Women's Intercultural Performance

Julie Holledge, Joanne Tompkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134688760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This is the first in-depth examination of contemporary intercultural performance by women around the world. Contemporary feminist performance is explored in the contexts of current intercultural practices, theories and debates.
Holledge and Tompkins provide ways of thinking about and analysing contemporary performance and representations of the performing, female, culturally-marked body. The book includes discussions of:
* ritual performance by women from Central Australia and Korea
* the cultural exchange of A Doll's House and Antigone
* plays from Algeria, South Africa and Ghana
* the work of the Takarazuka revue company
* the market forces that govern the distribution of women and women's performance.
This is an essential read for anyone studying or interested in women's performance.

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.

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 d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Women’s intercultural performance
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Culture, feminism, theatre
• Chapter 1: Narrative trajectories: A doll’s house and antigone
• Chapter 2: Ritual translocations: Kim kum hwa and warlpiri women
• Chapter 3: Layering space: Staging and remembering ‘home’
• Chapter 4: Intercultural bodies: Meetings in the flesh
• Chapter 5: Intercultural markets: The female body and censorship
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References