Can one of the most controversial keywords in theatre and performance studies be made new? Interculturalism, one of theatre and performance studies’ consistently notorious critical keywords, has experienced a powerful theoretical resurgence in the last decade. Or, as Marcus Cheng Chye Tan puts it, “Intercultural theatre, as a Western performance discourse defined by Western theoretical frameworks, is experiencing an evolution” (2012, 10). The so-called new interculturalism is no longer defined by a focus on what Daphne P. Lei succinctly terms “hegemonic intercultural theatre” (HIT ) practices—a “specific artistic genre and state of mind that combines First World capital and brainpower with Third World raw material and labor, and Western classical texts with Eastern performance” (2011, 571). Rather, the new interculturalism as re-imagined by Tan, Lei, Ric Knowles, Royona Mitra, Leo Cabranes-Grant, Hae-kyung Um, and Diana Looser, among others, is driven from below by minority and subaltern voices, whether gathered in diverse, contemporary urban locations or excavated from the recesses of colonial archives shaped by the “ambiguities and performative accretions that characterize the historical record” (Looser 2011, 524). New interculturalism’s critical approaches also repeatedly reverse, redirect, and/or complicate familiar networks or routes of intercultural exchange, exploding East/West and Global North/Global South binaries of prestige and innovation in the process.
This pronounced discursive shift delivers on Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert’s 2002 provocation that it might be “possible to explore the rhizomatic potential of interculturalism- its ability to make multiple connections and disconnections between cultural spaces- and to create representations that are unbounded and open, and potentially resistant to forms of imperialist closure” (47). In addition, this critical turn towards new interculturalism centrally recognizes that, as Lei summarizes, “intercultural theatre has diversified and multiplied as the discourse has been enriched and complicated by other pressing issues like gender, diaspora, ethnicity, and globalization” (2011, 572). Hae-kyung Um puts it thus: “In the current context of late modernity and globalization, performance is increasingly drawn from intercultural creativity and located in multicultural milieu” (2005, 1), a condition that has prompted theorists to increasingly conceive of interculturalism as something that actually begins at home rather than being primarily mediated through elite international exchanges. So, while Erika Fischer-Lichte has recently alleged that intercultural theatre as a field of practice and criticism “has proven inadequate to assess” the reality that “differences in and between cultures are dynamic and permanently shifting,” new interculturalism actually is directed almost entirely towards investigating culture’s individual and collective multiplicities, as mediated through performance in both local and global contexts.
In Ric Knowles’ already seminal 2010 Theatre & Interculturalism, which compellingly summarizes the aspirations of new interculturalism, he contends that the new “rhizomatic (multiple, non-hierarchical, horizontal) intercultural-performance-from-below…no longer retains a west and the rest binary.” It “is no longer dominated by charismatic white men or performed before audiences assumed to be monochromatic” or depends on “the urban centres (in the west or elsewhere) raiding traditional forms seen to be preserved in more primitive or ‘authentic’ rural settings.” It also finally “no longer focuses on the individual performances or projects of a single artist or group” (2010, 59). Knowles’ optimistic claims for the possibilities of new interculturalism are grounded primarily in his own rich local context of Toronto—the “world’s most multicultural city,” “the third most active theatre center in the English-speaking world (after London and New York),” and the “largest city in the in the first country in the world to legislate, however problematically, a policy of official multiculturalism” (2017, 2). But despite his arguably unique frame of immediate reference including a rich network of Toronto-based artists and companies that he works with directly, Knowles has been far from alone in his turn back to and faith in interculturalism as a politically expedient and even transformational term at this historical and critical juncture. Royona Mitra too offers that conceiving of a new interculturalism “changes the power dynamics at play by dismantling historical us-them hierarchies, by simultaneously embodying us, them and phases in-between” (2015, 15) as in the citationally layered work of British Asian dancer Akram Khan. Even Rustom Bharucha, arguably interculturalism’s most sustained and vocal critic, recently observed that “the intercultural as an imaginary still remains to be fully conceptualized, particularly in its interweaving, if you will, of aesthetics and ethics” (2014, 181).
Interculturalism’s pronounced return is made evident by a range of works including, most prominently, Knowles’ Theatre & Interculturalism (2010) and Performing the Intercultural City (2017) among his other articles and volumes including “Ethnic,” Multicultural, and Intercultural Theatre (2009), co-edited with Ingrid Mündel. But his work is joined by the 2011 “Rethinking Intercultural Performance” issue of Theatre Journal (which Knowles co-edited with Penny Farfan), Marcus Cheng Chye Tan’s Acoustic Interculturalism: Listening to Performance (2012), Royona Mitra’s Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (2015), the autumn 2016 special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training on “‘intercultural’ acting and performer training,” my monograph Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards A New Interculturalism (2016), Leo Cabranes-Grant’s From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico (2016), The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (edited by Pamela Burnard, Elizabeth Mackinlay, and Kimberly Powell, 2016), and recent articles by Yvette Hutchison, San-San Kwan, and Patrice Pavis, among others, including the editors of this volume (Chaudhuri 2002, 33–47; King 2007, 153, 168; Hutchison 2010, 57–74; McIvor 2011, 310–332; Kwan 2014, 185–201; McIvor and Spangler 2014).
While these works employ a broad variety of approaches and cover disparate geopolitical milieus, their approach is unified by many common methodological and theoretical approaches that, this collection argues, is symptomatic of what might be termed new interculturalism. Across this body of recent work, scholars working broadly within the paradigm of new interculturalism in theatre and performance studies repeatedly deploy these common (if not conflicting and conflicted) approaches:By resignifying interculturalism’s practical operations as a collaborative model and particularly what “culture” means as a constitutive element of the overall term, new interculturalism opens up possibilities for both revisionist and future-oriented modes of critical engagement. Therefore, while Erika Fischer-Lichte has to some degree convincingly offered interweaving as a less problematic but again utopian contemporary substitute for “intercultural theatre,” interculturalism’s very loadedness remains in fact a critical and political asset as demonstrated by the authors in this volume. Fischer-Lichte contends that:
- Examination of intercultural flows/encounters from the perspective of non-Western and/or minority or subaltern stakeholders (Asian interculturalism, intercultural performance “from below” (Knowles 2010, 79))
- Increased application of intercultural performance theory to extra-theatrical as well as non-theatrical case studies
- Do not limit their focus to theatre, but also consider other forms and modalities of performance including but not limited to dance, music, film, visual art, and the performance of everyday life
- Prioritization of local rather than distance-based models of intercultural exchange
- Movement beyond binary models of intercultural exchange
- Highlighting of performance making processes and material production conditions (including funding) over a primary focus on intercultural representation and semiotics within the final performance event
- Use of intercultural theory as a historiographical tool (with particular emphasis on archival research methods)
- Driven by intersectional feminist approaches which engage the entanglement of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and/or disability among other identity factors as negotiated in/through intercultural performance, particularly within culturally diverse, diasporic, and migrant contexts
- Focus on the processual production of individual and group identities through intercultural performance encounters
- Theoretical focus on performativity as a tool through which to interrogate interculturalism’s function as potentially transformative mode of contact/enactment
- Investigation of interculturalism as a keyword of social and artistic policy by the state and supra-national bodies including the European Union
New interculturalism professes similar aims but, unlike Fischer-Lichte’s interweaving, does not seek to move beyond postcolonialism, racism, or “the pervasive binary concepts of Self versus Other, East versus West, North versus South, own versus foreign and the aesthetic (i.e. intercultural performance) versus the political and ethical (i.e. postcolonial theory)” (13). New interculturalism rather stays with the challenge of how these very dynami...processes of interweaving performance cultures can and quite often do provide an experimental framework for experiencing the utopian potential of culturally diverse and globalized societies by realizing an aesthetic which gives shape to unprecedented collaborative policies in society. (2014, 11)