Julie Holledge

ADDRESSING THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON OF A DOLL'S HOUSE: AN INTERCULTURAL INTERVENTION

NORA rivals Antigone, Medea, and Juliet, as the most performed, discussed, and debated female character on the international stage. The extraordinary diversity of audiences across historical time and geographical space who have responded to A Doll’s House can be illustrated by the following performances randomly chosen from the hundreds of productions presented over the past 126 years. In 1891, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the first performance of the play coincided with an agricultural show; it was so popular that the auditorium overflowed and an extra 200 or 300 people were crammed onto the stage to watch the drama. Forty-five years later, in 1934, the play provoked such a stir in the audience in Seoul that, according to Korean critic Na Woong, ‘At Nora’s last dialogue, rolling applause broke out from the ladies’ seats, and the sound ‘‘hush, hush’’ rose among the gentlemen.’ Seventy-two years later, in May 2006, the first Egyptian production of A Doll’s House was seen in Alexandria and proved so successful it was chosen to open the First National Egyptian Theatre Festival. As a scholar of intercultural performance, I am fascinated by this ‘Doll’s House’ phenomenon. How can we account for the play’s extraordinary success? As this question is impossible to answer in a short paper, the following remarks should be read as my initial thoughts on a methodology for conducting a full-length study of this global theatrical conundrum. A premise commonly used to explain global success in art works has been articulated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith: ‘At a given time and under the contemporary conditions of available materials, technology, and techniques, a particular object – let us say a verbal artefact or text – may perform certain desired/able functions quite well for some set of subjects. It will do so by virtue of certain of its ‘‘properties’’.’

Hidden Dramas: Cartographic Revelations in the World of Theatre Studies

Abstract Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House) by Henrik Ibsen is one of the most performed modern dramas in the world. Using cartographic and network visualisations, this article divulges a hitherto obscured Nordic history of this play: first, as a product of the cultural and aesthetic blending in the late nineteenth century; then as an icon of nation building in the post-war years; and finally, as a global icon for the Norwegian nation state. While charting this affair between Norway and one of its national cultural treasures, this article also exposes the transmission of an aesthetic heritage. Network visualisations of the Nordic productions of Et dukkehjem reveal an unbroken connection between productions of the play from 1879 to 1991. Oral transmission of production knowledge concerning canonical texts is commonplace in most national theatres, but this is the first study to document the phenomenon within the interpretative history of a single play. By applying time–geography to the production history of a ubiquitous dramatic text, ‘Hidden Dramas’ demonstrates the value of cartographic investigations to the field of theatre historiography.

Global Ibsen: Performing multiple modernities

Global Ibsen: Performing multiple modernities is a delight to read. It reflects the shift in studies of world theatre from the deep analyses of written texts and their literary sources to analyses of themultiple performance texts created from canonical works. As the first global collection dedicated to the study of multiple plays by Ibsen in performance, it offers fascinating new insights into this world dramatist. The collection originated as a series of papers delivered at the 2006 conference marking the centenary of the death of Ibsen held at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin; it contains 17 articles that reflect the theatre histories and practices of five continents: Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas andAustralia.Most of the contributors take one play and describe its transformation into multiple performance texts by the theatre artists in a single country. As the authors are scholars, critics and scholar/artists immersed in their local theatre cultures, they provide nuanced readings of the images and symbols containedwithin the productions they critique. Like any collection that emerges from conference papers, it contains a wide range of theoretical approaches, but all the articles relate to the theme as outlined in the excellent introductionbyErika Fischer-Lichte of exploring Ibsen in performance to elucidate the “interweaving of cultures as part of a process of modernization”. The book is organized into sections according to play titles, which leaves readers free toweave their own threads of thematic connection between the articles and, for this reader, two threads dominated. The first thread was the extraordinary variety of political and aesthetic purposes that Ibsen’s texts have served for over a century. The five chapters devoted to productions of Peer Gynt raise

Pastor Hansen's Confirmation Class: Religion, Freedom, and the Female Body in Et dukkehjem

For over 100 years, scholars, artists, and critics have argued over whether Et dukkehjem is a play about the emancipation of women, or a universal text about human freedom. Whatever Henrik Ibsen’s intentions when writing the play, in performance it depends on a female body personifying a discourse on personal autonomy and subjective freedom; and freedom for the female body, particularly if it is sexually active, has always been a problem for the peoples of the Book – be they Jews, Christians, or Muslims. Islam may not share an interpretation of the Creation that depicts Eve as a seductive temptress, or the Christian doctrine that makes her responsible for original sin, but as Leila Ahmed has convincingly argued, Islam, as a new Middle Eastern religion in the seventh century, incorporated “seamlessly an already developed scriptural misogyny into the socioreligious universe it too would inscribe” (Ahmed, 1992, p. 36). The Prophet is reported to have said: “Were it not for Bani Isra’il, meat would not decay; and were it not for Eve, no woman would betray her husband” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 55, Hadith 611; http:// www.scribd.com/doc/16665458/Hadith-Sahih-Bukhari). In this paper, I intend to focus on the interpretative possibilities contained in Et dukkehjem that give artists the opportunity to represent publicly an autonomous female desiring body on the stage; a body that is an anathema to theatre subjugated to the hegemonic influences of Judaeo-Christian or Islamic patriarchal ideology. In my search for a free, desiring female body in contemporary productions of Et dukkehjem, I will argue that we are currently witnessing a clear bifurcation of interpretative strategies: at one end of a continuum, we find Noras wrapped in a discourse of modesty and piety, while at the other, we find this same character gripped in a crisis of sexual fetishisation. The question I will ask of

Exile and the Elusive Qualities of Time

Time is frozen when the elements contained in an intercultural performance are subjected to classification; if a taxonomic analysis of the cultural signifiers is to be successful, the creative process must be momentarily suspended. Yet it is the living creative process that fuels the fascination of all intercultural inquiry, whether it is the negotiations between artists from different cultures, or the cross-cultural interactions between performers and audiences. These encounters are like interactive cells in an organism, forever merging and splitting, changing the unfamiliar into the familiar, and the familiar into the strange.