desire to inner space
creates more overt and powerful reverberations in our discussions of chora
as creative and regenerative space in Chapter 3, and in our discussions of
ritual performance in Chapter 2. The role of shaman or mudang in Korea is
seen as an alternative to the subordinate position of women in the
traditional patriarchal family structure, and it is the female inner space with
its capacity to hold the human spirit that attracts the deities: by entering this
void the deities possess the human body. Hence it can be argued that the
force and power of the mudang emanates from the inner space within the
female body.
Benjamin (ibid.: 96) asserts that ‘[t]his experience of inner space is in
turn associated with the space between self and other: the holding
environment and transitional experience’. By linking the notion of female
desire both to perceptions of inner space and to questions of alterity,
Benjamin’s theory turns a symbolic element that we have found to be
significant to women’s intercultural performance into a representation not
Conclusion 181
only of female desire but also of intersubjectivity. However tempting it

may be to tie up loose ends in a conclusion, it is not our intention to reduce
the variety and range of the work we have analysed to a single paradigm;
to do so would be reductionist. But it may be the case that symbolic
constructions in women’s intercultural theatre reflect the sexually
differentiated body of the artist and a fascination with questions of alterity,
even if the precise nature of these symbolic constructions will always be
culturally determined.
COMMODIFICATION
A tension exists between a dynamic model of culture embodied in an

intersubjective relationship and the reification that occurs when cultures
are commodified within performance. The communication between artists
and their audiences is never free of the social context and production
histories, and we have paid particular attention to the distribution,
marketing, and commodification of culture as it pertains to contemporary
intercultural performances. In many ways, our final chapter has proved the
most provocative aspect of this study, because it deals with the realities of
international distribution networks for the performing arts, but these
processes of commodification have been present throughout the entire
study. The operations of the postmodern marketplace were crucial to the
discussion of ritual translocation, which demonstrated that publicists,
news reporters, and art reviewers colluded in the commodifying of the
Korean shaman as an exoticised spectacle. Our critique of intercultural
bodies documented the impact of international arts festivals on the
distribution of a specific genre, Ankoku Butoh, and the importance of these
festivals on the development of taxonomic performances that reify
difference for a culturally homogeneous audience.
The late twentieth-century festival circuit has impacted directly on the
production and consumption of intercultural performance; yet despite the
employment of increasing numbers of women as administrators and
programmers in this network, there is still manifest censorship imposed on
women artists. While our investigation of intercultural bodies ends with a
glimpse of theatrical desiring machines created by female performing
bodies, these same bodies are subjected to censorship and control in the
marketplace. It is not just the representation itself at issue, but who
determines the nature of the representation and controls its
commodification. Alternative distribution networks do exist, but if they
are working outside the major flows of international or state capital they
operate with voluntary labour and lurch from one funding crisis to another,
as the history of Magdalena demonstrates.
GLOBALISM
As the economic forces of globalisation shrink and stratify the world, the
creation of intercultural performance is an increasingly complex affair.
Even the concept of cultural identity is fraught with the complications of
migration, cultural authenticity, and ‘ethnic cleansing’. The questions
concerning cultural appropriation and assimilation that used to preoccupy
rehearsal rooms are being replaced with a search for a methodology that
can shift representations of cultural difference from superficial
descriptions to ‘thick descriptions’. We cannot offer easy solutions to these
problems, but we have tried to explore a number of possibilities and
paradoxes that may be of use to both artists and theorists.
Ultimately the future of intercultural work is more likely to be tied to
patterns of consumption than to idealistic notions of cultural exchange.
The global arts market already traverses national boundaries to access
wealthy citizens prepared to buy cultural bricolage. In the realm of
contemporary performance, international links are a necessary stimulus to
artists working in the area of performance, but they can unduly influence
and drain valuable resources from local cultural production.
The impact of globalisation on the performing arts is still being assessed,
but the process of transformation is extremely rapid. This book is still
predicated on the existence of cultural and sexual borders, but these
borders are shifting. Medical technology is undermining the sexually
differentiated body, while cultural borders are constantly being redrawn
and redefined. What has been fixed and impermeable is becoming fluid
and permeable. In the realm of women’s performance the focus is moving
to experiments where cultures are no longer represented as fixed essences
Conclusion 183
embodied by performers and placed side by side. They now move fluidly
through the performing bodies. We have briefly touched on this art of
metamorphosis in relation to the nomadic performing body, but this is still
a tentative study and fraught with the problems presented by a visceral
experience dependent on highly subjective perceptions. It does, however,
offer a new way of reading ‘thick descriptions’ of culture in the body
through an examination of performance energy flows. This kinaesthetic
approach may be of assistance to artists grappling with the complexities of
multiple cultural inheritances, and artists whose corporeal realities have
been shaped by diverse geo-political spaces. For a younger generation of
female artists with no passports, or too many, signing culture through
costume or traditional performance forms is no longer an option. The
effects of culturally heterogeneous frameworks on the creation of new
performance works have to be explored at a more profound level to reveal
the deep cultural elements that inform, amongst other things, performance
time, dramaturgical structures, emotional expression, and the contract
between the performer and the audience. This process may involve as
much clashing as synthesising of culturally divergent matter. For artists
working in this realm, embracing a nomadic identity space could be both
an aesthetic and a political choice. If there is to be a second wave of
women’s intercultural performance which manages to negotiate the
vagaries of the marketplace, we believe it will emerge from artists whose
performance practice shapes a chora from the indeterminant, transitional
spaces that lie in between cultural certainties.
Notes
Introduction: culture, feminism, theatre

1 The nineteenth-century concept of nationalism is certainly not superseded by
globalism, postmodernism, or other contemporary discourses. It has,
however, receded in importance in global contexts. This is not to suggest that
globalism has demonstrated a superior power, but rather because globalism
tends to oppose itself more to the localism of cultural or ethnic identities.
Through the last 200 years, national parameters have frequently been
constructed for political or economic reasons, often regardless of cultural
boundaries. Nevertheless it is possible for globalism and nationalism to
continue to co-exist. Appadurai (1986a: 296) makes an argument for this in
the development of his five ‘scapes’. It does seem, though, that Appadurai’s
constructions are in part an attempt to bridge too easily the cavern between the
two approaches.
2 While Geertz’s concept is ethnographic in origin, it is very useful to our
discussion in that it situates analysis within culture: ‘As inter-worked systems
of construable signs . . . culture is not a power, something to which social
events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a
context, something within which they can be intelligibly – that is, thickly –
described’ (Geertz 1973: 14).
3 Interculturalism has been compared with (and occasionally mistaken for)
theatre anthropology, most likely because Eugenio Barba engages in both.
Rustom Bharucha is particularly scathing about theatre anthropology which
all too frequently becomes a form of ‘cultural tourism’ (1993: 35), or an
opportunity for western practitioners and/or academics to visit ‘exotic’
locations and publish their often decontextualised observations.
4 For more information on Artaud’s predilection for incorporating material
from a variety of cultures, see Bharucha (1993: 14–17). For Brecht’s interest
in Chinese performance, based on seeing Mei Lan-fang’s company in
Moscow in 1935, see ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’, collected in
Willett (1978: 91–9).
Notes 185
5 Carlson’s model is based in part on a three-stage version developed by

Michael Gissenwehrer.
6 Pavis’s conclusion regarding the efficacy of the hourglass reveals a salient
warning for interculturalism:
Unfortunately, we seem to be heading toward a two-tiered culture and

interculturalism: a consumable culture for a large audience or even for a
targeted group from the conservative middle class, a culture of easy access
that is neither controversial nor radical, which provides ready-made answers
to big questions, cavalier views on history (Cixous) or pleasing
embellishments (Mnouchkine), preaching an end to cultural differentiation
under the cover of ‘an all-purpose culture’; or, on the contrary, an elite culture
that is radical and irreducible, that abandons spectacular performance to
work at the microscopic level, almost in secret, and whose results are never
immediate and often obscure.
(Pavis 1992: 212)
7 See Williams (1991) for the most complete account of The Mahabharata.
8 Noh originates from early religious celebratory dances. Formalised in the
fourteenth century by Kan’ami and his son, Zeami, Noh prizes the Zen artistic
ideals of restraint, minimalism, and yugen (mysterious or suggestive beauty).
Noh’s comic counterpart, Kyogen, is thought to be as old as Noh, but its scripts
were not recorded until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Kyogen,
loud, exaggerated, and farcical, is commonly associated with the short comic
performances that occur between Noh plays. Kabuki, the theatre of the
people, originated from the dances of a woman named Okuni in the early
seventeenth century. Spectacular and bawdy, Kabuki reflected contemporary
urban life. Kabuki adapts to its times, unlike Noh. For more on these and other
Japanese theatre forms, see Ortolani (1990).
9 Bharucha is quick to acknowledge that non-western cultures have themselves
been guilty of pandering to this western exoticism of the ‘orient’: ‘the
“Orient” can be manufactured in India itself and then transported abroad to
validate earlier modes of “orientalism” which are in the process of being
dismantled elsewhere’ (Bharucha 1996: 210).
10 See Bharucha (1993) for a detailed analysis of how commodification
underpinned Brook’s The Mahabharata.
11 See Chapter 2 for a sustained argument regarding the reception of ritual in
western cultures. Chapter 5 also explores in greater depth the
commodification of performance and culture. It is important to remember,
however, that, as Hinsley points out, many cultures are complicit in their own
commodification: in his analysis of the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1893,
Hinsley observes that: ‘wherever we traffic in the world, there are those
market informants who understand the commodity premise and are prepared
to authenticate their cultures accordingly’ (Hinsley 1991: 363).
186 Notes
12 A brief (and general) exploration of the nature of alterity illuminates the ways
in which interculturalism – founded on the construction of identity, identity
formation, and subject position – operates. A major criticism of recent
intercultural theatre can be traced back to an underlying distrust of the
subject–object duality of western thinking, what Adorno and Horkheimer
called ‘instrumental rationality’ (cited in Gardiner 1996: 125) and Martin
Buber described as the I–It relation:
I–It denotes a situation where the self confronts an external object-world, and
proceeds to give this world shape, meaning, and pragmatic ‘use-value’. . . .
Hence, the world only has significance from the perspective of the
intentional, self-contained ego, and is manipulated according to a pre-
established conceptual schema.
(ibid.)
In contrast to this relationship which objectifies, shapes, and controls the other
as object, Buber suggests a radically different relation of the I–Thou, in which
the ‘self comes to the realization that it cannot be a self-constituting,
autonomous ego, but part of the category “in between”, or what Buber
sometimes calls the “ontology of the inter-human’” (ibid.). Artists who
venture across cultural borders would do well to remember the perceptual
difference between the I–It and the I–Thou relations. Luckily, as Emmanuel
Levinas points out, Buber’s model comes to the rescue of the integrity of
artists, by citing the creative impulse as an example of the I–Thou relation:
The thing which is merely given and which I can dominate belongs to the
sphere of the It. But the specific way in which the artist, for example,
confronts the thing in creating a work of art, may be construed as a response
to an appeal, and therefore, as a meeting.
(Levinas 1989: 70)
Despite Buber’s generosity, it would be difficult to argue that the I–It relation
has not found a presence within intercultural theatre. One of the main
criticisms levelled at western practitioners has been the ease with which they
have manipulated other cultures into a ‘pre-established conceptual schema’.
Buber’s pursuit of an ethics of intersubjectivity and the exploration of the
‘ontology of the interhuman’ lie at the heart of the paradox facing the theatre
artist. In the continuum of intercultural performance, the extremes are marked
on the one hand by the total commodification of the other as ‘It’ through the
reification of cultural traces and, on the other, by the illusion of an encounter
with the ‘Thou’ based on a false sense of identification in which the fixed
subject merely engages with what is familiar to reinforce a sense of self. This
theoretical model can be applied to the theatre experience through the various
relationships of artist to other culture, artist to artist, artist to audience, and
audience and artist to the cultural ‘artefact’ of the other.
13 See note 12 for more on the subjective experience of artists.
Notes 187
1 Narrative trajectories: A Doll’s House and

Antigone
1 Eleanor Marx organised a reading of the play in London in 1886; Alexandra
Kollontai spoke of the inspiration of Nora in Oslo in 1928 (Templeton 1997).
2 See Johannes Fabian (1983).
3 Seito was the major publication in the struggle for women’s emancipation. It
operated from 1911–16 and on six occasions issues were banned by
government censors on the basis that they were ‘an offense against public
decency’ and had the intention of the ‘destruction of the family system’. These
issues included articles and short stories that advocated free love, equality in
the home, and raised the subject of abortion (Sato 1981: 286).
4 This conflation reflected the emergence of the arts as an attractive arena for
middle-class women looking for new roles outside the home; actresses had
also recently reappeared on the Japanese stage after an absence of 300 years
(Rodd 1991: 175).
5 The first spoken drama was The New Village Head, written and directed by
Zhang Penchun. See Yan (1992: 56).
6 The issue of arranged marriages was as topical in China as it had been in Japan
several years earlier. In the journals edited by women, the tenets of
Confucianism were once again under attack: articles were written on how to
select a husband, claiming that now ‘western civilisation had come to China
– parents no longer have right to interfere’ (Croll 1978: 89).
7 Women’s associations and unions were accused of communist sympathies
and closed down. The Guomindang disbanded all people’s organisations and
massacred their leaders. The girl agitators were easily recognised because of
their cropped hair: during the next three years, literally thousands of women
activists were killed (Croll 1978: 151).
8 Our accounts of Jiang Qing’s performance of Nora are drawn from the
available English language sources, and in the case of Roxane Witke’s
biography, the information is of questionable accuracy (Ly Singko 1979).
Attempts by Li Jiaojiao, our Chinese research assistant in Shanghai, to
recover important commentaries on the production by critics Cui Wanqui and
Tang Na proved unsuccessful. These documents are held in the Shanghai
Library in archive collections that are still not open to the public.
9 It is interesting to note that 30 years later when Jiang Qing began to exert
control on the arts, particularly the Model Beijing Opera, the heroines she
demanded on the stage were not rebels, but figures who conformed to the
views of the political establishment (see Terrill 1984).
10 The Shah persecuted anyone who attempted to oppose him. Five thousand
people died and 50,000 were forced into exile. Savak had 60,000 people
working as informers and was known for its brutality. Over US$2,000 million
was exported annually from Iran during 1973–8; half of this amount belonged
to Pahlavi extended family members (Hiro 1985: 95).
188 Notes
11 In the early 1990s, women were still barred from 97 areas of academic study
in universities in Iran (Afshar 1996: 203).
12 The hejab comes from the root word, ‘hajaba’, meaning to conceal a space, to
mark it off with a curtain, or a symbolic boundary. For a fascinating discussion
linking the imposition of the veil and terrorism in Muslim capitals during the
1980s, see Mernessi (1996).
13 In a private correspondence with the authors (2.12.99) regarding the
reception of Sara in Iran, Dariush Mehrjui points out:
The women audiences in Iran were divided: there were those who were
feminists and deplored the first half of the movie and applauded Sara’s
rebellion. And then there were those more traditional women who could not
believe that an Iranian woman would make such a sacrifice for her husband,
and still approved of her rebellion. In general most of the audiences were
women, a lot of them crying during the projection, many of them identifying
with the heroine.
14 Steiner notes that Hegel ‘uses Sophocles’ Antigone to test and to exemplify
successive models of religious-civic conflict and of historical coming-into-
being [while] Kierkegaard’s use is desperate in its needful arbitrariness. . . .
Kierkegaard makes of Antigone an open-ended precedent. . . . The unknown
retains a greater measure of healing authority’ (Steiner 1984: 104).
Kierkegaard also uses the figure of Antigone to explore subjectivity and
subjective truth, and the problems of Hegelian objectivity. We are indebted to
Dimitri Poulos for this observation.
15 Sarumpaet’s Antigone, performed in Jakarta in March 1991, foregrounds the
extreme subservience of women in the Batak culture. For a description of the
production, see Sarumpaet (1995). The writer has herself been arrested in
1998 for crimes against the state (Eisenstein 1998).
16 Subasinghe’s Antigone was performed in Colombo in 1993. She writes
exclusively in her native Sinhala language and is committed to the revival of
traditional forms of folk theatre to reflect the concerns of contemporary Sri
Lankan society. Subasinghe highlights Creon’s familial relationship to
Antigone instead of presenting Creon in terms of a particular faction (such as
secular law) and Antigone representing another (such as religious law). For
more information on this production, see Subasinghe (1997).
17 The original performance, on 24 September 1986 at the Goethe Institute in
Buenos Aires, was directed by Laura Yusem and designed by Graciela Galán
and Juan Carlos Distéfano. Antígona was played by Bettina Muraña, a mestiza
dancer (Feitlowitz 1990: 9). Gambaro’s version of Antigone borrows from
other traditions as well, including lines from Ophelia in Hamlet, references to
Rubén Darío, William Faulkner, and Søren Kierkegaard (Gambaro 1995: 57).
18 The phenomenon of ‘disappearance’, or desaparición, has become a
particularly popular abuse of human rights. It has entered the language in
Notes 189
several ways: one can speak of the disappeared (singular or plural) and the
word can become a verb as well (to have been disappeared). The Mothers
never refer to their children as killed, murdered, dead, corpses, etc. They
always use ‘disappeared’ because the government has never admitted to
killing them.
19 While President Carter stopped all aid and loans when he learned of the
disappearances, Ronald Reagan reversed this decision when he took office.
Most of the higher-ranked military officers were trained in the US or by US
trainers. American multinational companies also invested heavily in
Argentina at this time (see Taylor 1997: 110–11).
20 The government ignored the Mothers for six months, assuming that they were
mad, claiming that they were only old women and therefore incapable of
harm. Then, on 15 October 1977, after they presented a petition with 24,000
names of people willing to demand investigation into the disappearances, the
police fired tear-gas into the 300-strong crowd of Mothers, arresting many. As
Schirmer explains, ‘the Madres’ immunity had come to an end, and they, too,
like their relatives, became subject to the state’s definition of subversion’
(1989: 7). At least one of the mothers, Azucena Villaflor, was herself
disappeared (Femenía 1987: 14). On an ostensibly more humanitarian front,
‘[s]ome of the Mothers were promised the return of their children if they
would stop demonstrating in the plaza’ (ibid.: 14). This seemingly helpful
tactic of the return of the children was later revealed to be particularly
grotesque: the relatives had long since been murdered.
21 See Taylor (1997) for a full description of the methods of murder during the
Dirty War years in Argentina.
2 Ritual translocations: Kim Kum hwa and

Warlpiri women
1 For a fuller discussion of the strands of ritual, see Gilbert and Tompkins (1996:
53–61).
2 This wholesale attack on the purposive rationality of the modern subject is
taken up by Georges Bataille, who furthers Nietzsche’s project by
concentrating on the power of the abject. See Botting and Wilson (1997).
3 Victor Turner makes the distinction between this definition by Gurvitch and
his own, more familiar, term of communitas (Turner 1982).
4 In the South, the role of shaman is hereditary, but in order to become a
charismatic shaman, it is necessary to undergo a sinbyoing, or illness, which
is interpreted as a calling from the deities. The following is an account of Kim
Kum hwa’s initiation as a shaman:
I was born quite sickly. I was always ill with one disease after another. When
I was eleven, my health was extremely weakened by malaria, stomach aches
and so on. When I was fourteen I was married by way of an arranged
190 Notes
marriage. The Japanese were involved in a war [Second World War]. The
Japanese occupied Korea from 1919 to 1945 so they were recruiting young
men in the villages and sending them off to fight. Girls were also recruited
and sent off to nearby cities to work in factories. Parents and daughter were
therefore anxious to get them married. So I married.
My married life was an anxiety in itself. My mother-in-law hated me
because I was always ill. She was quite mean to me as a result. My health
began to deteriorate further and I felt I was losing my mind quite often. I
began then to talk to spirits in gibberish. My mother-in-law thought that I was
caught by an evil spirit and sent me back home.
One night, when I was seventeen, I went to a brook to admire the full moon.
When I tried to leap over the stream, I fell backwards, and as I did, I rolled
backward into a ball. After that incident, I became severely ill for about three
months. One morning, at dawn, I dashed out of my bed and ran like a mad
woman to one of the houses of a shaman in the village.
(Kim Kum hwa cited in Kim 1988: 160)
5 If a man is to practise as a shaman he must dress as a woman during the Kut.

There are a number of explanations for the predominance of women
practising charismatic shamanism in Korea. Women are seen as the
receptacles for human spirits through the womb and it is believed that the
deities possess the shaman by entering the inner void of the womb.
‘According to the shamanic world view, the universe is born out of the Void.
Because all entities are part of the universe, each entity observes the
macrocosmic rule and each entity possesses a Void within itself (Kim 1988:
169). Alternative explanations for the high numbers of female shaman
emphasise the importance of the role as a possible alternative to patriarchal
family structures and the lack of opportunities for women in the workforce. In
1980, the male–female wage gap was greater in Korea than in any other
country for which data was available from the International Labour
Organisation. See Amsden (1989).
6 Even at the public demonstration held in 1990 to mark the tenth anniversary
of the infamous Kwang Ju massacre, a performer dressed as a traditional
shaman could be seen – amidst the tear-gas, truncheons, armed vehicles, and
police in their ‘kurosawa’ riot helmets – dancing a funeral rite. Behind her
were the rows and rows of mothers who carried the portraits of their dead and
disappeared children in protest through the streets.
7 Planning for the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference began
in 1991, two months after the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was
established by the Federal government. The Conference theme – the
relationship between traditional women’s ritual or storytelling and
contemporary women’s performance – grew out of this Australian
experience. The programme highlighted the work of artists in postcolonial
Notes 191
societies who were creating new hybrid art out of their traditional
performance forms and the theatres of colonisation. Some 450 delegates from
37 countries attended the seven-day conference and witnessed the two major
ritual performances: the Inma, or women’s ritual business, performed by the
Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjarjara women from Central
Australia, and the Taedong Kut performed by Kim Kum hwa and her company
of shaman.
8 The performance included the Shin Chong U-lim, inviting the General God;
Il Wall Maji, inviting the sun, moon, star gods, and the gods of nature; Chil
Sung Je Seok Kut, prayers on behalf of the people; Ta Sal Kut, the offering of
the pig to cleanse the community of sin; Soo Wang Cheon, leading wandering
souls to Heavenly Paradise; Chak Doo Ta Ki, the appearance of the Knife
Riding General; Tae Keum No Ri, community celebration, when the evil
spirits have been driven away. Madame Kim and her company took great care
to reproduce accurately the environment of the Kut within their Australian
venues. An altar, or god table, was set up along the back wall of the theatre and
behind the table a backdrop was created with paintings of the various deities.
Korean shaman honour 273 deities: Buddha and bodhisattvas, Chinese and
Korean folk heroes have all found their way into the songs and chants. The god
table is laden with food intended to appeal to the tastes of the various deities
invited to the ritual: the Sun and Moon deities are vegetarian, the Great
Warrior is carnivorous. The dishes on display include rice cakes, fruits,
vegetables, cooked rice, and dried fish. When the Great Ritual is performed as
an annual celebration for the well-being of the village, the god table is laid out
in one of the large farm buildings and, on completion of the rites, the food is
consumed by the participants. In theatre venues, the god table defines the
performance area, whilst the musicians who accompany the shaman are
seated on stage left. Percussion instruments dominate the sound-scape and
feature a variety of drums and cymbals; the rhythms are overlaid with
traditional wind instruments and the wailing sound of the farmer’s trumpet.
9 Kim Kum hwa is protected from the pain of the blades, which she tests on her
arms and tongue. On the last night of the Adelaide season, the company felt
that ritual pollution had affected the Kut, and Kim Kum hwa was forced to go
into a very deep trance.
10 These interviews – in addition to the pre-publicity and performance reviews
cited in this section – are collected in the press clippings file of the Third
International Women Playwrights’ Conference, housed in the Third
International Women Playwrights’ Conference Collection at the Mortlock
Library in South Australia (Third International Women Playwrights’
Conference 1994b).
11 In the post-Conference documentation, Madame Kim’s image dominates. For
instance, a full-page photograph appeared in Theatre Journal, two large
format photographs in TDR, the photograph that accompanied the report in
192 Notes
the NZADIE (New Zealand Association for Drama in Education), her image
was on the front cover of the special issue of Australasian Drama Studies, and
two full-page portraits appeared in the special issue of Australian Feminist
Studies. There were 65 speakers from 30 countries at the Conference. All of
these speakers were leading artists, and the press was provided with
information and photographs of at least 20 of them: the closest competition
for visual representation came from Joan Littlewood, whose image appeared
four times.
12 Freud put forward this theory in Totem and Taboo while writing about
Australian Aborigines:
their psychic life assumes a peculiar interest for us, for we can recognise in
their psychic life the well-preserved, early stage of our own development. . . .
I am choosing for comparison those tribes which have been described by
ethnologists as being the most backward and wretched: the aborigines of the
youngest continent, namely Australia.
(Freud 1938: 15–16)
13 The most relevant theorising of the pre-Oedipal to our investigation lies in the
parallels that have been drawn between the retrieval of this state and the
perception of the sublime in art. The sublime – which is as much a reworking
of a classical concept by nineteenth-century Romanticism as the
representations of Dionysus – is characterised by psychoanalytic theorist
Thomas Weiskel as the ‘primordial desire to bond or fuse with the other’
(Weiskel 1976: 104). Fear and ambivalence accompany this desire for
inundation: the manner in which this ambivalence is negotiated determines
the nature of the sublime experience. If we accept this definition of the
sublime, then an aesthetic experience should be capable of triggering a trace
memory of the intersubjective bliss of the mother–child dyad.
14 See Chodorow (1978), Grosz (1989), and Conley (1984).
15 This section is based on an interview conducted on 21 August 1998 in Seoul
between Kim Kum hwa and Hyun Chang on behalf of the authors. Quotations
are taken from transcripts of this interview.
16 This comment was translated for the authors by Sabina Chang.
17 Shim Jung Soon, academic and major Korean theatre critic, provided the
following response to Kim Kum hwa’s Adelaide performance:
To my eyes, it looked as if Kim Kum hwa and the other performers on stage
had learned about the ways of Western audiences and Western performances,
and in that moment, I saw a Kut commodified according to a Western capitalist
logic. . . . I came to see her performance in a more comprehensive or global
way: if we are to represent/present our authentic Korean tradition/identity to
the Western audiences, we may have to appropriate their cultural/ performing
paradigms. I realize that it is a necessity to accommodate the audience, but I
Notes 193
still feel sorry that part of our authentic tradition/identity has to be moderated
and disappear.
(personal correspondence with the authors, 14 September 1998)
18 The Warlpiri were one of the last indigenous groups to be affected by

colonisation and it was not until the late 1920s that they were forced into a
dependent relationship with the Northern Territory white settlers. The
deciding moment in the history of the relationship between the Warlpiri and
the colonial administration occurred in 1928, when an incident between an
Aboriginal woman and a white settler culminated in the death of the latter. In
response to this incident, the colonial administration organised a punitive raid
near Coniston, which is in the centre of Warlpiri country. Over 100 bush
people were massacred, 40 of whom were Warlpiri. Fear of further violence,
starvation, drought, and the destruction of the native vegetation by cattle drew
the Warlpiri out of the bush and into the orbit of the station communities.
Increasingly, Warlpiri took jobs at the gold and wolfram mines and on the
cattle stations, but it was not until the Second World War that they were
guaranteed a wage for their labour. After a brief period as wage earners, the
Warlpiri were forced out of the workforce by falling mineral prices and the
post-war demobilisation. The Native Affairs branch of the Australian
Government, in an attempt to keep unemployed indigenous people away from
major towns like Alice Springs, established new large-scale Aboriginal
settlements. Under this scheme Yuendumu was established in 1946 and
Lajamanu in 1949.
19 See M. Bachelard (1997) for further discussion of this issue and its complex
effect on 1990s politics in Australia.
20 All the interviews were conducted in Warlpiri, rather than English, and
subsequently translated by Lee Cataldi.
21 Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi shares certain ceremonies with Nungarrayis
from different parts of Warlpiri country, but as she points out, her entitlement
is extremely specific:
All those Nungarrayis, like myself, will have our own Jukurrpa designs from
our grandfathers and identify with different country. But I can’t paint any
other Nungarrayi’s designs. I don’t have that right. Those designs don’t
belong to me; it’s not my country. People aren’t allowed to sing songs, tell
Jukurrpa stories or paint designs belonging to other people. In fact, when this
occasionally happens, people can be punished – even physically
reprimanded. Warlpiri people view the wrongful use of other people’s body
designs very seriously.
(Herbert Nungarrayi 1995)
194 Notes
22 The remarks made by the Warlpiri women relating to Yawulyu performances

are taken from transcripts of interviews conducted by the authors from 2 to 12
August 1998 in Lajamanu and Yuendumu, NT, Australia.
23 This may in part be attributable to the fact that the Warlpiri Yawulyu are
frequently based on track dreamings (as opposed to site-based dreamings) and
are therefore mimetic of journeys covering vast areas of land. See Bell (1993:
138).
3 Layering space: staging and remembering
‘home’
1 Africa does share this legacy with a number of locations including Bali, Papua
New Guinea, Japan, China, and various parts of India. Bali and Africa have
been especially well mined by European interculturalists – not to mention
other types of speculators – since the beginning of the twentieth century.
2 Indeed, Gregory and Urry comment that at the end of the twentieth century,
‘spatial structure is now seen not merely as an arena in which social life
unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social relations are produced
and reproduced’ (Gregory and Urry 1985: 3). Space does, then, have a degree
of autonomy in commenting on the world and experiences in that world. Soja
comments that ‘spatiality, as socially produced space, must thus be
distinguished from the physical space of material nature and the mental space
of cognition and representation, each of which is used and incorporated into
the social construction of spatiality but cannot be conceptualised as its
equivalent’ (Soja 1989: 92–3). The socially produced nature of space, then,
makes even the most ethereal of spaces virtually tangible.
3 For a fuller explanation, see Scolnicov (1994) and Best (1995).
4 Of course, different cultures teach their members different methods of
‘reading’ any social structures. We hope that the methods we describe here
will be useful in a variety of contexts, even though they emanate from a
broadly western approach to theatre.
5 In his description of space in the postcolonial context, Young recognises the
necessary layering of the types of space when he applies Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of territorialisation to postcolonial spatialisation in ‘a form
of palimpsestual inscription and reinscription, an historical paradigm that will
acknowledge the extent to which cultures were not simply destroyed but
rather layered on top of each other’ (Young 1995: 173–4).
6 It is important to realise that merely recognising the presence of the workings
of space as reflecting or even determining dominant ideology does not
necessarily reduce their impact, as Tejumola Olaniyan explains:
What the dramatic practices of Wole Soyinka, Amiri Baraka, Derek Walcott,
and Ntozake Shange together show us is an empowering post-Afrocentric
Notes 195
space, a space that calls to account and radically revises the colonialist,
triumphalist narrative of European modernity. The dramatists show us that
the space, though possible, is a thoroughly embattled space, a guerrilla space
that is constantly forced to shift and improvise terrains because it is still a
dominated space. In showing us that the space and its attendant performative
conception of cultural identity are possible, the question they ask, I think, is
whether the space can really flourish without its own supporting structures,
that is, within still Eurocentric institutions . . . in the current global political
economy of the production and circulation of subjectivities.
(Olaniyan 1995: 139)
Recognising the nature of these spatial structures is, however, the first step
towards any type of dismantling or reorganising project.
7 It is important to acknowledge, however, that early attempts to theorise and
empower postcolonial Africa were based in pan-African movements and
negritude, both of which aimed to destabilise the Manichean Europe/Africa
or white/black binaries by constructing theoretical and political movements
that operated well beyond political borders.
8 The Mother Africa figure has endured in writing by African men, even after
the end of the colonial era. While no longer necessarily imbued with racist
assumptions, these figures in literature tend to be governed by sexist
boundaries ostensibly determining women’s subject positions.
9 Algeria won independence from France in 1962, after an eight-year war.
During most of the 1990s, Algerians have lived through a civil war that has
pitted various ruling regimes (usually characterised by militarism and a
willingness to suspend elections when the opposition appeared to be gaining
power) against an Islamic party (the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, now
banned). Since the mid-1980s, the influence of Islam on Algeria has been
profound, coinciding with the fall of oil prices and domestic economic
hardship (Out There News 1997; ArabNet 1997; Marlowe 1997). One of the
effects of the unrest since the mid-1980s is that thousands of people,
particularly artists and writers, have been killed. Some such murders have
resulted from terrorist acts by opposition forces, while others have been
caused by government intervention. Many of the dead were educated people
considered to be threats to one side or the other.
10 This does raise a question regarding the objectification of women and
women’s bodies. Hanna Scolnicov (1994: 8) argues that from the time of
modernism, leaving the house is the sign of women’s emancipation – A Doll’s
House is the obvious example. Bachelard’s construction suggests the
importance of the return to the home, which, for Scolnicov, could be read as a
sign of man’s return to dominate the house, and thereby, its female inhabitants
(Bachelard 1964: 8). This does not, however, seem to be a necessarily logical
196 Notes
outcome of memory space, particularly since the desire to return to a memory

space obviously applies to women as well as to men.
11 Grosz (1995) reads chora through Plato, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray.
12 It is useful to introduce a fourth play here, Djanet Sears’s Afrika Solo. This is
another play that explores the African imaginary in terms of homecoming as
it stages a journey to Africa through space, time, and history for the
eponymous character to ‘find herself’. Her adventures include reclaiming
African histories and various cultural practices specific to the countries she
visits and culminate in her decision to return to Canada, but not to abandon
Africa. She carries Africa ‘with’ her in her body: the spatial location of Africa
(as well as all the other significations of ‘Africa’) becomes coded within and
upon the body of Djanet. In other words, Djanet’s body, which she comes to
recognise as beautiful ‘despite’ its blackness, with its renewed sense of self-
worth, becomes the site of chora.
13 Suitcases also represent the state of the vast majority of blacks in South Africa
during apartheid who were forced to live and work away from their families,
returning ‘home’ for just a short, annual visit.
14 The mother figure is, of course, not solely associated with Africa. It is also
present in India and in cultures with a strong Roman Catholic religious base
where the worship of Mary is important. Mary and/or the idealised woman
then becomes conflated with nationality and patriotism, as we have seen in
Argentina.
15 For a full discussion, see Best (1995: 183–92).
16 Of course, any number of other considerations may also play a part, including
the size of the theatre (a theatre seating 3,000 people necessarily deploys
different kinesics to an actor performing in a small studio theatre seating 30),
the differences between indoor and outdoor performance, and discrete
cultural differences in the coding of performance.
17 Formerly a food market for approximately 60 years (Fuchs 1990: 35–6), the
Market’s main space is in an octagonal building once known as the Indian
Citrus Market. Located in Newtown, near central Johannesburg, ‘on the edge
of an Indian residential neighbourhood’ and ‘the white city of Johannesburg’
(Fuchs 1990: 36), the Market Theatre complex has grown to include other
performance spaces: Upstairs at the Market, the Laager, and the Rehearsal
Room. In 1995 Mhlope became the first black woman to be artistic director of
the Market Theatre.
4 Intercultural bodies: meetings in the

flesh
1 In tracing the origins of this racial discourse, we are indebted to the ground-
breaking analysis by Colette Guillaumin (1995): she distinguishes between
the European aristocracy, who claimed their status through systems of lineage
Notes 197
and divine right, and the bourgeoisie, who claimed power through the
definition of what they were not.
2 We use this term ironically, in the same way that it was used by Rustom
Bharucha in his address to the Australasian Drama Studies Association
annual conference at Hamilton, New Zealand in 1998. ‘We don’t need any
more intercultural masterpieces’, Bharucha stated, referring to the
extravagant productions that have been commissioned by international
festivals in recent years.
3 The performing bodies may have existed in the same theatrical place and time,
and frequently performed a designated classic with so-called universal
themes (Shakespeare was a popular choice), but the narrative and discourse
allowed cultures to be located in a system that established hierarchical
positions and values. The premise for each of these works was identical. The
host country provided the creative team, the production was financed through
Government arts bureaux and international agencies, and the actors were cast
either according to the amount of sponsorship provided by their governments,
or by their ability physically to denote racial and cultural differences. King
Lear, performed at the Theatre of Nations Festival in Seoul in September
1997, was a marvellous illustration of this genre of intercultural theatre. The
production was funded through the United Nations, the International Theatre
Institute, and the American, Korean, German, and Japanese Governments.
Lear and Cordelia were Korean, Kent was an American, Edgar Japanese, and
Gloucester German. The two actors from Sierra Leone were dressed in
feathers, furs, and body paint, and were not assigned characters. Rehearsals
happened to coincide with the major currency crisis of the ASEAN countries
in late 1997. Eight weeks after the final performances in Tokyo, the
International Monetary Fund organised a US$57 billion bail-out of the
Korean economy, widely reported as the biggest financial rescue package in
history. Kent was indeed a faithful servant (King Lear 1997).
4 The original Akwanso cast consisted of Rhoda Roberts, Dorinda Hafner,
Jigzie Campbell, and Aku Kadogo.
5 The original members of the Top End Girls were: Joanna Barrkman, Maria
Alice Casimiro Branco, Venetia Gillot, Betchay Mondragon, Lilliane
Rababarisoa, Desak Putu Warti, Paia Ingram, Hortensia ‘Tetchy’ Masero, and
Alison Mills. As we discuss below, Desak Putu Warti was forced to withdraw
from the production and her place was taken by Dorothea Randall.
6 At the time of writing, Australian troops are stationed in East Timor as part of
the United Nations multinational force deployed to establish security after the
vote for independence on 30 August 1999. The Indonesian military were
implicated in the pro-Jakarta violence perpetrated by local militias following
the referendum. On assuming power in November 1999, the newly elected
President of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, pledged to decentralise control
of the provinces and to attack the overriding power of the army.
7 See Bhabha (1994b).
198 Notes
8 See Friedman (1997), Chow (1991: ch. 2), and Young (1995) for extensive
arguments about problematic perceptions of hybridity.
9 This section uses the western-style order of Japanese names for reasons of
consistency and in line with contemporary Japanese usage in English-
speaking countries.
10 The apartment block had been built by the Government to provide
accommodation for the increasing numbers of professional women entering
the workforce in the 1930s. There were 150 Japanese- and western-style one-
room apartments. All the tenants were the sole occupants of their rooms, all
visitors were monitored, and a strict curfew was enforced. The architectural
design of this building conformed to all the practices of enclosure,
partitioning, and surveillance identified by Foucault in his analyses of the
spatial power mechanisms employed in factories, workshops, schools, and
prisons. The new and independent women who moved into this purpose-built
accommodation in Tokyo were subjected to a bodily regime that had little in
common with the body-spaces inhabited by their mothers and grandmothers.
11 The ‘Hybrid Committee’ of the Australia Council was established to consider
funding applications for new works that crossed conventional art forms. The
term ‘Hybrid’ was later replaced by ‘New Media’.
12 ‘The Co-Prosperity Sphere, formalised in 1940, was an integral part of Prime
Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s idea of a “New Order” in which the Japanese
would lead a Pan-Asian effort towards Asian self-sufficiency and stability,
anti-communism, and resistance to Western imperialism’ (Robertson 1998:
93, n. 3).
13 In Sayonara (1954), the film based on the James Michener novel, the Marlon
Brando character, Major Gruver, has an affair with a Takarazuka otokoyaku,
in yet another variant on the Madame Butterfly theme. When this process of
displaced sexual desire was re-directed at the Takarazuka Revue by
Hollywood, the management refused to co-operate with the production
(Robertson 1998: 221, n. 12).
14 Ankoku Butoh is the name given to the strain of butoh developed by Tatsumi
Hijikata. There are numerous forms of butoh that have developed in the past
40 years, so much so that critics argue whether there is any consistency in the
work that can legitimate the present categorisation into a single genre.
15 Ohno, the most famous of the dancers associated with the butoh movement,
cites his major inspirations as the Christian religion, the famous flamenco
dancer Antonia Merce, Monet, Les Enfants du Paradis, and his mother. It was
through Ohno that Hijikata became aware of the work of the choreographer
and initiator of Ausdruckstanz, Mary Wigman, and Harald Kreutzberg, a
dancer infamous for the ambiguity of his performed sexuality. It -was through
Hijikata that Ohno was introduced to the works of Genet, the Marquis de Sade,
Lautréamont, Aubrey Beardsley, Hemingway, and Artaud. Ironically, some
of these artists, most prominently Wigman and Artaud, had themselves drawn
major inspiration from ‘oriental’ sources; in fact, one of Wigman’s most
famous works was entitled Marche Orientale (Takai, interview 1998).
Notes 199
16 It was not until Ohno and Sankai Juku achieved critical success in Europe and
America that it became more than a minor avant-garde phenomenon in Japan.
The first major butoh season, the ‘Reimport Festival’, was held in downtown
Tokyo in 1985. By this time there were over 100 butoh companies in Japan and
another 100 overseas. It was impossible to attend an international arts festival
in the late 1980s and early 1990s and not see a butoh performance.
17 It is arguable whether these companies comprise a consistent choreographic
movement; certainly Hijikata felt that butoh was being commodified before
reaching maturity. To many of its critics the dance form has degenerated into
exoticism.
18 One of the most famous transformation exercises created by Hijikata was
based on the rooster. Ojima Ichiro explains: ‘The idea was to push out all of
the human inside and let the bird take its place. You may start by imitating, but
imitation is not your final goal; when you believe you are thinking completely
like a chicken, you have succeeded’ (cited in Klein 1988: 97).
19 Quotations by Pol Pelletier regarding her performance practice are taken from
transcripts of an interview conducted by the authors on 3 June 1998 in
Montréal, Canada.
5 Intercultural markets: the female body

and censorship
1 Large corporations now support arts organisations (theatre, dance, opera
companies, museums, as well as festivals) almost as heavily as they support
sporting events. This is not, however, generally motivated by philanthropy or
an interest in the arts. Rather, it is generally useful as a tax write-off, a
promotional or advertising exercise, or to entertain clients: ‘Australian Ballet
corporate development manager Kenneth Watkins says some companies
sponsor the ballet purely for its opening night parties, at which they can
entertain a host of existing clients and potentially meet and woo any number
of new ones’ (Strickland 1998: 6). As Marie-Hélène Falcon, director of
Montréal’s Festival de Théâtre des Amériques, explains, ‘Sponsors will not
get involved because they want to support art. They will get involved because
you have an audience that they’re interested in. . . . That’s what sponsorship is
about. It’s extremely naïve to think of anything else’ (interview 1998).
2 There is, of course, some complicity in this commodification, and we do not
assume that all cultures are powerless to change how they are represented.
Neither do we lay the responsibility for the sustained commodification of
culture on festivals.
3 The official definition of trafficking in women is defined by the International
Organisation of Migration as the situation in which
a woman in a country other than her own is exploited by another person

against her will and for financial gain. The trafficking element may –
200 Notes
cumulatively or separately – consist of: arranging legal or illegal migration

from the country of origin to the country of destination; deceiving victims
into prostitution once in the country of destination; or enforcing victims’
exploitation through violence, threat of violence, or other forms of coercion.
(Migration Information Programme 1995: 6)
4 Trafficked women also comply with the structural exchange of women

through marriage, which Claude Lévi-Strauss observed as a means of
ensuring the continuation of a social order (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 309).
5 Penalties for human smuggling remain low throughout Europe: ‘In Poland,
there are no specific laws governing the smuggling of aliens, whilst in the
Czech Republic, smuggling aliens is considered a misdemeanour’ (Migration
Information Programme 1995: 10). Trafficking in women was the subject of
a European Commission conference in Vienna in June 1996 that was
successful in placing the issue on the EU agenda of concerns (Commission of
the European Communities 1996: 26). The Circle against Sex Trafficking of
The Global Fund for Women held a conference in October 1996 in Reno,
Nevada, which acknowledged that trafficking is partly assisted by the
nebulous laws on prostitution. In addition, questions regarding the victims’
culpability remain (particularly whether or not they chose to become
involved). Sentences for trafficking in the US carry a maximum of only five
years (Circle against Sex Trafficking 1997: 10). Some of the key European-
based men who have been heavily involved in trafficking thousands of
women have been convicted of tax evasion, a crime which is more easily
proven than trafficking (de Stoop 1994: 8).
6 De Stoop explains that ‘exotic girls were much cheaper’ but their cultural
capital as ‘exotic’ is their chief attraction (de Stoop 1994: 105).
7 See Begg (1996: 13) for a description of the Virgin Mary as a product of
cultural adaptation originating with the Egyptian goddess Isis.
8 The geographical points are the Southern Cross constellation, roman
numerals to signify the twentieth festival, Mt Lofty (Adelaide’s highest point)
and its television antennae, the Rotunda (an image frequently used to market
Adelaide as a tourist destination), the Festival Centre building, and St Peter’s
Cathedral in Adelaide (which is known as the City of Churches). The religions
encompass Frejha from the Germanic tradition, a Buddha, the Egyptian gods
Horus and Seti, an Aboriginal Mimi or spirit person, a Siberian Shaman,
Athena, and the Hindu god Ganesha (Harris 1997b: 7).
9 The grounds of condemnation were at times extremely tenuous: Father John
Fleming, a Catholic priest who also hosts a radio talk-back programme,
argued that the two large Xs which signified the twentieth festival in roman
numerals were upside-down crosses, and thereby symbols of satanic worship
(5AN 1997a). Indeed, the poster became ‘fair game’ for any and all attacks:
even the representation of St Peter’s Cathedral was condemned by Reverend
Notes 201
Peter Osborn, the honorary Chaplain for the Arts, who said ‘Its spires are
better than that’ (The Advertiser 1997: 7).
10 Noris Iannou, a cultural historian of Greek heritage, was able to find a way to
read both sides of this clash in equivalent postmodern terms: he applauded the
poster in terms of a postmodern hybridity, but condemned it on the grounds of
interculturalism because it did not take into account the views of Greek
Orthodoxy (Iannou, interview 1998). He seems to have been the exception,
however. Interestingly, Iannou’s position was of limited interest during the
controversy: most participants preferred to use inflammatory arguments that
registered cultural pique more than rigour.
11 Some Catholic leaders subsequently demanded that Archer should have
approached them for permission (5DN 1997a) to use the image of the Virgin
Mary as well.
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Index
5AA Radio 170 America 7, 25, 71, 92, 108, 120,

5AN Radio 169, 200 137, 146, 176, 198
5DN Radio 170, 201 Amsden, Alice 109
Aboriginal Women (Australia) ancient Greece 43
72–86, 160–1; spirituality 74–82, Alliance Française 107
172, 200 Anouilh, Jean 44–5
Adelaide 67, 69, 77, 78, 83, 107, Antígona Furiosa 15, 43, 45, 51–4,
114, 156, 159–61, 169, 174, 192, 179–80
200 Antigone 15, 19–20, 43–6, 53, 56,
Adelaide Ray, The 67 178, 187, 188
Admiring La Argentina 139 Aoki, Michiko 123, 125, 126
Adorno, Theodor W. 13, 158, 186 Appadurai, Arjun 4, 184
Advertiser, The (Adelaide) 65, 67, Araluen Arts Centre 83
68, 160, 200 Archer, Robyn 114, 167–74, 180,
Afghanistan 174 201
Africa 88, 92–4, 96, 100, 104–8, Argentina 15, 19, 43, 45–7, 48, 49,
165, 176, 177, 194–6; ‘Mother 52, 53, 137, 176, 189, 196;
Africa’ 93, 116; see also Ghana; Congress 46; Constitution 46;
South Africa Dirty War 176
Afrika Solo 195 Artaud, Antonin 7–8, 57, 184, 198
Afshar, Haleh 88 Art Gallery (Darwin) 83
Age, The 68 Article 1170 39
Agosin, Marjorie 18, 50 ‘artist’s record book’ (ARB)
Aidoo, Ama Ata 88, 93, 96, 100, (Philippines) 165
104; see also The Dilemma of a Arts Academy in Jinan 34
Ghost arts festivals 153–9; 1992 Adelaide
Akita 144 Festival 159–61; 1996 Adelaide
Akwanso Flies South 114–15, 197 Festival 161; 1998 Adelaide
Algeria 16, 88, 91–4, 96–9, 102–7, Festival Poster 167, 169–74,
195 200–1; 1998 Telstra Adelaide
Alice Springs 78, 83, 193 Festival 16, 121, 155, 157, 167,
‘Alienation Effects in Chinese 168, 169–70, 176; Adelaide
Acting’ (Bertolt Brecht) 184 Festival of the Arts 156; Adelaide
alterity 13–14, 186 Festival Board 170; Autumn
Index 219
Festival (Paris) 140; Avignon 156; Barba, Eugenio 146, 184

Canberra Festival 114; Edinburgh Barrkman, Joanna 197
Festival 107, 156; and explicit Bassnett, Susan 175
body performance 159–63; Bataille, Georges 189
Festival de Théâtre des Amériques Baudrillard, Jean 129, 158
199; Hong Kong 156; Perth Beardsley, Aubrey 198
Festival 16, 121, 159; Singapore Begg, Ean 200
156; and sponsorship 199; The Beijing 32, 36
Standard Bank National Arts Belgium 165, 166, 175
Festival (Grahamstown, South Bell, Diane 193
Africa) 157; Theatre of Nations Benjamin, Jessica 13, 179, 180
Festival 197 Benjamin, Walter 151
ASEAN (Association of South East Berlin, Zeke 130, 132
Asian Nations) 197 Best, Sue 90, 105, 194, 196
Ashikawa, Yoko 16, 134, 137–45, Bhabha, Homi 121–2, 126, 197
148 Bharucha, Rustom 1, 10–11, 184,
Asia 120, 165, 175; East Asia 20, 185, 196
28; South-east Asia 9, 11 Blard, Raymond 160
Association of Literature and Arts at Bluestockings (Seito) 27, 28, 54
Bungei Kyokai Shenjyo in bodhisattvas 191
Waseda 25, 29 body 110–50, 179–81; of the
Athena 200 audience 112; butoh 137–45; and
Athens 174 censorship 151–75; of corporeal
Atkinson, Michael 170 materialism 110; definitions
Ausdruckstanz 198 110–13; explicit 152–3, 159–63, 166–7;
Australasian Drama Studies 191 female nude 152; female performing
Australasian Drama Studies 5–6, 111–12; hybrid
Association 196 16, 112, 120–34, 149; maternal
Australia 2, 5, 61, 62, 63, 68, 70, 88, 90, 93, 101–3, 105, 119;
72, 73, 74, 78, 80, 107, 114, 115, nomads 112, 134–50; of the performer
118, 120, 122, 137, 148, 172, 111; of rural poor in Akita 144;
176 sexually differentiated 16; of shaman in
Australia Council (Hybrid Kut 190;
Committee) 126, 198 taxonomies 16, 112, 113–19, 148
Australia Korea Foundation 62 Bogart, Anne 7
Australian Ballet 199 Botting, Fred 189
Australian Feminist Studies 191 Braidotti, Rosi 54, 110, 134, 136,
Australian Government (Federal) 179
190; Native Affairs branch 193 Brando, Marlon 128, 198
Ayatollah Khomeini 37, 38, 41 Brau, Lorie 130
Azerbaijan 41 Brecht, Bertolt 7–8, 21, 122, 184
Breughel, Pieter 144
Bachelard, Gaston 98, 99, 122–3, British Intelligence 37
195 Brook, Peter 10–11, 57, 119, 185
Bachelard, Michael 193 Brookman, Rob 160
Bacon, Francis 144 Brown, Michael F. 172
Bakhtin, Mikhail 120 Brysk, Alison 46
Bali 146, 157, 194 Buber, Martin 186
Baraka, Amiri 194 Buddha 200
220 Index
Buddhism 25, 27, 28, 31, 42, 62, 71 Christianity 65, 69, 71, 172
Bulletin, The 65, 67 Chun, Allen 20, 42
burakumin 138 Chunliu Theatre 32
Butler, Rhett 130 chusei 129
butoh 16, 122, 126, 137–46, 198; CIA 37
Ankoku Butoh 137, 181 Circle against Sex Trafficking 164, 200
Cixous, H. 185
Campbell, Jigzie 197 Coca Cola 100, 114
Canada 137, 160, 196, 199 Colombia 175
Canning/Melville Times, The 67, 68 commedia dell’arte 8
Carlson, Marvin 8–9, 14 Commission of the European
Carmen 130 Communities 200
Carribean, the 92, 116 commodification 13, 151, 157–8,
Carter, Jimmy 189 166, 181–2; of culture 157–8;
Casa Rosada 47 resistance to 84
Casimiro Branco, Maria Alice 118, communitas 189
197 Confucianism 25, 33, 42, 62
Cat – a dance to pinch a fish, a dance to eat Coniston Massacre 193
rice from a cauldron 140 Conley, Verena Andermatt 192
Cataldi, Lee 80, 193 costume 115, 123–6, 128–9
censorship 16, 54, 118, 154, 160–74, 181 Council for Aboriginal
Central Australia 191; Central Desert 73 Reconciliation (Australia) 190
Ch’ach’a ung (shaman) 65 Cow, The 37
Chak Doo Ta Ki 64, 191 Croll, Elizabeth 32, 33, 187
Chang, Chu-kun 65 cross-dressing 127–34
Chang, Hyun 61, 192 Cui Wanqui 34, 187
Chang, Sabina 192 Czech Republic 200
Chaudhuri, Una 11–12, 87, 97, 108
Cheshire, Godfrey 37 Dairakudakan 122
Chevalier, Maurice 128 Daniels Nampijinpa, Dolly 82
Chiang Kai-Shek 33 Darío, Rubén 188
Chicago 107, 185 Darwin, Northern Territory 78, 83, 114
Chigaku, Tanaka 28 Dean, James 128, 130
Chil Sung Je Seok Kut 191 de Certeau, Michel 89, 97, 106
Chin, Daryl 12 de Kooning, Willem 144
China 19, 20, 24, 31–4, 36, 42, 54, 146, 187, de Lauretis, Teresa 1
194; Chinese Deleuze, Gilles 135, 136, 144, 149, 194
Communist Party 33, 36; Chinese Delon, Alain 128
Revolution 176; Marriage Law (1950) Denmark 175
36; Northern China 32 Derrida, Jacques 195
Chodorow, Nancy 192 desiring-machine 135–7, 144–5,
Ch’olmuri-gut (Great Ritual of Good 148–9
Fortune) 63 de Stoop, Chris 165, 166, 200
Chora 101–8, 183 Dilemma of a Ghost, The 88, 91, 93, 96–7,
Chosun Kingdom 62 99–100, 103, 107
Chow, Rey 18, 197 Dionysus 69, 192
Christ, Carol P. 59 Diprose, Rosalyn 111
Index 221
Dirty War, The (Argentina) 176 Ganesha 200

Distéfano, Juan Carlos 188 ganimata 144
‘Dojo pour acteurs’ 146 Gardiner, Michael 13, 186
Doll’s House, A 15, 19–20, gaymuma 41
21–43, 54, 56, 176, 178, 179, Geertz, Clifford 4, 184
187, 195 Genet, Jean 139, 198
Durban 95, 97 Gens de Couleurs, Les (Coloured People) 159
Germany 137, 175
East of Eden 130 George, Jose 151
East Timor 118, 197 Ghana 16, 93, 107, 108
Eisenstein, Linda 188 Ghosts 21
Emotion and Metaphysics (Keijijyogaku) 140 Gilbert, Helen 120, 189
Enfants du Paradis, Les 198 Gillot, Venetia 114, 117, 197
England 137, 116 ginkyou 132
Enlightenment 21, 58 Gissenwehrer, Michael 185
ethnoscapes 4, 184 globalism 59, 182–4
Europe 25, 27, 120, 148, 166, 176, 195, Goethe Institute (Buenos Aires) 188
198, 200; Central 165; Golden City Theatre (Shanghai) 34
Eastern 165 Gone with the Wind 130, 131
Goya, Francisco de 144
Fabian, Johannes 187 Grahamstown 157
Falcon, Marie-Hélène 199 Granites Nampijinpa, Judy 77–8
fatwah 171 Great East Asia Co-Prosperity
Faulkner, William 188 Sphere 127, 198
Feeble Husband 28, 42 Great Exhibition, Crystal Palace 114
Feitlowitz, Marguerite 188 Great Event of Life, The 32
Femenía, Nora Amalia 47, 50, 189 Great Gatsby, The 130
feminist performance 5–6, 174–6 Greek Orthodox Church 167,
Fischer-Lichte, Erika 20 169–73; Archbishop of 170;
Fleming, Father John 200 Greek Orthodoxy 200
Foucault, Michel 106, 123, 198 Gregory, Derek 194
France 94, 137, 195 Grimes, R.L. 57, 58
Frejha 200 Grosz, Elizabeth 101, 102, 195
French Revolution 21 Grotowski, Jerzy 57
Freud, Sigmund 83, 135, 192 Guattari, Félix 135, 194
Friedman, Jonathan 1, 4, 197 Guillaumin, Colette 196
Fuchs, Anne 106, 196 Guomindang 33, 34, 187; Civil
Fumimaro, Konoe 198 Code 33; New Life Movement
33
Gable, Clark 128, 130 Gurvitch, Georges 61, 189
Galán, Graciela 188
Gallaire-Bourega, Fatima 88, 94, 96, 99, Habermas, Jurgens 21, 42, 58–9, 60
103, 105, 107; see also You Have Come Hafner, Dorinda 197
Back Hahm, Pyong-choon 61
Galway 174 Hale, Kenneth Locke 75
Gambaro, Griselda 15, 43, 45–6, Hall, Stuart 5
51–3, 179, 188; see also Antígona Hamilton (New Zealand) 196
Furiosa hangan bishoh 139
222 Index
han-nya 139 India 146, 157, 185, 194

Harris, Samela 68, 169, 200 Indian Citrus Market 196
Hashemi, Faezeh 39 Indonesia 45, 146
Hashemi Rafsanjani, Akbar 39 Indonesian Consulate 118, 119
Hastings, Sally Ann 27 Ingram, Paia 197
Have You Seen Zandile? 88, 91, 93, 95, 96–7, Inma 191
100, 103, 105–7, 180 interculturalism: commodification
Hedda Gabler 21 and 12–13; criticism of 10–12;
Hegel, Georg W.F. 44, 188 definitions of 7–12, Carlson 8,
hejab 40, 41, 188 Marranca 9, Pavis 9–10; festival
Hemingway, Ernest 198 ‘masterpieces’ 196–7; and the
Herbert Nungarrayi, Jeannie 75–6, marketplace 151–2; museum
193 interculturalism 12; and the
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara 19 political 176–7; postcolonial 88;
Heyward, Nicholas 170 and realism 30–1; and ritual 57,
High Court of Australia 73 184, 185; women’s 14–17
Hijikata, Tatsumi 122, 137–40, 142, 144–5, International Labour Organisation 190
198, 199 International Monetary Fund 197
Hinsley, C.M. 185 International Organisation for Migration
Hiratsuka, Raicho 27–8 report on Trafficking
Hiro, Dilip 41, 187 and Prostitution 165, 199
Hogetsu, Shimamura 25 International Theatre Institute 197
Hölderlin, Friedrich 20, 45 International Women Playwrights’
Holland 137, 165, 166 Conference 174; Third
Holledge, Julie 23 International Women
Hollywood 198 Playwrights’Conference 62, 64, 65, 67,
Hong Kong 156 114, 145–6
Honshu 144 Iran 19, 36, 37, 54, 187, 188;
Hoogenraad, Robert 45 Iranian Islamic Republic 37, 40,
Horkheimer, Max 13, 186 176
Horus 200 Irigaray, Luce 195
Hwanghae-Do 63 iroke 129
hybridity 16, 112, 120–34, 149 Islam 171; Islamic law 39, 42;
Islamic Republic (Iran) 37, 40,
Iannou, Noris 200 176; Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) 195
Ibsen, Henrik 15, 19, 21–4, 32–4, Italy 28, 175
36, 42, 43, 54; see also A Doll’s House
Ichiro, Ojima 199 Jakarta 188
Ichizo, Kobayashi 127 Jakarta Government (Suharto) 118
identity spaces 3–5, 14, 16, 17, 20, Japan 9, 15, 16, 19, 20, 24, 25, 29,
31, 36, 40, 42–3, 52, 54–5, 56, 177–9; 32, 36, 42, 120, 121, 125, 126,
and authenticity 117; 133, 136, 137, 145, 146, 165,
blurring of 136; corporate 166, 187, 194, 198
identities 74; false identities Jesus Christ 71, 138, 169, 173
164–5; and postmodern Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) 15, 33,
subjectivity 60; in ritual 72 34, 35, 36, 187, see also Lan Ping
Ilotopie 154, 159, 161, 163, 167 Jinan 34
Il Wall Maji 191 Johannesburg 106, 196
Index 223
Joie 145, 147 Lajamanu 73, 82, 83, 193

Jones, Leslie 60 Laidlaw, Di 170
Jouffroy, Alain 142 Lampe, Eelka 7
juju 77 Lan Ping 33; see also Jiang Qing
Jukurrpa 74–6, 78, 80, 81, 83 Las Madres see Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo
Kabuki 11, 114, 185 Latin America 15, 176
Kahdija 39 Lattas, Andrew 56, 74, 83–4
Kahlo, Frida 144 Laughren, Mary 75
Kadogo, Aku 197 Laurie, Vicki 65
Kan’ami 185 Lautréamont, Isidore Ducasse 198
kanzashi o sasu 139 League of Left–Wing Theatre People 33
kardiya 77, 81, 82, 84 Legon, Ghana 107
Karimi, Niki 15, 37, 38 Leith, Audine 126
Karmi, Ghada 39, 41 Lenore, Miriel 126
Karp, Ivan 157 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 199
kata 128–30, 132, 139–40, 144 Levinas, Emmanuel 186
Katai, Tayama 25 Liberal Government (South
Kathakali 114, 157 Australia) 169
kawara mono 138 Li Jiaojiao 187
Littlewood, Joan 192
Keijijyogaku (Emotion and Metaphysics) 140
Lo, Jacqueline 120
Kennedy Napaljarri, Lucy 81
Lukács, Georg 12
Kierkegaard, Søren 44, 188
Ly Sinko 187
Kim Kum hwa 15, 56, 60–72, 84–5, 189,
190–2
M. Butterfly 8
King, Ynestra 44
Mabo, Eddie 73
King of Silla 65
MacAloon, John J. 57
kirda 76–8, 81
McClintock, Anne 12
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 13
McLuhan, Marshall 4
Klein, Susan Blakely 199
Madame Butterfly 121, 198
Klimt, Gustav 144
Madame Mao see Jiang Qing
Knoxville 71 Madonna 165
Kobe 131 Magdalena Project 174–5, 182
Kollontai, Alexandra 23, 187 Mahabharata,The 10, 185
Kopytoff, Igor 151, 166 mahr 39
Korea 15, 61, 62, 65, 71, 84, 180, 189, 192, Majlis 39
197; Central 64; North 63, 64, 71; malong 115
South 62 Manon Lescaut 130
kori 63, 71 Marche Orientale 198
Kreutzberg, Harald 198 Market Theatre 106, 107, 196
Kuniyoshi, Kazuko 137, 142 markets 14, 16, 59, 151–75; of Kut 64–70,
kurdungurlu 76–7, 81 73; outside of 84
kuruwarri 75, 77, 80 Marlowe, L. 195
Kut 60, 64, 67, 70–2, 85; see alsoTaedong Kut Marquis de Sade 198
Kyogen 11, 185 Marranca, Bonnie 9
Marx, Eleanor 23, 187
Labour Party (South Australia) 169 Marxism 46
224 Index
Masao, Kusuyama 28 Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney)

Masero, Hortensia ‘Tetchy’ 197 62
‘Ma-Space/Time’ Exhibition (Paris) 140 Museum of Sydney 83
Masson-Sekine, Nourit 138, 139, 142 Myerhoff, Barbara 57
Masterkey 16, 121–2, 124, 125–7
May Fourth Movement 32, 34 Nakamura, Toshiko 28
Media and Entertainment Arts namba 144
Alliance 63 Nanjing Road 32
Mehrjui, Dariush 37, 38, 40–2, 188 Napangardi, Maisie 82
Meiji Restoration 126 narrative 14–15, 18–55; of Warlpiri 78–83,
Mei Lan-fang 184 101
Melbourne 62, 68, 78 Native Title 73
Merce, Antonia 139, 198 Nead, Lynda 152
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 143 Nelson Nakamarra, Liddy 78, 82
Mernessi, Fatima 188 Nelson Napurrurla, Jorna 78, 80
mestiza 188 New Age 59
Mhlope, Gcina 88, 101, 107, 196; New Play Movement (China) 32
see also Have You Seen Zandile? New Village Head, The 187
Michener, James 198 New Woman 32
Middle East 15, 176 New York 93, 107, 114, 116
New Youth 32
‘Midori’ 27
New Zealand 137, 175, 196
Migration Information Programme 165–
Ngaanyatjarra 191
6, 199, 200
Ngardilpi 78
Mills, Alison 117, 118, 197
ngarlajiyi 78
Mills, June 117
Nicholson, Jack 128
Min, Xiaosi 32
Nietzsche, Friedrich 60, 69, 189
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba 39
Niranjana, Tejaswini 14
Mishima, Yukio 138
Nobana No Tsuyu 141
Mnouchkine, Ariane 185
Noh 11, 185
Model Beijing Opera 187 Nolte, Sharon H. 27
modernity 20, 24; four gateways to nomadism 112, 134–50
24, 36–9, 42, 56, 58–9, 61; revolt against Nora 32
145; subjectivity of 21, 23 Northern Territory 73, 83, 192
Mohanty, Chandra 5, 6 Norway 174
Mondragon, Betchay 197 Notre Dame des Fleurs 139
Monet, Claude 198 Nungarrayi, Wendy 81
Moore, Mary 121–3, 125 NZADIE (New Zealand Association
Mortlock Library (South Australia) of Drama in Education) 191
191
Moscow 184 Oedipus 135
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo 21, Oedipus Rex 44
45, 47, 48, 49, 50–4, 180, 189 Ohno, Kazuo 137, 139, 146, 198
Mtshali, Thembi 88 Oi Naru Genei 121
mudang 62–4, 180 Okuni 185
multiculturalism 83–4, 117, 120, Olaniyan, Tejumola 195
169–75 Oldfield, Ruth Napaljarri 81
Muraña, Bettina 188 One That Got Away, The (Robyn
Murobushi, Ko 137, 142 Archer) 170
Index 225
Organisation for Human Rights and Rababarisoa, Lilliane 197

Fundamental Freedoms for Iran race 93, 113–14, 118–19, 196
39 Radic, Leonard 68–9
Ortiz, A.D. 50 Randall, Dorothea 197
Ortolani, Benito 185 Reagan, Ronald 189
Osborn, Reverend Peter 200 Reformation 21
Osaka 30 Rehearsal Room (Market Theatre)
Oslo 187 196
otokoyaku 127–30, 132–3, 149, Reinelt, Janelle 5
198 Reno, Nevada 200
Otsuka Women’s Apartments 122 Rice, Verity 125
Out of a Doll’s House 28 ritual 14–15, 56–86; definitions of
Out There News 195 57–8; evolutionary and
psychoanalytic interpretation of
pansori 62 70, 189; inma 191
Papua New Guinea 194 Roberts, Rhoda 115, 197
Paris 28, 107, 148 Robertson, Jennifer 127, 130, 132,
parraja 77 198
Pavis, Patrice 9–10, 117, 185 Rockman Napaljarri, Peggy 80
Pelletier, Pol 16, 134, 145–6, 147, Rodd, Laurel Rasplica 187
Romantics 59, 60, 69, 192
148, 199
Ross Jampijinpa, Darby 77
People’s Daily 36
Ross Napaljarri, Kay 82
Perth 65, 68, 78; Arts Trust 62
Rotterdam 165
Peru 175
Rubin, Don 107
‘Peruvian Mongrelity’ 113
Rushdie, Salman 171
Philippine Daily Inquirer 165
Russo-Japanese War 25
Philp, Richard 139
Picasso, Pablo 144
Salt Fire Water 114–15, 117–19
Pirandello, Luigi 21
San Maek Theatre Company 62
Pitjantjatjara 191 Sara 37, 38, 42, 188
Plato 195 Sartre, Jean-Paul 117
Poetics of Space, The 98–9 Sarumpaet, Ratna 45, 188
Poland 175, 200 Sato, Toshihiko 25, 27, 28, 187
postcolonialism 88, 92, 97–8, 194, Savak 37, 187
Post Porn Modernism 161, 163 Sayonara 198
postural schema 143 Schirmer, Jennifer 46–7
Poulson Napurrurla, Peggy 78, 80 Schneider, Rebecca 134–5, 152,
Pratt, Minnie Bruce 87 161–2
Presley, Elvis 128 Scobie, Ian 162
Prijent, Myriam 160–1 Scolnicov, Hanna 194–5
Prince 165 Sears, Djanet 195–6
Prophet, The (Mohammed) 38, seduction 129–32
39 Seifi, Hashem 38
‘Public Cervix Announcement’ 161, 180 Seito (Bluestocking) 18, 25, 26, 27,
31, 54, 187
Queensland 73 senkoh no kemuri 139
Quilt 25 Seoul 65, 190
Qur’an 20, 38, 39, 41 Seti 200
226 Index
Shah of Iran (Pahlavi Dynasty) 24, Subasinghe, Somalatha 45, 188

37, 41, 187 Subiaco Post,The 67
Shahidian, Hammed 37 Suh Kwang Seok 62, 63
Shakespeare, William 164, 196; Sumako, Matsui 15, 28, 29, 30–1
Antony and Cleopatra 129–30; Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari 6
Hamlet 130, 188; King Lear 197; Sunrise, Nora in Japan 28, 42
Macbeth 8; Romeo and Juliet 130 Suzuki, Tadashi 7
Shange, Ntozake 194 Switzerland 107, 137, 165, 166
Shanghai 31–5, 187 Sydney 62, 68, 78, 81, 83
Shi, Hu 32, 33 Sydney Cultural Olympics 121
Shim Jung Soon 192 Sydney Morning Herald, The 68
Shin Chong U-lim 191 Sydney Myer Foundation 121
shingeki 122, 123
Sierra Leone 197 Ta Sal Kut 191
sinbyoing 189 Taedong Kut 60, 63, 64, 65, 67–72, 85, 86,
Singapore 156 190, 191
Soja, Edward 89, 194 Tae Keum No Ri 191
Soo Wang Cheon 191 Taiwan 146
Sophocles 15, 19, 44, 45, 51, 52, Takai, Tomiko 16, 122, 126, 134,
188 135, 137–40, 141, 144–5, 148, 198
Takarazuka Revue 6, 16, 121,
South Africa 16, 88, 91, 93, 95–7,
127–33, 149, 198
100, 103, 105–7, 180, 196
Tanami Desert 72, 74
South America 148, 165; see also Argentina
Tandanya Arts Centre 83
South Australian Arts Museum 83
Tang Na 187
South Australian Museum 78
Taro, Akiba 27
Soyinka, Wole 194
Taylor, Diana 47, 50, 189
space 14–15, 74, 87–109, 194–6;
taxonomies 16, 112, 113–19, 148
chora 101–6, 195–6; definitions 89–91,
TDR (The Drama Review) 191
95–7, 194; geo-political
Templeton, Joan 23, 187
87–8, 91–3; home 87–8, 98–9, terra nullius 73, 74
195; imaginary 89; location 88; in Terrill, Ross 34, 36
Masterkey 122–3, 197–8; memory 97– Théâtre de l’Atelier 44
101; polytopian nature 108; in theatre Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes
16, 91, 106–8, 196 145
Spain 165 Theatre Journal 191
spirituality 57; and copyright Therborn, Goran 24; ‘Four
167–75; ecstatic states 69; Gateways’ to modernity 24
indigenous 59; packaging of 60; Third International Women
significance of Kut 70–2; Playwrights’ Conference 62, 64,
undervaluing of Kut 85 65, 67, 114, 145–6, 174, 190,
Sprinkle, Annie 154, 159, 161–3, 191
167, 180 Togawa, Masako 16, 121, 126
sramana/sran 65 Tokyo 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 121, 122, 125, 133,
Sri Lanka 45; Colombo 188 156, 198
Stage International (Rotterdam) 165 Tompkins, Joanne 189
Stanislavski (system) 122, 126, 127 Totem and Taboo 192
Steiner, George 20, 44, 45, 188 Top End Girls 114, 116, 197; see
Strickland, Katrina 199 also Salt Fire Water
Index 227
trafficking 17, 153, 163–7, 199–200 Waterstradt, J.A. 44

Transkei 95, 97 Watkins, Kenneth 199
Traviata, La 130 wayang kulit 157
Treaty of Versailles 32 Wedekind, Frank 21
Tristan and Isolde 130 Weiskel, Thomas 192
Turandot 130 West Australian, The 65, 68
Turner, Joseph Mallord William Wigman, Mary 198
144 Wilentz, Gay 108
Turner, Victor 61, 65, 189 Willett, John 184
Tweddell, Ed 170 Williams, David 119, 185
Williams, Nadine 67
Umiumare, Yumi 125 Wilson, Scott 189
United Nations 197 Witke, Roxane 34, 187
Urry, John 194 World Exhibition (Chicago) 185
Uruguay 175 World War, Second 45, 126, 156,
Uzbekistan 107 189, 193
Wu, Xue 32, 36
Vanrenen, Maralin 88 Wuthering Heights 130
Viala, Jean 138, 139, 142
Victorian Arts Centre (Melbourne) Yan, Haiping 32, 187
62 Yankunytjarjara 191
Vienna 200 yapa (Warlpiri) 82
Villaflor, Azucena 189 yarla 78
Virgin Mary 155, 167, 171–3, 180, Yawulyu 72, 74–8, 80–1, 83–6, 193
196, 200, 201; Byzantine Virgin ‘Year of Nora’ 34
Mary 167; Our Lady of Perpetual yilpinji 81
Succour 173; Virgin of Guadalupe Yirara College 83
169 You Have Come Back 88, 91, 93–4,
Vitebsky, Piers 60 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 105, 107
Verfremdung 8 Young, Robert 87, 91–2, 113, 118,
120, 194, 197
Wagner, Richard 164 Yuendumu 73, 78, 82, 83, 193
Wahid, Abdurrahman 197 Yuendumu Women’s Centre 78
Wales 1741, 175 Yuendumu Women’s Museum 77,
Walcott, Derek 194 78, 193
Wapurtarli 78 Yusem, Laura 188
warau hana 139
Warlpiri 15, 56, 57, 72–85, 189, Zarrilli, Phillip 3
192, 193; skin names 75, 76 Zeami 185
Warlukurlangu Art Gallery 78 Zhang Min 34, 35
Warti, Desak Putu 118, 197 Zhang Penchun 187
Waseda 25, 29 Zhao Dan 34

Womens Intercultural Performance

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Women’s Intercultural

Women’s Intercultural Performance explores contemporary feminist performance

Julie Holledge is Professor of Drama and Director of the Drama Centre at

Joanne Tompkins teaches at the University of Queensland. She is a co-

Julie Holledge and

London and New York

ISBN 0–415–17378–7 (hbk)

List of plates vii

Introduction: culture, feminism, theatre 1

1 Narrative trajectories: A Doll’s House and Antigone 18

2 Ritual translocations: Kim Kum hwa and

3 Layering space: staging and remembering ‘home’ 87

4 Intercultural bodies: meetings in the flesh 110

5 Intercultural markets: the female body and

1 The Seito Collective, 1912 26

Practitioners, artists, and arts administrators who have assisted us include:

Culture as product, thing, substance is culture disembodied from

Interculturalism could be viewed as a ‘two-way street’, based on a

It is not a matter of finding common elements among the texts written or

that has been sadly neglected in critical work on interculturalism and

Culture is frequently associated with nationalism, yet efforts to configure

culture is about the products of a more complex and specific substrate

Like culture, feminism as a discourse is based on and in western experience

since it is political and also deeply personal, it cannot be put on and

Paradoxically, this second skin has not been adequately considered in

with feminism, even if the label has been rejected in a number of

The resistance of oppressed groups, including women, takes place on

Both critics maintain the importance of specificity when referring to

Western feminist discourse, by assuming women as a coherent,

[Interculturalism is characterised by] the tension between common

Interculturalism is the meeting in the moment of performance of two or

stages.4 The motivation of early interculturalists tended to vary greatly

Three intercultural models

1. The totally familiar tradition of regular performance.

Carlson’s model acknowledges that there is a great deal of variance among

cultures engage in an equitable exchange does not necessarily have to

(1) cultural modeling (modélisations), sociologi-

It is turned upside-down as soon as the users of a foreign culture ask

again every sedimentation, to flow indefinitely from one culture to the

Chief criticisms of interculturalism

Interculturalism in the late twentieth century continues to be a theoretical,

the implications of interculturalism are very different for people in

where postmodernism appears to approve of cultural ‘patchwork’

Commodification and interculturalism

While many right-wing politicians and commentators cling to fixed,

The self-other duality

Interculturalism requires a perception of the subject–object or self– other

in creating an aesthetics of intersubjectivity or finding methods of bringing

WOMEN’S INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE

The field of culture is . . . a constant battlefield where there are no

As will be obvious by now, this study is not a history of interculturalism,

Chapter 1 concentrates on narrative or theatrical plot, which is generally

postcolonial theories. In an endeavour to narrow down the vast topic of

market, and the enforced exchange or trafficking of the commodified

We begin this investigation of women’s intercultural performance with the

In recent intercultural theatre criticism, the two major strands of debate

At a given time and under the contemporary conditions of available

We begin by attempting to identify the ‘contemporary conditions’ in host

THE MANY FACES OF NORA