Keynote Speakers - Abstracts
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Modernisation as Interweaving of Cultures in Performance
Date & Time
Wednesday, July 28, 9.00 − 10.00 am
Venue & Room
LMU main building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Aula Magna (E 120)
Abstract
Since the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, processes of modernisation within societies quite often go together with processes of interweaving different cultures in performance. Be it by transferring texts, devices, stage conventions, be it by cooperation with travelling artists from other cultures, be it by guest tours and international theatre festivals where productions created for a particular local audience are presented to audiences of different cultural backgrounds, in each case, a very specific interweaving of cultures takes place in the performance. Proceeding from the assumption that a performance comes into being out of the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators as an autopoietic process, the question must be posed how such an interweaving affects the performance. And since a performance always takes place not only as an artistic but also as a social event, the possible consequences in other cultural fields must also be examined. Since processes of modernisation can develop multi-dimensionally, since they refer to specific constellations of certain artistic, political, social, technological, or economic dimensions, it cannot be assumed that modernisation in one field – let us say, theatre – goes hand in hand with that in others, for instance, politics or economics. By drawing on various examples, the relationship between processes of interweaving cultures in performance and other processes of modernisation will be discussed.
Khalid Amine
Postcolonial Modernity: Theatre in Morocco and the Re-Invention of Tradition
Date & Time
Thursday, July 29, 3.30 − 4.30 pm
Venue & Room
LMU main building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Aula Magna (E 120)
Abstract
While the legitimation of Oriental performance cultures in relation to the European canon has been a major issue for the international theatre research community in the past decades, Moroccan artists and scholars are faced with a different task, namely that of negotiating the passage of modernity with a particular attention to the complexities of the current postcolonial situation. The Franco-Hispanic colonial presence in Morocco between 1912 and 1956 made of culturally complex formulaic spaces and patterns of basic orality simulated "Disney-like" arenas of a folklorized performance of leisure. These newly devised "lieux de mémoires" (like Marakech's famous square Jemmaa el-fnaa) are usually reflections of the trope of nostalgia for the lost or vanishing traditional underground self of Morocco that peppers the urban sprawl of modern Moroccan society. Nostalgia becomes the sentiment that Moroccan postcolonial version of modernity yields, as a structure of feeling, characterized by mourning for the "authentic", the "pure", or "original". However, the so-called "authentic" performance cultures are fundamentally diasporic cultural constructs that constantly change time and again and are transformed according to the inner dynamics of folk traditions as adaptive, fluid, and changing behaviors in permanent interweaving from within and without. The intercultural theatre debate has not only critiqued such artistic "syncretism" and negotiations, but also articulated an optimistic belief in the achievability of a common "interweaving" across worldwide performance cultures. My paper seeks to explore aspects and processes of what Erika Fischer-Lichte calls "performance cultures in Interweaving" in Moroccan Theatre today, a theatre that is construed within a third space as a liminal site of enunciation that permanently reassesses fluctuating boundaries between tradition and modernity, East and West, past and present, orality and literacy, Semitism and Latinity... liminality, and not hybridity, has been a dominant form of interweaving. My intention is to bring to light marginalized voices and bodies of inquiry into performance research, and meanwhile I propose to offer a few elements of reflection and critique of the postcolonial debate. Moroccan theatre's "hybridity", however, cannot be an inexorable condition forever, insofar as it is characteristic to its historical positioning rather than a manifestation of an adamant inner life of postcolonial artists. In this context, Moroccan re-enactments of Western canons are not simply demythologized forms of writing back re-located within the emerging space of Moroccan postcoloniality, but also liminal third spaces that elude the politics of polarity and Manichaeism.
Helen Gilbert
Making Modernity: Indigenous Theatre and Salvage Ethnography
Date & Time'
Friday, July 29, 9.00 − 10.00 am
Venue & Room
LMU main building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, Aula Magna (E 120)
Abstract
Working from the premise that imperialism and modernity have been co-constitutive in most parts of the world, this presentation examines modernist ethnographic practice as reviewed through the lens of recent indigenous performances in postcolonial settler nations. The main focus is on theatrical engagements with "salvage ethnography" and its paternalistic attempts to document indigenous cultures apparently on the verge of extinction. In particular, I analyse performances that re-use (or salvage) early photographic stills to position indigeneity amid the intensifying intercultural contact zones that Western modernity instantiated. As well as engaging with the particular optics of ethnography's mission to record the life-ways of pre-modern societies, this paper also looks at indigenous performances that have investigated a more macabre sense of the term "salvage", the collection of skeletal remains and preserved body parts – the detritus of empire – for scientific studies and museum display. Drawing on indicative examples from indigenous performances in Canada, Australia and the Pacific, my overall aim is to assess the processes and legacies of salvage practices in (un)making imperial modernity.