User:321- Tia M/sandbox

Interculturalism and Orientalism in Experimental Theatre
In their efforts to challenge the realism of western drama, many modernists looked to other cultures for inspiration. Indeed, Artaud has often credited the Balinese dance traditions as a strong influence on his experimental theories: his call for a departure from language in the theatre, he says, partially came to him as a concept after having seen the Balinese Theatre’s performance at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931. He was particularly interested in the symbolic gestures performed by the dancers and their intimate connection to the music; in his Notes on Oriental, Greek and Indian Cultures, we find a curiosity as to what the French theatre scene could become if it pulled from traditions such as Noh and Balinese dance.

Similarly, it is in his essay on Chinese acting that Brecht used the term Verfremdungseffekt for the first time. Brecht’s essay, written shortly after having witnessed performer Mei Langfang’s demonstration of a few Peking Opera performance practices in 1935 Moscow, elaborates on his experience on his experience feeling “alienated” by Mei’s performance: Brecht notably mentions the absence of a fourth wall in the demonstration, which later on became a staple in Brechtian theatre, and the “stylistic” nature of the performance; another key concept which would find its way into Brecht’s later theories. In fact, three of Brecht's plays are set in China (The Measures Taken, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Turandot)

Yeats, pioneer of the modernist and symbolist movement, discovered Noh drama in 1916, as detailed in his essay Certain Noble Plays of Japan, which reveals a strong interest in the musicality and stillness of the Noh performance. His production of the same year, At the Hawk's Well was created by loosely following the rules of a Noh Play: Yeats' attempt at exploring Noh's spiritual power, its lyrical tone and its synthesis of dance, music and verse.

Additionally, Gordon Craig repeatedly theorized about "the idea of danger in the Indian theatre", as a potential solution to the lack of risk-taking in the western theatre, and some might argue his theories about an über-marionette actor could be compared to the kathakali training. In 1956, Grotowski too found himself an interest for Eastern performance practices, and experimented with using some aspects of Kathakali in his actor training program. He had studied the South-Indian tradition in Kerala, at the Kalamandalam.

In many cases, these practitioners' pulling of theatrical conventions from the East came from their desire to explore unexpected or novel approaches to theatre-making. Audiences at the time were not often exposed to Eastern theatre practices, and the latter were hence a powerful tool for modernists: Brecht could easily generate the alienation of his western audiences by presenting them with these supposedly "strange" and "foreign" theatrical conventions they were simply not familiar with. Artaud and Yeats could experiment with the musicality and ritualistic nature of Eastern dance traditions as a means to reconnect the western theatre to the mystical and to the universe; and both Grotowski and Craig could draw from the kathakali perfomers' training as a means to challenge the western theatre's sole focus on psychological truth and truthful behavior.

However, their exposure to these theatre traditions was extremely limited: these theatre-makers's understandings of the Eastern traditions they were pulling from were often limited to a few readings, translations of Chinese and Japanese works, and, in the case of Brecht and Artaud, the witnessing of an out-of-context demonstration of Balinese Theatre Dance and Peking Opera conventions. Remaining geographically distant, for the most part, of the traditions they wrote about, the "oriental theatre" could hence be argued to be more of a construct than a true practice for these theatre-makers. While they do pull from Eastern traditions, Brecht, Artaud, Yeats, Craig and Artaud's respective articulations of their vision for theatre predate their exposure to these practices: their approach to Eastern theatre traditions were filtered "through a personal agenda", and the absence of earnest curiosity for the oriental theatre could be argued to have led to its misinterpretation and distortion in the modernist movement.

Furthermore, Eastern theatre was repeatedly reduced by these western practitioners to an exotic, mystical form. It is important here to acknowledge the importance of cultural context in theatre-making: these practitioners' isolating of a particular ritual or convention from its broader cultural significance and social context shows perhaps that this "questionable exoticization" was customarily used to push their own preconceived notions about the theatre, rather than to explore the culture they were borrowing from.