I see “interweaving performance cultures” as a flexible perspective to inquire into the cultural adjustments, ambiguities, and misalignments performative events produce and manifest. I consider it meaningful that performance is mentioned instead of art – although art is certainly included – which shows such inquiries are not circumscribed to an elitist definition of art nor to a field with the official approval stamp of the academies. Thus, “interweaving performance cultures” in my view refers to a rigorous inquiry into the cultural complexities of human actions–as creative forms that enter into a dialogical relationship with others–that does not start from a single prescribed ideological, philosophical, aesthetic, or theoretical model.

In 1963, the Polish novelist and dramatist Witold Gombrowicz sailed from South America to Europe. He was bound for Berlin, where he was to take up a Ford Foundation fellowship, the first of a series of artist residencies meant to initiate a cultural revival of the recently divided city. For Gombrowicz, it was his first journey to Europe in twenty-three years. In his journal, he describes an extraordinary encounter: at the break of dawn, northeast of the Canary Islands, he sees in a distance the ship of Chrobry, sailing on her maiden voyage from the Polish harbor Gdynia to Argentina. Gombrowicz was on board as a correspondent. Bound to spend a short period abroad and then return.

Are the terms „interweaving/entwining“ acquiring the status of key concepts in contemporary performing arts? Both terms (and others related to them, such as Brecht’s „visible knots“ or Michel Vinaver’s „interlacs“ are increasingly felt as powerful metaphors, especially in connection to postmodern and transcultural practice, as they point to the discontinuous, fragmented, heterogeneous and processual character of the arts rather than to an alleged unity of monolithic structure, as implied in the idea of „Gesamtkunstwerk“ or Peter Brook’s „yoghurt culture“ (both of which stand suspected of hegemonic thinking). „Interweaving“, however, alludes not only to intertextual and intermedial connections, but also to intercultural links inherent in every performative event.

From the range of the five horizontally-covered research areas clearly defined, I also see these areas vertically combined with at least four layers among the complexity of their interweaving processes from the departure of demographic approaches on any particular theatre production.

Which kind of relation is created through interweaving processes? What can interweaving tell us about the potentiality of a relation? These are crucial questions for my approach to the concept of interweaving of performance cultures. As image interweaving points to the irreducible diversity of connections, which bring into relatedness not essentialist identities, but further hybrid forms. By that, it is noticeable that interweaving exceeds its threads allowing them to reach a particular and actual configuration beyond themselves. It is also a matter of the circulation of threads, in such a manner that they constantly flow and that they relate precisely through its movement.

ahhhh performance:

that momentary manifestation

of personal timing

and eccentric personality

that occurs while dealing

with materials of choice

(voice, text, the musical thought, gramophone records, 2 horses)

lives in the territory of surprise,

in the landscape of possibilities –

an architecture of individuality

a helix of memories

always just diving

The recent debates on the politics of intercultural theatre practice have not only critiqued artistic ‘syncretism’ and negotiations, but articulated an optimistic belief in the achievability of a common “interweaving” across worldwide performance cultures.  Erika Fischer-Lichte is justly acclaimed as an exemplary de-mystifier – the thinker who has provided unsurpassed critiques of Eurocentric intercultural performance elements that lurk in the work of various western theatrical enterprises that went East & South.  

Interweaving Performance Cultures are encounters of various kinds in which performance practices, conventions, traditions, innovations and theories enter into an integrative, cross-cultural dialogue and/or interaction out of which emerges a seamless unity that enriches mutual understanding and appreciation of contemporary global cohesion.