To welcome the new Fellows to the International Research Centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures”, Erika Fischer-Lichte and Christel Weiler convened a meeting at the beginning of the academic year 2010/11 to discuss the Centre’s programme and concepts. The following conversation between Erika Fischer-Lichte and Rustom Bharucha about “interweaving” versus “intercultural” took place on this occasion.

In my view Plato and Africa are not very far from each other.
History, men, have distanced them.
(Soulemayne Mbodj)

In this interview with Gastón Alzate, Souleymane Mbodj discusses several issues relating to the interweaving of performing cultures. These include the unity of literature and the performing arts in Africa; his views on African and Western philosophy; his experience playing Bach’s second prelude in C minor with Lebanese and Armenian musicians; the appropriation processes and cultural fractures resulting from colonization; and the essential value of black music in the Americas for African communities to recover cultural ties shattered by the slave trade. He shares his thoughts on the crossroads and divergences between Africa and the West regarding ways of thinking and conceptions of art. The interview took place in the context of the Kosmopolis International Literature Festival in Barcelona (March 24-26, 2011). Souleymane Mbodj performed alongside Nicolás Buenaventura and Marta Gómez in a show entitled Giving Birth: The Adventure of Thought. The original interview was in French; it was translated into English by Paola Marin.

© association R.B.

In my paper, I would like to look at dance as an art form within the context of intercultural encounters. Discourses on dance often betray an underlying assumption that dance is universal and can be understood by anyone, everywhere – dance as a global player! But even just a cursory glance at the history and the diversity of forms in different cultures reveals that dance performs culturally specific, regional, and local conceptions of the body, of interaction, and of rhythmic staging. On the one hand, dance performances invite (kinesthetic) identification and an inclusive participation; on the other, they can also induce experiences of difference, exclusion, or transgression. What experience, what specific knowledge is embodied in dance, dance techniques, and choreographic performances? To what extent does this describe a “knowledge of the human being” that can be portrayed only performatively – through body movements, interactions, and space-time-models?

In 2006 the famous Greek theatre director and founder of the Attis-Theatre (Athens) Theodoros Terzopoulos presented a short performance entitled Jenin (based on the poem of the same name by Etel Adnan). Terzopoulos staged the performance as a parcours that began in an Arabic coffee shop near his theatre and encompased the entire theatre space, including the foyer, the space beneath the seats, the stage itself, the rear exit, etc. The performance could best be described as a kind of silent dealing with the other that remains unincorporated. Drawing upon this experience, we talked about alterity, encounters and the power of the others.

The Kulturstiftung des Bundes funds collaborations between city theatres in Germany and theatres from abroad. The Mainfranken Theater in Würzburg has started a collaboration with the Burkinan C.I.T.O. Theatre. Kai Tuchmann, currently executive dramaturge of the Mainfranken Theater, reflects on this international collaboration.

Under the title “The presence of the elsewhere in the now (Die Gegenwart des Anderswo im Jetzt)”, the festival Theaterformen, which took place in Braunschweig in June 2010, devoted a full weekend to debating issues of colonialism and racism. Within the context of this colloquium, which opened up diverse, partly conflicting perspectives on the topic’s complexity in talks, debates, performances and video installations, a dramaturgy of heterogeneity allowed visitors to carve their own itinerary amongst people and things. The following considerations should be understood as an initial ex post mapping of an individual path through events. In the process, lines are of necessity drawn to reading and theatre experiences that were and are relevant at other times and in other contexts.

In this interview Professor Brian Singleton gave us upon leaving Berlin and the Centre he complicates terms like Orientalism, Interculturalism and Interweaving. In Ariane Mnouchkine’s performance “Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir” he perceives an ethically conscious Intercultural he generally believes to not have happened yet.

Quad directed by Yannick Donet and Élisa Morello, August 18th 2010.

As I have argued in my recent book The Transformative Power of Performance, performances epitomize the state of in-betweenness. These states give rise to performances, because they take place through the bodily co-presence of those who perform and those who look on. Whatever the performers do affects the participating spectators; and whatever the spectators do affects the performers and other spectators. Thus, a performance comes into being only during its course. It arises from the interaction of performers and spectators.

Upon leaving in July 2010 Professor Daryl Chin is giving us an interview about his time and experiences at the Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures from 2009-2010. Therein Daryl shares his perspectives on the development and specificity of art under the conditions of the Modern.

Daryl maintains a cultural blog, Documents on Art & Cinema.

At the time of writing this essay (March 2009), an exhibition entitled “Bangkok 226” had just come to a close at the newly created Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. My expectation was to see an exhibition of works in the visual arts that could tell the story of how Bangkok evolved over the past 200 years. In other words, I had expected those works to speak to me on their own terms and be brought together in this specific exhibition in such a way as to engage in a seamless narrative. What I saw confused me. The choice of artworks which had been borrowed from various museums and collections as well as those specifically commissioned for this exhibition could not, on the whole, be justified on the grounds of their aesthetic value. Walking through the exhibition I soon realized that the organizers had had in mind a documentary on the history of Bangkok. Large panels with detailed accounts of the city’s historical development and descriptions of the individual exhibits had been put up. In the spirit of a documentary, the word seemed to have been granted supremacy over visual expression. I was not sure whether this was intentional.

Art cannot reveal the truth about art without snatching it away again by turning the revelation into an artistic event. (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production)

On February 26 at the Kule Theatre in Berlin, I saw Hotel Arabia by Carola Lehmann and David Merten, who performed their voyage to ‘Arabia’ in a way reminiscent of the early European narratives from Barbary land. The tendency of exoticising otherness was apparent, and the commodification of cultural difference was at times disturbing during the performance. Rimini Protokoll’s intercultural projects, on the other hand, are neither about sublimating otherness nor reversing the gaze, but rather about the possibilities of transferring the debate taking place in developing countries to the metropolis, through the deployment (rather than invention) of the tradition of docu-drama. Radio Muezzin, which premiered at the HAU 2 on the third of March, is a prime example of art that bridges the gap between cultures and reaches across the divide to the Other (the not I) during the ‘imperial’ present. The performance challenges the age-old division between art and public since it does away with barriers that emphasize contrived and constructed arenas of artistic production. In the process, live performance of al-adhan exposes the simulated and the genuine, art and life, to each other and to audiences as it conflates the divided spaces of artistic activity. The reconstruction of al-adhan , the call to prayer, fuses the memory-site of the mosque to memory narratives of the muadhinin (muezzins).

“In societies dominted by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” Guy Debord  1967  paragraph 1.

Personal impressions
As HAU’s stage went dark, four Egyptian muezzins illuminated by radiant white Klieg lights started their calls to prayer from the four corners of the auditorium. My first sensation, as I intently watched the dark stage from my seat in one of the front rows, was not determined by sight and vision, but by aurality: I felt pleasure mixed with unease derived from the suddenness of the sensory impact. While the voices were distinct, they produced a pleasant harmony of multivocality, reminiscent of choral or Gregorian chants.
However, even before the four muezzins in their different garb proceeded to the stage I realized that my unease had other roots than the surprise assault on my auditive perception. Evoked by the auditive impact of the performance, I remembered my first close encounter with a muezzin’s call to prayer: I relived my night in a clay hut where I slept with twenty odd Afghan tribesmen (the men in one room, the women in separate quarters) of a herding community in the province of Baghlan in the winter of 1978. We were huddling close on mats and sleeping bags in the bitter cold early one morning when the thunderous voice of the mullah, another nomadic herder sleeping with us in the same room, awoke us from our sleep. For a moment, I conjured up the feeling of this past horror (of being roused from sleep so suddenly) mixed with the pleasure of having experienced this lifestyle during my fieldwork where the warmth and company of these men sustained me and my family (including my 18-month-old twin daughters) as Soviet tanks rolled across the country about eighty miles away on the highway from Baghlan to Kabul.

What still resonates, and organizes for me the memory of the entire piece, is the sentence, pronounced quite early on, stating that one of the muezzin’s would only join the others on stage “later…” This announced delay, this procrastinated entering suggests already a kind of separation between those present on stage since the beginning and the belated one, and dramaturgically produces a sense of anticipation clouded by a question: “Why will he come only later?”

The answer is given immediately upon the last Muezzin’s arrival. Clad in a smooth, well cut grey suit, moving with the gentleness of a cat, or with the thick lightness of a cloud, he arrives with his own tempo and timing, late, later, after all: the time of the state.

Upon leaving in March 2010 Professor Khalid Amine is giving us an interview about his time and experiences at the Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures from 2008-2010.

Further information on Professor Amine’s work at the International Centre for Performance Studies in Tangier, Morocco, can be found here.

Some ideas about networking
You only get something out from a network if you are willing to put something into it.
Networking is about personal responsibility, about communication and trust.
Networking is about sharing knowledge and experience.

“… follow the breath with the inner eye … residual awareness of the point … forwarding down, inhalation back, and up, exhalation forward, and down … sustain the stretch … don’t second-guess your impulse … oops, everyone is not together … once it’s in play you have to deal with it … slide left, sense right, slide right, sense left, slide the left back, sense the left, slide the right back, sense the right …”

When I was growing up, there were certain books which really galvanized me, making me think that critical writing was as richly evocative as any other kind of writing. One such book was Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation; it was so inspiring that I rushed out to get her second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will, the minute it was published. (I still have the hardcover, though the jacket has long since disintegrated.) But then I read her novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, and I was stumped. I couldn’t understand how someone with such a keen, critical mind could turn out such… crap. Soon after, I remember reading Gore Vidal’s review of her novels in The New York Review of Books, in which he explained how the analytic sense and the intellectual enthusiasm, which made Sontag such a formidable essayist, were not the same as the imaginative and emotional qualities needed for a novelist. He noted that Sontag was one of the few American writers well-acquainted with the most recent developments in European literature, but ticking off the influences (a little Sarraute here, a dollop of Robbe-Grillet there, Tomasso Landolfi coming in during the final stretch) wasn’t the same as being transported into the imaginative realm of the aesthetic.

The success of the German entry to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo was matched by stunning sales and chart positions in many countries throughout Europe. Having more Google hits than any of the contestants before the contest itself was a sure sign that the appeal of a German contest song was to a much broader European youth culture than a national boundary could contain. The song was produced by Stefan Raab, himself a former contest entrant as a writer,  and now the producer of the German national contest. In a wrap-up event two days after Lena triumphed in Oslo, she guested on Raab’s night-time talk show which was frequently interrupted by the host (Raab) and guest (Lena) breaking into a football chant of ’Deutsch-e-land’ to celebrate only the second win for Germany in the 55 year history of the contest, a Cold War-era televisual phenomenon purporting to be apolitical and aiming for the promotion of a collective European identity. Also, in a succession of post-contest interviews it was strongly suggested by Raab that Lena should defend (verteidigen) her title, and thereby undeniably linking a song contest to a sporting contest, and in particular to the imminent World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa. In terms of the impact of popular culture, the World cup soccer tournament and the Eurovision Song Contest are the two biggest televions shows in the world, both televisual spectacle fo competitive and competing nationalisms.

Festival Theaterformen in Braunschweig – Thematic weekend: The Presence of Elsewhere – Here and Now

Still from Christmas Beach Walk – Jörg Laue, 2008.

This short film features parts of the presentation and workshop Phillip Zarrilli held in Tanzfabrik Berlin in March 2010.