One of the most urgent issues facing theatre research today is the question of how theatre is affected by the rapid processes of globalization.
Theatre is an ‘old-fashioned’ art form in which performances come into being through the bodily co-presence of actors/dancers/singers/performers on the one hand and spectators on the other. Two groups of people, ‘doers’ and ‘onlookers’, must thus convene at a certain time and place in order to share this situation, a span of lifetime. It is out of their encounter and interaction that a performance comes into being.
While performers do certain things – moving through space, performing gestures, manipulating objects, speaking and singing – spectators perceive them and respond. Such reactions might partly be internal – imaginative and cognitive – i.e. purely mental processes. However, most responses can be perceived by other spectators and by the performers. This perception, in turn, triggers further perceptible reactions. Whatever the performers do has an effect on the spectators; whatever the spectators do has an effect on the performers and on other spectators. Hence a performance comes into being only over its duration. It generates itself through the interaction between performers and spectators. The question thus arises as to how processes of globalization may affect this interaction, i.e. the autopoietic process by which performances come into being.
Obviously, people, goods and knowledge also travelled in earlier times. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for instance, commedia dell'arte troupes, Italian opera companies and French theatre ensembles travelled all over Europe, spreading texts, music, acting techniques, practices and so on. As early as the seventeenth century, missionaries and other travellers brought home reports on different theatre forms they had encountered in China and Japan. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw European companies like Sarah Bernhardt's troupe or the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater Berlin (led by Max Reinhardt) visiting the United States, and Japanese troupes like that of Kawakami Otojiro and his wife Sada Yakko touring the United States and Europe. As is well known, European stage directors have experimented with Japanese and Chinese stage conventions – such as stage hands or the hanamichi – and staged Japanese, Chinese and Indian plays, while in Japan and China spoken theatre presenting Western drama was introduced as a new theatre form.
While such processes might be described quite rightly as forms of cultural exchange, globalization has engineered shifts that are far more fundamental. Texts, devices, practices and artists still travel as they have done for centuries. However, the context in which they do so has changed dramatically, as becomes obvious when considering the following three examples: internationally composed opera, dance and theatre companies; the ubiquitous workshop culture; and international theatre festivals.
To the work of an internationally constituted company, each member brings a particular tradition and a specific training. Such an ensemble might further be working under the guest direction of a stage director or choreographer coming from yet another cultural background. In such a situation, the question arises as to whether the resulting production or choreography will allow spectators to track different elements back to different cultures. It seems more likely that such a process of interweaving would yield something new that cannot readily be identified with any culture in particular, yet still resonates with members of different cultures. How is theatre research to deal with such an aesthetic, one which no doubt holds important social as well as political implications?
With workshops, different bodily practices, techniques and training methods travel all over the world: t'ai chi, Yoga, Suzuki Tadashi's or Theodoros Terzopoulos's training methods, Meyerhold's biomechanics, traditional theatre styles and conventions such as Kathakali, Noh or Beijing Opera. Whereas traditional theatre schools train their students mostly from childhood and exclusively in their own style, travelling workshops make it possible to receive more varied training and to shape the body according to very different traditions, styles and methods. Each will leave an imprint on the body, with varying consequences for each performer in terms of her/his being a body and having a body, to use Plessner's phrase. We still have no concept, no theoretical foundation, not even a terminology, to tackle issues arising from this emerging landscape.
At international festivals and on guest tours, productions originally designed for one particular audience are presented to another, which, during the performance itself, results in processes of cultural interweaving. Up until now, such processes have barely been identified, let alone analysed. Given that a performance comes into being out of the encounter and interaction between performers and spectators, what are the implications of such cases? What about productions designed from the outset with a guest tour or an international festival in mind, in this sense lacking an original ‘local’ audience: how does this affect the encounter between performers and spectators? And what about the issue of power relations when special interests motivate a third party to fund the production of a particular play or a production using a particular style to be shown in an international context?
These and many other related questions variously are in need of being asked, addressed and researched. Tackling them does not simply mean pursuing the research of the 1980s and 1990s on intercultural theatre under modified premises, but – in many respects – opening up a completely new field. This is a challenge that theatre studies will have to meet in the decade ahead.
