Jacqueline Lo

Peforming Hybridity in Post-Colonial Monodrama1:

an open-ended play as in game and performance in which the speech or accents of multiple voices are inserted into one speaker’s utterance (that of the lone actor) without being fully internalized or appropriated. The prime focus of their study is autobiographical monodrama, a specific subgenre in which subjectivity is dialogized in performance through the very act of publicly constructing a social &dquo;self&dquo; and thus disclosing the fiction of

Asianizing Australian Theatre

While recent Aboriginal incursions into mainstream Australian theatre are strongly associated with the cultural politics of reconciliation and, indeed, perceived in some quarters as exemplary of the commitment to cultural rapprochement found lacking in the present conservative government, the Asian influence is closely connected to public policy and the arts establishment. As noted in Chapter 1, Asia has figured periodically in the national theatrical imaginary as a site of both desire and disavowal since the mid-1800s. This ambivalence continued to inform cross-cultural theatrical activities in the region in complex and sometimes contradictory ways as Asian themes and art forms became highly visible on the main stage in the latter part of the twentieth century, a trend facilitated by the government-led campaign for cultural and economic (re)alignment with the Asian region. The Asianizing process in theatre has occurred less through the emergence of a distinct body of works and practices by/about Australians of Asian descent, although this is an important aspect of the phenomenon (see Chapter 6), than through the incorporation and valorization of (selected) elements of Asianness in the performing arts industry, in a range of political, aesthetic and commercial sites. While there is some evidence to support a reading of this process as a form of neo-orientalist cosmopolitanism, we contend that Asianization, like indigenization, is a multifaceted and dynamic process that presents opportunities for exploitation and commoditization as well as prospects for mutually productive and sustained cross-cultural engagement.

Crossing Cultures: Case Studies

Thus far, the parallel processes of indigenizing and Asianizing Australian theatre have been broadly delineated in terms of patterns of occurrence and political influences. We have attempted in this survey to identify the key elements of each process as well as some of the motifs and problematics of cross-cultural theatre praxis in the Australasian region. As suggested, these developments must be understood not only with reference to Australian cultural politics but also within the context of a global arts market, the impact of which is refracted and reflected through localized modes and conditions of production and consumption. The following three case studies are designed to provide a more nuanced investigation of selected aspects of this aesthetic ‘glocalization’. The first explores indigenous refigurings of European canonical theatre texts that assume metropolitan body cultures and aesthetic systems, while the second analyses the ways in which a ‘classic’ Australian play has been progressively reinterpreted and stylistically hybridized to reflect changing dynamics in Australian-Japanese relations. The final case study investigates the incorporation of the internationally acclaimed Suzuki Method into the training regimes and performances of two avant-garde theatre groups. Cumulatively, these case studies demonstrate the ways in which global-local forces intersect with cosmopolitanism to produce art forms and practices invested with particular cultural and economic values.

Introduction: Performing Cosmopolitics

On 15 September 2000, Australians from all walks of life joined with the performing arts community to stage what is undoubtedly the most spectacular theatrical event in the nation’s history: the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games. This ‘world show stopper’,1 as one newspaper termed it, was an emphatically global and local performance, designed not only to capture the imagination of a vast media audience but also to present the nation to itself through popular and allusive iconographies. In line with the generic template for suchevents, the performance explicitly modelled the social values behind Olympism: global democracy founded on harmony and community among individuals, cultures and nations. The local script of such democracy was written as an allegory of postcolonial reconciliation in which a young white schoolgirl, Nikki Webster, travelled through a potted version of Australia’s history guided by Aboriginal songman, Djakapurra Munyarryun. Notable segments of the performance included ‘Awakenings’, an indigenous welcome featuring over 1000 dancers from clans across the country (see Figure 1); ‘Arrivals’, a float parade celebrating immigration from all corners of the world; and ‘Eternity’, a tribute to contemporary society in which some 12,000 performers participating in the ceremony merged in a triumphant finale.

Performance and Asylum: Ethics, Embodiment, Efficacy

In their attempts to conceptualize non-elitist versions of transnational belonging and political community that are not bound by Western privilege or the capitalist ideologies of globalization, some proponents of new cosmopolitanism have taken pains to position forced migrants and refugees as potential — and even exemplary — cosmopolitan subjects. These deterritorialized (non-)citizens are thus seen to participate in the uneven affiliations and ‘discrepant’ cultural engagements of mobile communities (Clifford, 1992), the survivalist, Vernacular’ cultural translations of postcolonial societies (Bhabha, 2000) and the practical, ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanisms of situated collectivities (Malcomson, 1998). In such inclusive formulations, refugees and forced migrants share with other globally mobile subjects the propensity for cosmopolitan ‘thinking and feeling’ and the ability to negotiate new sociocultural and political attachments. What is taken for granted in this discourse is that refugees and forced migrants are necessarily accorded the ancient right of universal hospitality that underpins Kantian cosmopolitanism, ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he [sic] arrives on someone else’s territory’ (Kant, 1970: 105). While this right is enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees and respected in many regions, refugees and asylum seekers are all too often divested of political status, targeted for exclusion/expulsion from specific sovereign territories and/or forced to live in camps or liminal zones where the conditions of existence are reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben terms ‘bare life’ (life exposed to death) (1998).

Indigenizing Australian Theatre

Few local observers would debate the claim that Australian theatre has now confidently outgrown its anti-cosmopolitan foundations, although some might argue about the extent to which historical patterns of cross-cultural engagement continue to impact upon performing arts praxis within and beyond the nation. The vital role played by indigenous products and practices in reorienting an industry currently defining itself as distinctive, culturally hybrid, innovative and entrepreneurial is indicated by recent claims that Aboriginal theatre constitutes one of the ‘emergent “sexy” experimental forms’ energizing the national repertoire (Veronica Kelly, 2001: 5) and that it projects the Australian voice that ‘will, in due course, be the most widely heard in other countries’ (Brisbane, 1995). Since its tentative beginnings in the civil-rights protest movements of the 1960s, contemporary Aboriginal theatre has burgeoned during a period when cultural diversity generally and Aboriginality specifically — each with their complex impacts on Australian identity formations — have been on the national agenda as never before. Hence, this theatre, like other indigenous art forms, has necessarily served at least two constituencies: its own indigenous community and the broader postcolonizing society, from which audiences are mostly drawn.

Asian Australian Hybrid Praxis

Contemporary theorization of cosmopolitanism has struggled to unhinge the concept from its genealogy in early modern European expansionism. In the words of Anthony Pagden, ‘it is hard to see how cosmopolitanism can be entirely separated from some kind of “civilizing” mission, or from the more humanizing aspects of the various imperial projects with which it has been so long associated’ (2000: 4). One of the central aims in the configuration of a ‘new’ cosmopolitanism has been to particularize and, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘provincialize’ cosmopolitan theorizing so as to diminish its privileged Eurocentricism. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘vernacular’ is particularly salient in this regard since it aims to destabilize and decentralize dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism by bringing it into conversation and collision with minoritarian and subaltern experiences of border-crossings. Vernacular cosmopolitanism is not, therefore, of the elite variety inspired by universalist patterns of humanistic thought that run gloriously across cultures, establishing an enlightened unity. Vernacular cosmopolitans are compelled to make a tryst with cultural translation as an act of survival. Their specific and local histories, often threatened and repressed, are inserted ‘between the lines’ of dominant cultural practices.

Marketing Difference at the Adelaide Festival

Comedian Barry Humphries is reputed to have said that arts festivals are ‘good for Australians’ because ‘they allow us to get a year’s worth of culture over and done with in a couple of weeks’ (quoted in Waites, 1987: 2). As well as satirizing the ‘typical’ (sports-loving) Australian’s apparent lack of sustained interest in the arts, this quip, made nearly two decades ago, indexes a mode of cultural exposure/consumption that has become increasingly prevalent within many parts of the nation. All Australian state and territory capitals now host annual or biennial international arts festivals, which, in combination, draw a considerable segment of the total audience for major performing arts events and demand an ever-increasing slice of the industry’s funding pie. While this trend is undoubtedly linked to the marked expansion of the international festival circuit in response to the globalization of national cultural economies, the growing emphasis on festival culture in Australia, seemingly among the most pronounced in the Western world, can also be traced to specific local interests and state imperatives, not least of which is the desire to develop and project cosmopolitan tastes/identities. This chapter examines the cosmopolitics of marketing and consuming Aboriginal and Asian performances at the Adelaide International Festival, widely acknowledged as the nation’s premier arts event.

Conclusion: Cosmopolitics in the New Millennium

Australia’s increasing openness to the globalization of market capitalism has been accompanied, ironically, by a progressive narrowing of the state’s vision of global social justice, particular as it informs domestic matters relating to the management of the cultural matrix. This anti-cosmopolitan turn is encapsulated by John Howard’s repeated assertion of the nation’s authority to determine the parameters of asylum seekers’ (human) rights: ‘We will decide who comes into the country and the circumstances in which they come.’ Here, the sovereign power of the nation-state is used to validate a legalistic stance that admits no overriding ethical or moral claim to hospitality. The government’s retreat from humanitarian responsibility is matched by the literal shrinking of the nation-space through the redefinition of its borders in an effort to prevent valid asylum applications.1 This (white) arrogation of sovereignty has been challenged by several indigenous leaders who point to the constitutive violence of colonialism, now being revisited in the regime of mandatory detention, as undermining the validity of government determinations of land rights/rights of landing. The presence of indigenous participants at arts events, public rallies and vigils in support of refugees confirm that there is strong feeling on this matter within sections of the Aboriginal community.

(Anti-)Cosmopolitan Encounters

A commonly held perception is that Australian theatre had only European and American models on which to draw as it gradually developed from an import-dominated enterprise in the convict era into a home-grown arts industry that, by the early 1970s, seemed ready to engage with the diverse range of non-Western performance practices becoming more accessible with the nation’s turn towards multiculturalism. In fact, colonial audiences — and presumably aspiring practitioners — did have some opportunities to observe specific kinds of Aboriginal, Maori, Chinese and Japanese performance, if not necessarily in establishment venues. Their responses, often marked by incomprehension and even distaste, nevertheless reveal a deep fascination with aestheticized displays of cultural difference. Such events, we argue, constitute the beginnings of an Australasian theatrical cosmopolitanism, albeit one marked by racism and a sense of cultural incommensurability.