Description:
This book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, are interwoven, and are dependent upon each other. While the term 'intercultural theatre' as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, this book explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy 'the West and the rest', as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership.
Review Quotes:
Helen Gilbert's essay 'Let the Games Begin: Pageants, Protests, Indigeneity (1968-2010)' won the 2015 Marlis Thiersch Prize for best essay from the Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association.
"Collectively, the essays in The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures offer a provocative argument for rethinking the paradigms that structure the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they draw - indeed how they are dependant - upon each other. Reading this book, one cannot help but feel that its essays are opening the first round of what will become a very significant debate." - James Harding, University of Warwick, UK
"The book repeatedly makes the point that the interaction of performance cultures is a political process, and yet it also provides solid empirical research and essays practically exploring specific productions. In this way it avoids obscuring experiences by crunching abstract data, and is able to provide a fascinating perspective on other countries and cultures via the study of performance." -- Anton Krueger, Rhodes University, South African Theatre Journal
"Assuredly an academic resource that must be considered requisite for any performance studies context committed to exploring cultures in all their diversities." -- Deirdre Osborne, Goldsmiths University of London, Theatre Research International