Intercultural performance as a paradigm for identity and discourse

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Yong Li Lan, for all of the guidance and invaluable advice she has given me throughout this thesis writing process, whilst allowing me the freedom to find my own way and my own voice. I would like to thank her for all the support and attention she has shown me, and for encouraging and teaching me to always strive to be better and aim higher. I would also like to acknowledge Robin Loon, Kaori Kobayashi, Michiko Suematsu and the rest of the A-S-I-A team for all their support and encouragement. Your suggestions and research materials have been very useful in getting me started with this thesis Many thanks go in particular to my parents and brother, who have been so patient and caring towards me during this entire process. Thank you for all the food and love. Words fail me to express my appreciation to Diego, who has been my constant pillar of support. I am very thankful for everything you have done for me and all the encouragement you have given me. Finally, I would like to thank everybody who has helped me make this thesis possible. My special thanks go to Jasmin, for always being confident in me, the Girls, who have listened endlessly to my ideas and complaints, and the Beavers, who have been so supportive and kind to me whenever I felt overwhelmed and stressed. i Table of Contents Acknowledgments........................................................................................................... i Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................ii Summary .......................................................................................................................iii List of Figures ...............................................................................................................iii Chapter One: To be or not to be – The Intercultural Force of Asian Shakespeare(s) .............................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Limitations and developments in intercultural theatre........................................ 7 1.2. Remembering Hamlet – The intercultural performativity and productivity of a Shakespearean text ................................................................................................... 22 Chapter Two: Asian Shakespeares – (Re)engaging History Through Intercultural Shakespeare Performances ................................................................ 29 2.1. Shakespeare in translation – Changing cultural representations from Japanese tradition to Japan’s modernization. .......................................................................... 36 2.2. Shifting Shakespeare in China – The growth of a modern Chinese theatre. .... 50 2.3. Singaporean Shakespeare – Locating culture within the contexts of “New Asia”. ....................................................................................................................... 63 Chapter 3: The Play’s the Thing: Identity and intercultural discourse in Asian Hamlet Performances................................................................................................. 79 3.1. Kurita Yoshihiro’s Hamlet (2007) .................................................................... 82 3.2. Lin Zhao Hua’s Hamlet (1990) ......................................................................... 91 3.3. Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet (2002) ........................................................... 99 Chapter Four: What is Intercultural Shakespeare? ............................................ 112 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 119 ii Summary The current debate on intercultural Asian Shakespeare suffers from two major deficiencies. On one hand, most of the literature on interculturalism tends to adopt a Eurocentric perspective in analyzing intercultural texts and performances. On the other hand, critiques of Asian Shakespeare are usually restricted to area studies, and offer little comparative scope. Thus, this thesis aims to document and differentiate Asian Shakespeare performance practices from European Shakespeare in the West. This thesis addresses these shortcomings by starting from a re-examination of the history of Shakespeare in Japan, China and Singapore. Such a comparative analysis sheds light on the diverse reasons for and approaches to appropriating Shakespeare in Asia, and provides a historical overview of how the concept of interculturalism has developed over time. The notion of Shakespeare’s universality is therefore challenged, as the intercultural Shakespearean performances discussed suggest how Asian Shakespeare is not only expanding the boundaries of Shakespeare as a cultural field, but redefining how we conceptualize “Shakespeare” and modern Shakespearean adaptations. Following this historical review, the paper moves on to highlighting the changing dynamics between Shakespeare and Asian Shakespeare performances. Three Asian Hamlet productions from Japan, China and Singapore are analyzed to examine how identity and intercultural discourse are constructed and interrogated through the divergent representations of a single Shakespearean text. The restaging of Hamlet through various Asian cultural, historical and socio-political contexts demonstrates that Shakespeare’s text engages with and is suitable for practiced and performed interculturality. The analysis of these Asian Hamlet performances also reinforces the significance of the research on performance within the field of intercultural Shakespeare. The examination of the interaction and exchanges between iii diverse staging strategies and performance traditions within Asian Shakespearean performances, demonstrates how Asian Shakespeare(s) reveal the potential for new research directions in the discursive field of intercultural Shakespeare. iv List of Figures Figure 1 ........................................................................................................................ 34 v Chapter One: To be or not to be – The Intercultural Force of Asian Shakespeare(s) Shakespeare’s dual canonicity in both theater and literature and his status as a symbol of high culture and high art have made him a valuable vehicle to transport local texts to worldwide audiences. It is no surprise that other performance cultures would employ Shakespeare to communicate diverse cultural and performance interests globally, since Shakespeare’s prevalence and popularity as the quintessential Author is constantly reinforced through education, the international entertainment industry, the worldwide web and globalization. This proliferation of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation in Asia, however, is not just a recent phenomenon but has been practiced since the early 1900s, and the current surge of scholarly attention in the field of Shakespeare as performance and intercultural medium has raised several important questions about Asian Shakespeare and intercultural theatre – What differentiates intercultural Shakespeare from other Shakespearean adaptations and appropriations? How does the interaction between Shakespeare and varied Asian performance practices, styles and cultures inform and affect our understanding of Shakespeare and performed interculturality? And even more simply, what is intercultural Shakespeare? With these questions in mind, this thesis aims to examine the interaction between diverse staging strategies and performance aesthetics within Asian Shakespearean performances, and demonstrate how these interactions suggest the potential for new research directions in the discursive field of intercultural Shakespeare. The relative lack of literature in English that focuses on the study of 1 performance in intercultural Asian Shakespeare also calls for the need to distinguish and document Asian Shakespeare performance practices from European Shakespeare performance practices in the West. The intercultural Shakespearean performances discussed in this thesis suggest how Asian Shakespeare is not only expanding the boundaries of Shakespeare as a cultural field, but challenging how we think about “Shakespeare” and modern Shakespearean adaptations. Shakespeare’s Hamlet will be analyzed as it provides an interesting case-study on how a play can be useful and productive interculturally. The restaging of Hamlet and the re-conceptualizing of Shakespeare’s iconic character in various Asian contexts offers further insights into how the dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s text engages with and is suitable for practiced and performed interculturality. In many ways, the attempt to take on Shakespeare’s iconic and enigmatic character becomes very much an endeavor to challenge the authority of Shakespeare and the traditional perspectives on Shakespeare performances, as Asian directors try to establish their own authority and standpoints by tackling theatre’s biggest giant. Three Asian Hamlet productions will be closely studied in chapter three - Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet (Denmark, 2002), Kurita Yoshihiro’s Hamlet (Tokyo, 2007), and Lin Zhao Hua’s Hamlet (Beijing, 1990), to demonstrate how Hamlet is remembered and (re)presented in different cultures through national histories, cosmopolitan ideologies, or contesting performance forms and cultural identities. The divergent reproductions of a single text also suggest that there could be something present in the text and the fictional world of Shakespeare that encourages such intercultural negotiations and exchanges; this will be further elaborated in this chapter. The re-presentation and re-imagination of Shakespeare’s play through these different cultures and histories not only assumes the possibility of the ideological reproduction of new (intercultural) Shakespeare(s) but also 2 demonstrates the potential for constructing the “national” and “cultural” through the mediation between Shakespeare and history. To begin seeing the value of Asian Shakespeare as a significant and equal force to traditional “English” Shakespeare that can challenge, change and expand how we think about “Shakespeare”, we have to acknowledge that the Shakespeare we know is not only influenced by the sum of his works but also by the literary criticisms, artistic responses and academic scholarship surrounding his corpus. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, “the producer of a work of art is not the artist but the field of production as a universe of belief which produces the value of the work of art as a fetish.”1 This being said, the inaccessibility of live Asian Shakespeare performances (created by both language and distance), and the limited availability of shared and translated specialized expertise, criticism and academic literature on these performances worldwide, may very well lead to a restricted and outdated view in Western/ Anglo-American Shakespeare Scholarship on what Shakespeare, Asian Shakespeare, intercultural Shakespeare and contemporary Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation is, or rather, can be. Therefore, it is imperative to review and build upon the growing literature of Shakespeare in Asia to not only gain a better perspective of the cross-cultural processes that have existed since the 1900s, but at the same time to identify how current ideologies of interculturalism have affected and effected our understanding and theorizing of past and present Asian (intercultural) Shakespeare performances. For instance, is there value in naming Asian Shakespeare as a form of intercultural Shakespeare? Does identifying Asian Shakespeare as intercultural theatre change the ways we consider Asian performances and foreign 1 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Rules of Art: Genesis and structure of the Literary field, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Pg 229. Quoted in Massai, Sonia, World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriation in Film and Performance, (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), Pg 6. 3 encounters with Shakespeare? How do we start reconsidering intercultural Shakespeare not just as a subcategory or a reflection of what Shakespeare is not – or at least not originally, but as a different form of Shakespeare worthy of its own critical frameworks, based as much on difference as it is on similarities? As the interest in intercultural Shakespeare performances increases, it is crucial that we start to consider the development of Shakespeare in Asia from an alternative perspective that encompasses plurality. Thus, these questions will be thoroughly interrogated in chapter two of this thesis as the history of Shakespeare in Asia is re-examined and reassessed through the frames of interculturalism. An intercultural outlook helps distinguish how various Asian Shakespeares relate to one another by not only drawing the connections between them, but also by highlighting the diversity of different Asian Shakespeares within the discourse of intercultural Shakespeare in Asia, as the reactions to and experiences with Shakespeare in India for instance, are greatly dissimilar to that of Shakespeare in China. Although it is important to distinguish between different histories of and responses to Shakespeare in Asia, it is equally important to establish an approach for comparative research between Shakespearean performances from different parts of Asia. This would ensure that Asian Shakespeares are not regarded as separate phenomena that are not relevant to each other and contribute no added value to the study of non-Asian Shakespeare(s) and other forms of intercultural theatre. Reviewing history through the perspectives of the present helps us gain a different understanding of the development of Asian Shakespeare and reassess how and why Shakespeare was transported to and transfigured by foreign cultures. Thus, history is not regarded as sealed but is seen as a process of ongoing construction. By tracing the 4 histories of Asian Shakespeares and offering alternative viewpoints of those histories, we are not only building upon the existing literature on intercultural Shakespeare but also challenging the prevailing notions of a universal Shakespeare. Accordingly, the retrospective on Asian Shakespeares in Japan, China, and Singapore will be analyzed from my perspective as the metadata editor of the international A-S-I-A project – the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive. A-S-I-A is an international initiative that consists of researchers and practitioners from Japan, Singapore, and Korea and digital research software developers and website designers from the US and Singapore. The driving force behind A-S-I-A is to encourage the collection and generation of research materials in Asian Shakespeare performance, but also the need to develop a discipline of intercultural research. The project is aimed at creating a digital online archive consisting not only of Shakespeare performances and translated scripts from Asia and Southeast Asia (e.g. Japan, Philippines, Korea, China and Singapore) but also focusing on producing metadata research material centered around four main aspects of a live performance event (this metadata schema was conceptualized by Dr Yong Li Lan). 2 The four core categories of the metadata schema are - Art/ Forms, Reception, Points of Reference and Production. The metadata and recorded performance materials collected in this digital archive will allow largely unavailable information to be available to a worldwide audience as performance scripts and metadata material will be translated into different Asian languages besides their original and English. The focus on the research of performance is an important initiative of the archive, as performance is not 2 See chapter two. 5 seen here as merely a subsidiary of Shakespeare’s plays but as a vital research resource to study and critique Shakespeare. The A-S-I-A metadata is intended to provide researchers with an archive of primary research information to build their own research upon, and at the same time offer a platform for research exchange between specialists and a broader non-specialist academic public across boundaries (i.e. language, education, nationalities and cultural backgrounds), thereby widening the discursive field. The metadata materials in this digital archive offer users a newly formulated vocabulary that is designed to enable users to articulate, understand and analyze intercultural staging strategies through performance. This international project scheduled to launch in November 2009 exemplifies the intercultural processes of creating a global online archive that consists of Shakespearean productions and collaborators from different parts of Asia, and at the same time, embodies the complexities of intercultural practice, negotiation and exchange between collaborators and contributors of different cultural backgrounds and specialized knowledge. My participation in the A-S-I-A project has made me acutely aware of the lack of critical literature in English on Asian Shakespeare by Asian Shakespearean scholars and researchers. Unlike intercultural performances from the West, for instance the works of Robert Wilson and Peter Brook, which have toured around the world and whose reception (i.e. reviews, academic essays, and performance analysis) is widely documented and circulated, the current field of Asian Shakespeare performance studies is more often than not enclosed within a particular cultural and geographical milieu. Hence, the A-S-I-A project aims to bridge that gap through the formation of a global multi-modal research platform and archive. It is critical that the strengths and weaknesses of existing literature on interculturalism are evaluated to 6 assess the relevance of current theories and discourses pertaining to Asian Shakespeare and intercultural theatre in Asia. The analysis in the following section aims to highlight the shifting paradigms of intercultural Shakespeare and advocate the need to approach Shakespeare in Asia using intercultural perspectives and models of research. 1.1. Limitations and developments in intercultural theatre In this perspective, a negative utopia lies at the root of the world market discourse. As the last niches are integrated into the world market, what emerges is indeed one world: not as a recognition of multiplicity or mutual openness, where images both of oneself and of foreigners are pluralist and cosmopolitan, but on the contrary as a single commodity-world where local cultures and identities are uprooted and replaced with symbols from publicity and image departments of multinational corporations. Ulrich Beck3 It is impossible to discuss intercultural theatre and Shakespeare in Asia without addressing the impact and pitfalls of globalization in this area of study. Globalization has facilitated the transportation of local knowledge, culture, and art to a world-wide audience, thus promoting the growth and popularity of intercultural theatre, and some might even argue that globalization has given rise to the development of intercultural theatre. Despite this, the terms “intercultural” and “global” should not be mistaken to represent the same thing. Unlike “globalization” that implies a process of integrating cultural, social, political, economical, and ideological practices specific to certain localities into a worldwide network to increase 3 Beck, Ulrich, What is Globalization? Trans. Patrick Camiller. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), Pg 43. 7 greater interconnectivity, productivity and interdependency, the term ‘intercultural’ does not necessarily encourage and/or generate such forms of uniformity and standardization across borders.4 Rustom Bharucha draws our attention to the persistent global/local problematic of postcolonial critique, as the resistance to the homogenizing, commoditizing and anti-democratic tendencies of globalization are issues important to Third world economies, national and indigenous art forms and post-colonial theatre.5 Ironic to the ethos of globalization, there seems to be a growing need to (re)establish and (re)define local and national boundaries as geographical margins begin to dissolve and cultural particularities become less exclusive. While globalization and postmodern discourses, as Jacqueline Lo asserts, “celebrate the erosion of national borders and the possibilities of new identities and knowledges as the result of new flows in capital, culture and people, for many postcolonial societies […], the nation as both political project and lived reality remains a central aspect of social life.”6 This is because international/transnational productions and practices may run the risk of erasing cultural specificities rather than creating cohesive pluralities (if even possible). Here, cultural flattening is a significant concern as the global is increasingly regarded as a force that obliterates local differences, where cultural (re)production and the commoditization of indigenous art forms as “intercultural” signifiers divorced from cultural significance or national histories are dominated by global economies that pander to the tastes and preferences of international/Western audiences. 4 This definition of globalization is taken from, Schechner, Richard, Performance Studies: An Introduction, (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), Pg 263. 5 Bharucha, Rustom, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an age of Globalization, (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), Pg 25 -26. 6 Lo, Jacqueline, Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore, (Hongkong University Press, 2004), Pg 1. 8 Asian performance forms and traditions used in performances this way may very well reduce Asian Shakespeare to an elaborate all-you-can-eat-Asian Exotica buffet with plenty of artificial flavoring but consisting of no real substance, leaving Shakespeare as the star ingredient that holds everything together. Take for example, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)’s “The Complete Works” project, a year-long play season which ran at Stratford UK in 2006.7 The season consisted of “23 plays throughout the year” and invited companies from all around the world to showcase their versions of the plays presented. Many would view this move as an obvious step towards establishing and presenting a “globalized Shakespeare”, but Criag Dionne and Parmita Kapadia warn that this international showcase at the RSC Theatre may not necessarily “produce a genuine pluralism”.8 Instead, Dionne and Kapadia assert that the RSC’s intentions behind inviting international Shakespeare productions to perform at the old RSC Theatre’s final season (as it was to be torn down and replaced by a larger arena-style playhouse) was motivated by economic interests, as the “gesture to use native voices and ‘responses’ to his work [are seen] as forms of flexible labor to expand the economic potential of the RSC itself, as the ideology that promotes a ‘native’ Shakespeare […] subtly reproduces the logic of global capitalism, a kind of outsourcing of labor at a time of economic expansion.”9 Ironically, Shakespeare is set up as an instrument to reassert neocolonial rhetoric, as the foreign reproductions seem to feed into the idea of Shakespeare’s universality. Even though this reaction may not be the desired effect the RSC aimed for, Shakespeare’s relationship with other cultures is never a simple one, especially when Shakespeare carries with him the burdens of being Britain’s national poet, an identity that is 7 Information in, Dionne, Craig and Kapadia, Parmita (eds), Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, (Ashgate, 2008), Pg 8. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid, Pg 9. 9 continually entangled with notions of colonialism, Western imperialism, and cultural superiority. These factors are further complicated when discussing Shakespeare, indigenous art forms and performance traditions and interculturalism, as Daryl Chin posits in his essay, “Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Pluralism”: Interculturalism hinges on the question of autonomy and empowerment. To deploy elements from the symbol system of another culture is a very delicate enterprise. In its crudest terms, the question is: when does that usage act as cultural imperialism? Forcing elements from disparate cultures together does not seem to be a solution that makes sense, aesthetically, ethically, or philosophically. What does that power prove: that the knowledge of other cultures exists? That information about other cultures now is readily available?10 The need to re-define the term “intercultural” and set it apart from other terms like “international”, “global” and “multicultural” is emphasized here as cultural borrowing and international collaborative ventures raise ethical issues surrounding ownership and appropriate cultural representation. The questions posed by Chin are central issues pertaining to discourses about intercultural theatre as cultural transference fueled by globalization may not necessarily lead to intercultural exchanges, even though the “inter” in intercultural suggests the preservation of cultural distinctiveness and egalitarianism. This is particularly so for intercultural Shakespeare performances, as Shakespeare tends to overshadow or even consume the values offered by foreign reproductions. John Barton’s (of the Royal Shakespeare Company) opinion that Shakespeare’s value is embedded in his text underscores the 10 Chin, Daryl, “Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Pluralism”. In Marrance, Bonnie and Dasgupta, Gautam (eds), Interculturalism and Performance, (New York: PAJ Publications, 1991), Pg 94. 10 importance audiences and performers place on Shakespeare’s text as a source that not only directs performances but also acts as a means to understand them: the clues in the text are much richer and more numerous than at first appears. […] If the textual points are ignored, then it’s pretty certain that Shakespeare’s intentions will be ignored also or at least twisted…Shakespeare is his text. So if you want to do him justice, you have to look for and follow the clues he offers.11 The tendency for global audiences to use Shakespeare as a (or the only) point of reference to understanding onstage action in intercultural performances is amplified, especially when the accessibility to familiar performance styles, traditions, common history or language is reduced. In this way, Shakespeare becomes the cultural touchstone, and our familiarity with his work becomes a language “we all understand”.12 This elevated view of Shakespeare as a “cultural touchstone” and taken-for-granted assumptions of Shakespeare’s universality is particularly counterproductive when considering intercultural Shakespeare, as Shakespeare gets firmly positioned as the central motivation for such (inter)cultural productions globally, whereas the value and contributions of Asian reproductions to Shakespearean studies become underrated. Instead, we need to reassess the value of Asian Shakespeare as a means to approach and think about Shakespeare differently. As John Russell Brown suggests, Shakespeare, when experienced in foreign circumstances and alternative cultural environments, “can bring in new sightings of the imaginative vision that 11 12 Barton, John, Playing Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1984), Pg 167-168. Sanders, Julie, Adaptation and Appropriation, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), Pg 52. 11 created the plays, and new ways in which we can call them our own.”13 Thus, translating Shakespeare’s plays to another language and context, changes how we engage with the text in performance, and alters our perception of the text as it brings the performance text closer to the political and social consciousness of present-day audiences since the translations are usually aligned to contemporary expressions and contexts which include topical significance. Besides this, Shakespeare plays in a foreign language, as Brown suggests, tend to be more political and polemical partly because directors seem to emphasize their chosen political interpretation without the use of Shakespeare’s language but with the help of visual signs.14 Likewise in New Sites for Shakespeare, as a result of his travels to Asia, Brown proposes an alternative way of approaching Shakespeare via Asian performance forms – a non-English way, where Shakespeare’s text can be understood in a foreign language and other forms of performance.15 Though it is valuable to acknowledge the importance of non-verbal representations of Shakespeare in Asian theatre as a means of understanding Shakespeare from a different perspective, the danger of generalizing and exoticizing Asian Shakespeare as a non-verbal/physically expressive form (that can release “Shakespeare” from his words) and defining Shakespeare through/as his language, is the reification of binary structures between East and West, performance and text. Brown’s praise of Asian performance practices and their performative potential to change how Shakespeare is presented, in this sense, can be regarded as a one-way cultural exchange as he neglects to recognize the changes Shakespeare has made to the culture that appropriates him. Nonetheless, Brown’s views on Asian theatre(s) as an alternative model to staging and relating to Shakespeare’s plays consolidates the 13 Brown, John Russell, “Foreign Shakespeare and English-speaking audiences”. In Kennedy, Dennis (ed), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Pg 25. 14 Ibid, Pg 26 -27. 15 Brown, John Russell, New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, The Audience, and Asia, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 12 awareness that the study of Asian performance forms is important to understanding the changes to traditional Shakespeare scholarship. In a similar way, Dennis Kennedy’s examination of Shakespeare’s proliferation across cultural boundaries in his essay, “Shakespeare without his language”, goes beyond thinking of Shakespeare as the transcendent humanist and emphasizes how the transference of Shakespeare’s texts to other foreign environments “require[s] not only linguistic translation but also cultural adaptation”16 to make Shakespeare performances relevant to specific and local audiences. Departing from Anglophone critics that commonly assume Shakespeare’s worldwide popularity is part of his comprehensive and universal appeal, Kennedy asserts that Shakespeare without his language on a foreign stage has led to vast changes to how Shakespeare is (re)conceptualized, (re)presented and staged, consequently redefining the meanings of his plays in the process. Though Kennedy focused mainly on Western Shakespeare productions (particularly European productions) to illustrate how cross-cultural, nonEnglish interpretations impact how one understands Shakespearean text(s), he more importantly encourages us to approach Shakespeare through means besides his original language or performance traditions, and thus provokes us to reconsider modern non-traditional Shakespearean performances through the frameworks of interculturalism. Despite Kennedy’s claim that “in the end Shakespeare doesn’t belong to any nation or anybody: Shakespeare is foreign to all of us”,17 Shakespeare’s global currency, cultural capital and international mobility is fueled by his status as the Bard 16 17 Kennedy, Introduction. Ibid. 13 of ‘great literature’ and continues to signify ‘Englishness’, cultural nationalism and high culture; and thus complicate ideologies of nationalism and cultural identity within the context of interculturalism. At the same time, it is also Shakespeare’s ‘Englishness’ and the history of exporting Shakespeare (the national icon of Britain) worldwide as part of colonialism and cultural imperialism that makes Shakespeare useful for intercultural practice as the appropriation of Shakespeare often serves as a counter-performance to contest and challenge Shakespeare’s cultural authority, and a means to establish and interrogate the status of contemporary cultural identities. Shakespeare’s long-term status as a symbol of cultural hierarchy and a benchmark for high art perpetuates a sense of difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and may very well prevail despite the growth of intercultural performances worldwide if we do not evaluate and question the political-cultural implications of performed interculturalism within Asian Shakespearean productions in Shakespearean studies.18 The boundaries of defining intercultural performance can sometimes be problematic, especially with the increase of touring productions and international collaborations. If labeled too loosely, the notion of intercultural performances can start to include any performance that simply has an international cast, transnational production crew, or are multicultural adaptations/ productions, that do not take into account the distinctive cultural interactivity and exchange(s) that can take place in intercultural performances. For instance, Julia Holledge and Joanne Tompkins characterize intercultural performances as “the meeting in the moment of performance of two or more cultural traditions, a temporary fusing of styles and/or techniques 18 Joughin, John J. (ed), Shakespeare and National Culture, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), Pg 273. 14 and/or cultures”;19 although this definition does give us an insight into the performative potential of intercultural performances, it can also be a description for most multicultural or multiracial production (where there is no real initiative to promote or produce cultural negotiations or cultural interactions). If this is the case, most Asian or non-western adaptations of Shakespeare could fall under this particular definition of intercultural performance. This loose definition of intercultural performance can also be mistaken as equivalent to postmodern eclecticism where unique cultural practices and cultural exchanges are neglected. The term intercultural, however, calls to mind a more dynamic relationship between cultures and performance forms, where intercultural Shakespearean productions can represent more than just any non-traditional version or variation of an original Shakespearean play by promoting the performative potential for creating alternative perspectives on cultural performance and traditions. The shortcoming of this definition is thus the failure to recognize the possibility of forming (rather than just the “temporary fusing of”) new and hybrid styles, techniques and identities that can materialize through the process of intercultural performance. Patrice Pavis offers 6 distinct varieties of theatrical interculturalism, 1) Intercultural theatre, 2) Multicultural theatre, 3) Cultural Collage, 4) Syncretic theatre, 5) post-colonial theatre and 6) The “Theatre of the Fourth World”, that are characterized and distinguished by the different forms of cultural interactions and exchanges. To Pavis, multicultural theatre refers to the “cross-influence between various ethnic or linguistic groups in multicultural societies” which has been “the source of performances utilizing several languages and performing for a bi- or 19 Holledge, Julia and Tompkins, Joanne, Women’s Intercultural Performance, (London: Routledge, 2000). In Worthen, W.B, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Pg 127. 15 multicultural public”, and is set apart from intercultural theater as the cross-cultural staging in multicultural theatre borrows various cultural signs without there being a direct relationship or coexistence between the cited cultural sources.20 As distinct from multicultural theatre, Pavis asserts that intercultural theatre creates hybrid forms that draw upon “a more or less conscious and voluntary mixing of performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas”, where the hybridization process often makes the original forms no longer readily distinguished.21 While Pavis’s definition of intercultural theatre seems more specific, his opinions on hybridity can be somewhat limiting, as performance hybridity may not (and perhaps should not) always eliminate the original form. Should performances that fuse and mix performance traditions and genres without completely erasing the source form be disregarded as legitimate intercultural performances or do they immediately get categorized under multicultural theatre? Ong Ken Seng’s Desdemona which re-conceptualizes Shakespeare’s Othello from a female perspective, challenges Pavis’s notions on hybridity, and expands the boundaries of what can be regarded as intercultural performaces. This international production deconstructs and reconstructs the original text through the use of contemporary media and mediums (i.e. video recording, live-feeds, and incorporated performance art), languages and indigenous Asian art forms. Ong’s Desdemona produces a complex visual spectacle that dismantles Othello and removes the traditional performances forms from their cultural contexts, but still manages to retain links to both the original text and the adapted Asian source cultures. This production not only demonstrates how intercultural performances can preserve the distinctiveness of the performance traditions used, but 20 Pavis, Patrice (ed), The Intercultural Performance Reader, (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), Pg 8. 21 Ibid. 16 at the same time shows how intercultural meaning can arise through discordance. Even though it is beneficial to consider intercultural theatre as a means to create new hybrid forms of performance styles and genres, it is important not to perceive hybridization in intercultural theatre only as a harmonious jointing of separate performance traditions and cultures. Pavis’s definition of hybridization which tends to be based on Western practices and intercultural models of “universality”, does not take into consideration the notion that hybridization can stem from cultural differences. It is through this form of hybridity based on diversity, as Homi K. Bhabha suggests, that cultural meaning can become plural and complex, as “the aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the ‘other’ that resists totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding-to does not add-up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification”.22 In view of that, hybridization in performance practice should not simply be regarded as a force which only creates new forms that have no links to the original or the past. On the contrary, intercultural Shakespeare performances always refer to a point of time or origin, as Shakespeare through intercultural reworking(s) is always made to signal at history, or what has come before, and intercultural Shakespeare performances more often than not signal at the present-ness of a new cultural interpretation. Following Pavis’s definition of hybridization, “Shakespeare” in intercultural Shakespeare performances is immediately cancelled as a (re)source for cultural reproduction, and traditional Asian art forms may also run the risk of simply becoming aesthetic markers of culture since their historical, geographical and cultural significance might 22 Bhabha, Homi K., “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”. In Bhabha,Homi K. (ed), Nation and Narration, (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), Pg 312. 17 get erased. While hybridization is an important concept when discussing interculturalism in theatre, Pavis’s definition proves inadequate when understanding cultural processes and exchanges in intercultural Shakespeare performances. Another weakness of this assessment of interculturalism in performance is also the failure to see the process of creating the performance and the actual experience of the live performance as an essential part of the intercultural negotiation between cultures. The final product therefore should not be the only way one can assess the intercultural-ness of a performance, instead one should also take into account the processes that take place between the director, designers and performers when conceiving the performance, and the spectator and the performance during the live event. The background of the creators undoubtedly effects the interaction of cultures while creating the performance and during the live performance. Additionally, the positionality of the spectator also plays an important part in determining the levels of intercultural exchange within intercultural theatre. This does not mean however, that there are no forms of criteria to comprehend and evaluate (inter)cultural collaborations and that “anything goes”. As Bharucha cautions, “we may need to develop in this regard a respect for imperfection in our shaping and viewing of inter/multi-cultural collaborations, which should not be equated with the valorization of half-knowledge that so often passes as ‘expertise’ among the aficionados of ‘other’ cultures”.23 Instead, what this calls for is for us to recognize that the complicatedness of negotiating between varying cultural frames and the difficulties in establishing a clear-cut paradigm of understanding the intercultural is an essential part in furthering research on interculturalism and intercultural research. 23 Ibid, Pg 41. 18 Developing on Pavis’s terminology, Richard Schechner offers a more welldefined description of ‘intercultural’ and refers to intercultural performances as interactions “between or among two or more cultures”. To Schechner, intercultural performances may also “emphasize what connects or is shared or what separates or is unique to each other”. 24 He further classifies intercultural performances in two categories separated by different forms of cultural interactions: integrative and disruptive. Integrative intercultural performances fall under the umbrella of hybrid performances that are based on the assumption that people from different cultures can work together to produce “hybrids that are whole and unified” based on reciprocity where no one culture or performance genre consumes or overwhelms the other.25 This form of intercultural performances involves the negotiation between various cultures resulting in the formation of new meaning(s) and aesthetics, as cultural practices and ideas are re-evaluated, re-interpreted and reconfigured. This framework when studying intercultural Shakespeare is particularly useful as Asian Shakespeare performances can be placed alongside Shakespeare, and seen as a driving force that can enable the expansion of Shakespeare as a global cultural field. On the other hand, Schechner asserts that not all intercultural performances present utopian ideals and aim for integration, and they may instead expose the complexities and possibilities of performances that move beyond national, cultural and artistic borders by highlighting problems like power relations or cultural misappropriations in intercultural performances. Following this description, the use of Shakespeare in intercultural performances can play a vital part in revealing often ignored issues concerning the tensions, hidden agendas and inequalities of intercultural exchange and international collaborations. 24 25 Schechner, Pg 263. Ibid, Pg 304 -310. 19 Schechner also underscores a need to study and approach interculturalism with caution as he addresses the complicated relationship between art, aesthetics, tradition and culture during the process of thinking about and conceptualizing intercultural performances, emphasizing how this process is not a “one-way street”.26 In the essay “After Appropriation”, Craig Latrell likewise calls for a new brand of interculturalism that does not view “intercultural transfer” or “artistic borrowing” as something done “by” the West “to” other cultures. Latrell suggests that intercultural borrowing is not just a one-way process and that non-western cultures should not be regarded as passive viewers and receivers but active manipulators of these foreign images.27 Although it is useful to foreground the position of non-western cultures as equal opportunity players in the global marketplace (especially when thinking about Shakespeare and Asian adaptation/ appropriation), one must be careful not to pit the West against the East, thereby reinforcing artificial dichotomies and reductive modes of thinking that are counterproductive to intercultural studies. By looking at the terms ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ through monolithic frames of cultural references, one inadvertently positions them as oppositions where the former represents all that is politically and culturally desirable and the latter as evil and anathema to the welfare of the nation.28 This mode of cultural essentialism inadvertently negates the distinctiveness and divergence of various types of Asian and Western performance traditions and arts forms, and ignores internal contradictions prevalent in each performance culture and cultural history. Asian art forms when analyzed through lenses tainted by Orientalist fantasies can be simply reduced to represent the physical, musical, ritualistic, and spiritual, in essence, all things non-verbal. One must also be cautious when engaging in intercultural research not to assume that Western and 26 Ibid, Pg 302. Latrell, Craig, “After Appropriation”. TDR: The Drama Review, 44(2), Winter 2000, Pg 44-47. 28 Lo, Pg 28. 27 20 Asian perspectives are reversible and symmetrical to each other, as cultural specificities, local histories, and performance traditions all play a significant role in the differing processes of intercultural exchange, reciprocity or resistance within intercultural theatre. 29 This brief look at the main ideas on intercultural theatre highlights not only the difficulty in defining and understanding the term ‘intercultural’, but also calls attention to the complexities of applying and practicing interculturalism in performance. In addition, we need to start differentiating between different forms and types of (intercultural) performance styles, traditions and cultures and maintain a sense of locale/and the local, so as to prevent intercultural Shakespeare performances from becoming haphazardly regarded as a unified representation of all foreign adaptations of contemporary Shakespeare worldwide. In spite of this, research on regional and local Asian Shakespeares should not just provide research material of isolated relevance, but should be able to promote comparative research and interconnectivity between diverse Asian Shakespeare performances as well as other forms of intercultural performances worldwide. Though ‘intercultural’ is a much contested term, it is its unstable nomenclature that affords us more room to explore current concerns regarding cultural identity, national exclusivity, ownership and autonomy, which seem to be unproblematic issues in the age of globalization. 29 Pavis, Pg 2. 21 1.2. Remembering Hamlet – The intercultural performativity and productivity of a Shakespearean text No Dane of flesh and blood has been written about so extensively as Hamlet. Shakespeare’s prince is certainly the best known representative of his nation. Innumerable glossaries and commentaries have grown round Hamlet, and he is one of the few literary heroes who live apart from the text, apart from theatre. His name means something even to those who have never seen or read Shakespeare’s play. Jan Kott30 It is these qualities as suggested by Jan Kott, which make Shakespeare’s Hamlet a suitable play for intercultural staging and a fitting intercultural subject. The prominence of Hamlet/ Hamlet worldwide ensures a ready and informed international audience. This is not only beneficial to ticket sales, but affords directors more freedom to diverge from the original script as audiences are familiar with Shakespeare’s texts. But more noteworthy, Hamlet as “representative of his nation” (both Danish and English), and the play’s representation of identity (or rather the struggles to represent Hamlet’s identity) and individualism allow Asian directors to use the iconic text and character to explore and challenge existing notions of (intercultural) identity. These issues pertaining to identity within the paradigms of interculturalism - the ‘local individual’ in a globalized world, the quandary to represent a balance of the traditional and the cosmopolitan, and the conception of a hybridized self, are key focal points addressed by the three productions studied in chapter three. The exploration and construction of an intercultural identity through the re-presentation of Hamlet in Asian Shakespeare performances seem like an apposite 30 Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1964), Pg58. 22 fit as Hamlet not only typifies the modern subject, but embodies the complicatedness of establishing a stable (intercultural) subject. Hamlet presents itself as a suitable text to discuss and discover the possibilities of the performance of identity as it is self-reflexive of the nature and performativity of roles and role-playing, and begs us to look within the performance of the text for answers, for truly “the play’s the thing. Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.” [2.2.603-605] This notion of performance and performativity in Hamlet is further heightened by Hamlet’s Mousetrap. Hamlet’s play has become an interesting point of departure for many intercultural performances as its use of the archaic device of the dumb show with its unspoken action pushes the focus away from Shakespeare’s language and redirects attention to the visual. Here, the dumb show is made to represent and uncover nature through images and not words, as “the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as t’were the mirror up to nature” [3.2.20-2].31 Paradoxically, performance in Hamlet is made to become the driving force that reveals reality, rather than represents it. This is underscored by Shakespeare’s use of two different modes of performance style which tries to differentiate between performance and (performed) reality. As Howard Felperin explains, Hamlet’s call “to hold as t’were the mirror to nature” accentuates two distinct notions of drama, each possessing a long tradition and each being antagonistic to the other in objectives and methods.32 The first form of drama is medieval and Tudor allegorical theatre, which is an older dramatic mode Hamlet engages with in the play-within-a-play scene. This form associates drama with theology and moral 31 Readings, Bill, “Hamlet’s Thing”. In Burnett, Mark Thronton and Manning, John (eds), New Essays on Hamlet, (New York: AMS Press, 1994), Pg 58. 32 Felperin, Howard, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy, (Princeton, New York: Princeton University Press, 1977), Pg 45 -47. 23 philosophy and Hamlet’s Mousetrap represents a typical revenge action of the Tudor morality drama during the late 1580’s and 1590’s that had straightforward personifications of vice and virtue. The second form of drama is “the view of the play as lifelike illusion, and is by its very nature time-bound and localized, [which] associates drama with historiography”, and can be seen more or less as naturalistic theatre of classical Rome and renaissance Italy.33 The distinct archaic and stylized dramatic mode of The Mousetrap is largely contrasted with the more naturalistic style of performance in Hamlet, and the disparity between the two performance styles highlights two different kinds of “playing”. This distinction between styles and historical references is particularly interesting for intercultural Shakespearean productions. Hamlet’s example of using an old play, The Murder of Gonzago, into which he inserts a few lines of his own, opens up the possibilities for directors to follow likewise in this manner and add to Shakespeare’s original to reconstruct stories of their own. The Mousetrap not only allows directors to draw from their own traditional performance histories and forms to present their version of Shakespeare’s adaptation of an older theatrical form, but directors are also afforded the freedom (as they are not restricted by language at this point in the play) to represent ‘the image of a murder’ [3.2.233] in their own context and style giving it new (intercultural) meaning. Analogously, the abrupt interruption of Hamlet’s play by the demands for ‘Lights’ reminds us that The Mousetrap is eternally unfinished and thus still available for continual new interpretation. 33 Ibid, Pg 46. 24 James L. Calderwood points out in To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet, the world of Hamlet is one that is highly theatricalized.34 Besides the palpable self-reflexivity of The Mousetrap as a dramatic play-within-aplay device that draws attention to the illusions of performance as it reveals Claudius’s covert usurpation of his brother’s throne and propels Hamlet’s actions in the play, The Mousetrap also reinforces the significance of performance and performers as “brief chronicles of the time” [2.2.464], that not only tell the stories of our times but can be used as tools to shape the future. The use of performance as a mirror by Hamlet to reflect reality also begs the question – whose reality is reflected in the mirror? Is Hamlet about Shakespeare’s own contemporary society, or is it a play about feudal Denmark, or about present day society (and again, whose society)? This quality of the play as Hanna Scolnicov asserts, makes the play “highly subjective and very much reader- or spectator-oriented”.35 The subjective characteristic of the play allows greater mobility to other cultures, as directors can use Hamlet to address contemporary issues relevant to their audiences, and more advantageously, use the text to reflect the current nature of intercultural performances. The life of Denmark created by Shakespeare is one full of theatricality and spectatorship, as unmasked in The Mousetrap, Claudius is portrayed as an inauthentic player-king, and Hamlet is obliged to play the role of a madman to seek his revenge. The Nunnery scene with Hamlet and Ophelia and the Sword-fighting duel between Hamlet and Laertes are examples of various performances within the play meant for 34 Calderwood, James L, To Be And Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), P167 – 170. 35 Scolnicov, Hanna, “Mimesis, mirror, double”. In Scolnicov, Hanna and Holland, Peter (eds), The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Pg 95. 25 an audience.36 The court thus becomes a stage and an auditorium where identities are simultaneously performed and created. The language in Hamlet further highlights the emphasis placed on the significance of performance and theatricalization in the play, as theatrical terms like “act”, “show”, “play”, “audience”, “perform”, force contemporary audiences to address the relationship between performance and the construct of identity and the dramatic world one sees on stage. This concept of performed identity is particularly interesting when thinking about the role of intercultural theatre as a medium and mode to discuss and represent various identities on a single stage. These instances, as Calderwood suggests, serve as Brechtian alienation devices that break “our illusion of Danish reality and cut the cord of our imaginative life there”.37 The discordance between reality and illusion within Hamlet obliges audiences to separate the act of performance on multiple levels. On a theatrical level, audiences are made to engage with the live performance through other frames besides Shakespeare’s original text, and this can lead to the development of original new meaning that arises from transporting Hamlet to a different cultural and historical context. Additionally, the performative act of role-playing in Hamlet also forces the audience to question the purpose and importance of performance in regards to the reproduction of cultural identities, as it is through the reinterpretation and recontextualization of Hamlet’s subjectivity and the different roles he plays that contemporary Asian directors and actors can represent the complexities of defining a modern (intercultural) identity. As Derrida posits, “the absence of the transcendental 36 37 Calderwood, Pg 167 – 170. Ibid, Pg 167. 26 signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely”.38 Since Shakespeare is not taken as the only source for meaning-making, the understanding of a performance is no longer just dictated by Shakespeare (and his language) but hinges on other signs and points of references these intercultural performances allude to. For intercultural performances on a meta-theatrical level, the fractured relationship between signifier and signified allows new opportunities to create other alternative meaning(s) that pertains to the larger idea of Shakespeare and Asia, as Shakespeare is no longer positioned as/at the center. This refusal to determine stable identities and identification in Hamlet then opens the field of interpretation and variation to encompass endless possibilities. As audience understanding is not solely determined by the text but also dependent on the performance, the value of performance studies as a means of relating to contemporary Shakespeare is amplified. Through Hamlet’s structure, style, and textual ambiguity, intercultural Shakespeare productions are given the space to interrogate and examine issues regarding the performance of identity and the efficacy of theatre as a means to communicate changes to the concept of hybrid identities. Although the play does provide a platform suitable for intercultural exchanges, the intercultural Shakespeare performances analyzed should not be considered simply as adaptations of Hamlet in a foreign language. The Asian intercultural productions studied in the following chapters aim to establish how interactions with Shakespeare theatrically not only alter one’s understanding of the original text and traditional Shakespearean performances, but also Asian performance traditions and conventions. The overview of Shakespeare in Asia in chapter two will illustrate how the re- 38 Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Pg 280. 27 conceptualizing of Shakespeare in Asia during different historical, cultural and topical contexts has affected the use of the term ‘intercultural’. The re-examination of Shakespeare in Asia aims to contest and challenge existing views of Shakespeare’s cultural authority and universality, as the rewriting of Shakespeare into different Asian histories brings attention to how cultural ownership and legitimacy can be reasserted through intercultural performance. The research methodology of the A-S-IA project that proposes a performance-centered approach to studying and understanding intercultural Asian Shakespeare performances will also be elaborated in chapter two. A more detailed analysis of three Hamlet productions from Japan, China and Singapore will be examined in chapter three to demonstrate how the discourses of interculturality are continuously part of a nation’s historical, sociopolitical and cultural context, and how intercultural performances are used as a means to re-engage, reshape and remake those contexts and circumstances. The case studies used in chapter three will illustrate how interculturalism and identity are performed and re-constructed via these Asian re-productions, and how Hamlet has been made to embody and explore the potentials of conceptualizing and creating new intercultural identities. But more notably, the re-imagining of Shakespeare on the meta-theatrical level signals at the changing ways we think about modern Asian Shakespeare performances and how we approach intercultural Shakespearean studies and research. 28 Chapter Two: Asian Shakespeares – (Re)engaging History Through Intercultural Shakespeare Performances There is no single reason for or approach to Asian appropriations of Shakespeare. This chapter will show how the transference of Shakespeare to Asian nations like Japan, China, and Singapore are conditioned by historical, cultural, and political circumstances, and also influenced by different performance traditions, art forms and aesthetics. Rather than advocate Shakespeare’s universality, indigenous Shakespeare performances destabilize Shakespeare’s position as the central driving force in intercultural performances. The divergent Shakespearean re-presentations will also demonstrate how Shakespeare does not stand for or produce the same meanings everywhere. Thus, retracing the history of Asian Shakespeares is also a retracing of the history of a nation and its identity interacting with Shakespeare. The study of Shakespeare performances throughout different histories makes us aware that the term ‘cultural’ in interculturalism is the variable that affects the different kinds of cultural exchanges and interactions within Asian Shakespeare performances, but more significantly, shows us that interculturality is historical - a fiction that is always related to a culture’s past and one that affects contemporary intercultural discourse and practices. To speak of Shakespeare’s texts as historical utterances, Shakespeare must be studied “with and within series of ‘con-text’”.39 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme use “con-texts with a hyphen, to signify a break from the inequality of the usual text/context relationship. Con-texts are themselves texts and must be read with: they 39 Barker, Francis and Hulme, Peter, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest”. In White, R.S. (ed), The Tempest: Contemporary Critical Essays. (New York: Palgrave, 1999), Pg195. 29 do not simply make up a background.”40 In many ways, research carried out in A-S-IA, aims to bridge that gap between Shakespeare and native Shakespeares, by tracing Shakespeare’s mobility through the frames of cultural, social, topical, political, and historical contexts and references. A-S-I-A’s performance metadata provides empirical evidence necessary for formulating a methodology to analyze and study Asian intercultural Shakespeare performances so as to encourage comparative and collaborative research between differing Asian cultures and other intercultural Shakespeare performances worldwide. In contrast to area studies which isolate indigenous Shakespeares to their given locales, comparative research identifies the linkages between cultures and relocates local Shakespeares within a global context. As Kennedy asserts, “if we are to make the study and performance of Shakespeare fully contemporary and fully international we must worry less about his textual meaning and more about his prodigious appropriation (or misappropriation) in a global context […] His work has become the closest thing we have to a common cultural inheritance, but it is an inheritance that is thoroughly redefined by each culture that receives it.”41 The close re-examination of the application of Shakespeare to various cultural and historical contexts thus reassesses the ways in which Asian Shakespeare performances have reshaped, reconfigured and re-performed context(s), and Asia’s relationship with text (Shakespeare). Before I begin elaborating on A-S-I-A, it is necessary to address my individual positionality. As metadata editor, I have access to a multitude of perspectives and materials from Shakespearean scholars, practitioners, and researchers, and the experience of watching, collecting and editing various Asian Shakespeare 40 41 Ibid, Pg 236. Kennedy, Pg 301. 30 performances and metadata materials has alerted me that my cultural position at times locates me as an insider to certain performances (due to language and knowledge), but more often than not, I am reminded that I am still an outsider to other forms of Asian Shakespeares (also due to language and knowledge). Through the editing process of refining metadata information, I have come to realize that it is the insider/outsider position of each researcher that helps to inculcate an intercultural research perspective on the metadata, as how a Singaporean watches Ninagawa, is very different from how a Japanese might interpret his work. So what may appear to be symbolic or significant to me may not produce the same meaning(s) to a native researcher/ audience, and it is this difference in reception and interpretation that facilitates intercultural research in A-S-I-A. Being Asian, therefore, does not give one automatic membership to an Asian collective (if there even is one), and foregrounds the role of spectatorship and the importance of reflexivity in engaging with intercultural theatre, as the cultural subjectivity of audiences become mediating factors that influence the interpretative and analytical perspective of laymen and scholars alike. Positionality as Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan suggests, not only affects reception, but also the nature of representation, as “the condition of the bodies of actors, the styles of costuming and mise-en-scene, the pre-existence of indigenous forms, the habits and social circumstances of the audience, and cost of attending a presentation, the position of theatre in the larger culture”,42 become important factors that shape the way we define and understand Shakespeare. The theorizing of Shakespeare’s history in Asia and Asia’s impact on Shakespeare provides one with the suitable frameworks to better understand the 42 Kennedy, Dennis and Yong, Li Lan (eds), Shakespeare in Asia, (Cambridge University Press, to be published in 2010), Pg 25 -26. 31 dynamic relationship between Shakespeare and Asia, and establishes Asian Shakespeare performance as a critical paradigm to examine the developments and limitations of existing intercultural Shakespeare studies. As Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia assert, local Shakespeare performances should not just be regarded as “derivations, excisions, or manipulations, but as forms of continuation and congruence” that inform the discipline of traditional Shakespeare scholarship.43 The changing responses to Shakespeare in Asia, and the negotiations between Shakespeare and divergent Asian cultures then draws attention to the performativity of both Shakespeare and the construction of (inter)cultural identity. Although Pavis raised certain valuable questions about the need to define culture through “a sociological approach, better grounded in history and ideological context”,44 his theories often focus on his semiotic approach to intercultural theatre, as he chooses to “put those contradictions in brackets for a moment”.45 Pavis has always been aware of the political and economic influence in contemporary intercultural theatre, and stresses the destructive and manipulative effects economics and politics have on cultural exchanges. However his approval of contemporary Western intercultural theatre’s desire for “universality” neglects to address deeper issues surrounding cultural politics.46 It is important not to take interculturality to mean universality (especially in the case of Asian Shakespeare performance), as it assumes cultural interactions and exchanges to be natural processes in intercultural theatre, particularly in the global age. Contrarily, Shakespeare’s integration into Asia has not always been harmonious or a testament of Shakespeare’s universal appeal, instead, Shakespeare appropriations 43 Dionne and Kapadia (eds), Pg 4. Pavis, Patrice, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Trans. Loren Kruger. (London: Routledge, 1992), Pg 12. 45 Pavis, Pg 212. 46 Tian, Min, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre. (Hong Kong University Press, 2008), Pg 4. 44 32 are often used as apparatuses for transgression and resistance, where Shakespeare’s cultural and literary authority is challenged through performance. As Kennedy remarks, Shakespeare’s appearance in most Asian (and African) environments is often led by imperialist notions as Shakespeare performances in their original language often connoted Britain’s linguistic and cultural superiority. This is most apparent in Shakespeare performances in India, “where the insertion of the Shakespearean master text into native life paralleled the insertion of the power of the master race”. 47 Thus, Shakespeare becomes a site of contestation for those who want to express and construct their own identity by means of reclaiming or repossessing the symbol of English identity, bourgeois culture and the British rule.48 In order to provide a counter-discourse of intercultural theatre (which is mostly dominated by theories based on Western intercultural theatre), this retrospective of Asian Shakespeares will interrogate the reasons for rewriting Shakespeare into Asian histories and cultures, and address the theoretical and theatrical implications of these cultural re-productions. As what may initially appear to be natural processes of transporting Shakespeare to a foreign stage become means to subvert, reinforce and challenge cultural hegemony and autonomy. As the metadata on contemporary Asian Shakespeare performances in A-S-IA is not a product of a particular history but a set of responses from researchers included in and excluded from that history, the approach to understanding and reengaging with history and Asian Shakespeare performance in A-S-I-A is often interactive and intercultural. In short, A-S-I-A allows us to think about what “Shakespeare” stood for in the past and what “global Shakespeare” stands for now 47 48 Kennedy (ed), Pg 291. Dionne and Kapadia (eds), Pg 2 - 3. 33 from a critical distance. The metadata research requires me to re-conceptualize Shakespeare not only within the contexts of Asia, but also involves thinking about how Asian Shakespeare is interconnected to other parts of the world. This is demonstrated by the metadata research template seen below: Figure 1 This diagram shows the four main categories (i.e. Art/ Forms, Reception, Points of Reference and Production) of the performance’s discursive field (i.e. information it contains/ relates to). These categories are used to formulate the metadata template, and the correlation between the four different categories illustrates the importance of developing a critical framework to relate internal and external factors of a live performance to Shakespeare.49 Here, the performance is placed at the center and the conditions surrounding a performance become key areas of research in 49 This diagram and approach to studying Asian Shakespeare performance was first formulated by Dr Yong Li Lan in 2007. 34 A-S-I-A. The art, the artist, the audience, and the critic become part of an elaborate web of interconnectivity and intertextuality that is responsible for the production and reception of a performance. Interestingly, it is the problems faced in the initial stages of the metadata research that have alerted me to the deficiencies and the growing needs of this field, as the entries of most of the research information belonging to the category – Art / Forms, instead of identifying the intercultural engagement between the different art forms and Shakespeare’s text, consisted mainly of descriptions of the particular art forms used in the performance. Though it is important to acknowledge the various Asian performance forms and styles being employed, a listing alone still neglects to inform us about the intercultural exchanges, interactions and negotiations that take place between Asian performance practices and cultures and Shakespeare onstage, nor does it tell us more about the distinctive usage of art forms in Asian Shakespeare performances. As Rustom Bharucha posits, “there are different Asias and different Shakespeares, arguably foreign to each other, even as they seem to be internalized and mutually understood”50, and the only way to understand the particularities and differences of cultural meanings and performance forms is to study them within a historical and cultural context. In many ways, “Asia”, like Shakespeare, is foreign to all of us, and it is only through the examination of practiced interculturality within a performance that a comparative perspective can develop not only across performances belonging to different cultures, but also between performances in the same locality. The distinctive 50 Bharucha, Rustom, “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization”. Theatre Journal (Assn for Theatre in Higher Education) (Baltimore, MD) (56:1) (Mar 2004), Pg 3. 35 usage of one particular art form like Kabuki in one Japanese Shakespeare performance, for instance, may differ from how Kabuki is mobilized in another performance, and the research done in A-S-I-A has emphasized these particularities and internal contradictions existing within a single performance tradition. This aspect of A-S-I-A is crucial to the development of the discursive field of intercultural Shakespeare, as the different usages of art forms or references intertextualized by a performance can be regarded as intercultural strategies of engaging with not only Shakespeare but also its own history. Asian Shakespeare is therefore not a unified and stable entity that can be studied neatly within a single culture, and has to be understood with the awareness that the dynamics between Asia and Shakespeare are changing with history. An analysis of art forms and performance styles and how they are utilized differently in various performances thus documents the varying kinds and degrees of intercultural interactions and exchanges in Asian Shakespeare performance. But more significantly, the divergent cultural re-productions of Shakespeare throughout history demonstrates the need to redefine Shakespeare performances in the context of the nation and its identity, as the shifting nature of the latter determines the production, reception and dissemination of Shakespeare in Asia. The most significant and probably the most difficult question to answer in this chapter is - How do we make sense of history interculturally? And in turn, what does the historicizing of Shakespeare’s positioning and repositioning in Asia do to our understanding and conceptualizing of intercultural Shakespeare? 2.1. Shakespeare in translation – Changing cultural representations from Japanese tradition to Japan’s modernization. For countries like Japan, the highest producers of Asian Shakespeare to date, Shakespeare’s integration into Japanese society has always been a process determined 36 by Japanese identity and performative modes. As early as the 1860s, Japanese newspapers and periodicals which were part of Japan’s modernization process became a means of spreading Shakespeare’s stories to a public hungry for Western culture.51 While most of these translations were based loosely on Shakespearean plots, the move to assimilate Shakespeare into Japanese society through literature and translations can be regarded as an early form of cultural negotiation between the differences of the East and the West, as Japanese translators and writers attempted to incorporate traditional literary and cultural elements into Shakespeare’s plays so as to make Shakespeare relevant to the Japanese public. Shoyo (Yuzo) Tsubouchi, the first to translate Shakespeare’s plays fully, translated Julius Caesar in 1884, and titled it, Shizaru Zidan: Jiyu no Tachi Nagori no Kireaji (Caesar’s Strange Tale: Residual Sharpness of the Sword of Freedom).52 Tsubouchi’s translation tried to make Shakespeare more relatable to the Japanese reading public by translating Julius Caesar to the traditional Joruri (ballad drama) style which is a Japanese native metric form of alternating five-and-seven-syllable verses used in tanka, a thirty-one-syllable ode. Tsubouchi even saw the need to add his own sentences to the original in order to explain and emphasize the plot and the psychology of the characters: If people administer the affairs of state freely, a close friendship will be established among the people. If the people are friendly to each other, the nation will be at peace. But if a self-centered man arrogates power to himself, the country will soon be thrown into chaos. This is a valuable lesson. In the Roman Empire, however, the republican government has started to decline 51 Kawachi, Yoshiko, “Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Japan”. In Courtney, Krystyna Kujawinska and Mercer, John M. (ed), The Globalization of Shakespeare In The Nineteeth Century. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), Pg 69 – 73. 52 Ibid, Pg 71. 37 because an evil politician seeks his own interests. Therefore, there is no end to the conflict in the country. 53 Tsubouchi’s translation is telling of his intentions to emphasize nationalistic sentiments, as he uses Shakespeare’s Roman play to highlight the precariousness of freedom and peace in Japan while the country progressed rapidly towards modernization. Differently, many contemporary Japanese Shakespeares tend to use translations that remain rather faithful to Shakespeare’s original plays, and the changes we are seeing currently from directors like Ninagawa and theatre companies like Ryutopia pertain more to the onstage visual interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays. This is a significant change to approaching Shakespeare’s texts as the performance now becomes a means to translate the world Shakespeare has imagined, and his poetry/ imagery to a performative and visual context. This adds a different value to Shakespeare’s texts, as the visual representation/ interpretation of his plays releases Shakespeare from the logocentric staging of western Shakespeare, and offers Shakespeare in a foreign language – one that is visual, cultural, and speaks of new meanings. Though translations of Shakespeare’s plays were widely accepted and popular in the mid-19th Century, the same cannot be said for Shakespeare’s appearance in Japan’s traditional theatre. The earlier cultural interactions between Kabuki and Shakespeare during the Meiji period reduced Shakespeare to a mere form of narrative and reference, as the complete translation of Shakespeare’s plays denied the actors the 53 Tsubouchi, Shoyo, Shizaru Kidan, Jiyu no Tachi Nagori no Kireaji ( Caesar’s Strange Tale: Residual Sharpness of the Sword of Freedom, (Tokyo: Toyokan, 1884). Ibid, Pg 73. 38 space for improvisation that was essential to their performance.54 Shakespeare had to culturally disappear in order to participate in the Kabuki “world”. This could be explained by the growing sense of a conservative and nationalistic outlook during this epoch.55 The revival of nationalistic sentiments could mean the increase in need for traditional art forms to be preserved and encouraged. For instance, Zeni, an early Kabuki adaptation of the Merchant of Venice (1885), set in the Edo era, adopted a nationalistic attitude as the characters were given Japanese names, and the play was turned into a parable of the western economy that Meiji Japan was trying to accommodate. Noh also resisted adapting Shakespeare to a large extent, as many traditional dramatists contested that Noh would no longer be regarded as Noh if performances did not meet its stylistic needs, and retain its traditional song, dance and tripartite-role structure (i.e. warrior, old person, woman). These examples of Japanese Shakespeare illustrate how past cultural exchanges were affected and limited by the cultural, political, and economic influences of a particular time. The need for modernization or an increase of nationalistic attitudes greatly impacted the artistic and cultural approaches to Shakespeare. Interestingly, contemporary Noh and Kabuki productions of Shakespeare in Japan signal a new direction for Japanese Shakespeare. Though Noh and Shakespeare used to be regarded as incompatible performance styles, current productions of Japanese Shakespeare (like those of Ninagawa and Tadashi Suzuki, which are usually seen abroad as part of the global festival circuit) often mix Noh, Kabuki and other traditional performance styles and aesthetics with Shakespeare. This perhaps indicates a new nationalistic movement that addresses the changes in contemporary Japan in 54 Ryuta, Minami, Carruthers, Ian, Gillies, John (Ed), Performing Shakespeare in Japan, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Pg 8 –9. 55 Taken from the website: http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2130.html 39 today’s globalized environment. Take for instance Ku Na’uka Theatre Company’s Othello (Noh Play Of Spirit Othello) directed by Miyagi Satoshi, which was staged both in Tokyo (2005), and was an invited production to the 8th National Theatre Festival, in New Delhi (2006).56 In this production, the structure of Othello was slightly altered to include a chorus and Desdemona’s spirit (a character adapted from a Haiku by Natsume Soseki, a Japanese novelist (1869 - 1916), who wrote about Othello’s killing of Desdemona - “A chrysanthemum whiter than snow I hesitate for a while, with the scissors”).57 This Japanese Othello encourages us to think about intercultural exchanges and negotiations differently, especially since this performance demonstrates how traditional Japanese art forms can be used alongside Shakespeare, without either source (i.e. the text or the performance) being adjusted too drastically to fit the other. This point may be elaborated through an extract from Ku Na’uka’s Othello’s Art/ Forms category: Plural (performance) Forms Noh Mugen-noh (fantasy Noh with two acts/ mixed with Ai Kyogen) Bunraku Used by Chorus “movers” - actors who move, and “speakers” - actors who chant the lines Kyogen scenes with Othello and Iago in Ai Kyogen Buyoh This performance draws from a multitude of traditional performance forms, like Noh, Bunraku (traditional puppet theatre), Kyogen (a comical form in Noh theater), and Buyoh (traditional Japanese dance form). In A-S-I-A, identification of the forms adopted is the first level of a performance’s use of art forms, and the second level of metadata information subsequently details the distinctive intercultural usage 56 Information on Ku Na’uka’s Othello is taken from metadata generated by the A-S-I-A project. This information is taken from the Ku Na’uka’s Othello metadata, which was compiled by Michiko Suematsu. 57 40 of the applied art form(s). The distinctive usage of performance forms at specific points of Othello, demonstrates how the conventions of Japanese performance traditions are used as an intercultural strategy that helps reconfigure Shakespeare’s play to fit a Japanese aesthetic and performative modes. Through the use of Mugennoh, for example, and the obvious addition of new text (i.e. “Nostalgic when we hear words from Venice” and “The shadow of the white sail appears far off of Cyprus. And I yearn for my Venice, my home.”), Othello becomes a fantasy tale retold from Desdemona’s spirit’s memory of her death, and the Venice that her spirit pines for and the Cyprus she is trapped in, become part of an imagined geography that simultaneously locates Shakespeare as the original, as the origins of his fictional world remains intact, but also reminds audiences that this is a memory remembered through a Japanese perspective. The Shingeki (New Drama) Movement is another example of how a performance style that was produced in response to a particular cultural context has been re-conceptualized to fit the needs of present-day directors and society, but in order to examine the changes made to this performance form and how it is made relevant today (elaborated in chapter 3), let us reexamine its past. The Shingeki Movement began in 1906 and was aimed at introducing modern realist theatre to Japan through the staging of translated modern western plays in their original western styles.58 To establish a modern theatre that was separate from the traditional theatre of Noh or Kabuki, Shingeki started to use Shakespeare to “enlighten the public”59 on the modern idea of realism, although the movement slowly shifted focus to socialist realism and preferred modern realist plays by Ibsen and Chekhov. Shingeki sprung 58 59 Ryuta, Carruthers, Gillies (eds), Pg 5 – 10. Ibid, Pg 4. 41 from Japan’s desire to westernize itself, in its attempts at inverse colonialism.60 The Shakespearean adaptations of this time saw little changes to Shakespeare’s plot as these productions paid close attention to textual authenticity, with the exception of translation. When presenting Shakespeare in translation, Shingeki companies tried their best to imitate English and other European examples of performance. The imitation of Western counterparts in style and appearance (e.g. wearing Renaissancestyle outfits, dying one’s hair blond or red, and even the use of artificial noses) was not only limited to the Japanese stage but was also mirrored by its society. According to Akihiko Senda, Shingeki in this sense “epitomized the ethos of the age when the whole nation was making strenuous efforts to overtake advanced Western nations.”61 The socio-political situation of Japan at that time influenced the ways in which Shakespeare was adapted, and for the most part, Shingeki presented productions that paled in comparison to the European theatre they took as their model (at least till the 1960s). This form of theatrical imitation departed from the earlier transports of Shakespeare to Japan, as more emphasis was placed on integrating Western culture into Japanese society and theatre, rather than on maintaining traditional art forms. By the late 1960s, Japan had begun to surpass West Germany in gross national product and became second only to the United States in the global market.62 The success of the Japanese economy motivated greater confidence in Japanese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, and prompted a changed attitude towards following the West. The flipside to this success was a stricter control of Japanese society. This created a lot of discontent amongst the youths who sought liberation through violent 60 Kennedy and Yong (eds), Pg 295. Senda, Akihiko, “The rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: from the 1960s to the 1990s”. In Sasayama, Takashi , Mulruyne, J.R, Shewring, Margaret, Shakespeare and the Japanese stage (ed), (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Pg 17. 62 Ibid. 61 42 protests and anti-Establishment activities. It was during this turbulent period in Japan’s history that avant-garde performance groups started forming. These unconventional troupes that consisted of young theatre professionals criticized Shingeki and aimed to produce “a new Japanese theatre fit for their age”.63 This was known as the Shogekijo Undo (the Little Theatre Movement), whose objective was to revive Japanese identity in contemporary theatre and create theatre that was characteristically Japanese. Shogekijo Undo rejected the Eurocentric and imitative standards of Shingeki, and opted for a performance style that was more relevant to Japanese culture at that time.64 This movement 1) was opposed to the modern idea of realism and the fourth-wall that divided audiences and the proscenium stage, 2) challenged the supremacy of the dramatic text and 3) re-evaluated traditional Japanese theatre forms and popular entertainment.65 Though Shakespeare was not employed much initially, practitioners later turned to Shakespeare as a resource to explore their own creativity by reinventing Shakespeare in the 1980s and 1990s once the original motivations of the Little Theatre Movement started to waver.66 This changed outlook towards Japanese theatre marked the departure from Western mimicry and the beginning of intercultural attempts in Japanese performance. Though Japanese Shakespeare started to move away from earlier imitations of western performances of Shakespeare, it is undeniable that the exposure to other methods of staging Shakespeare by touring groups from the West and an increase in translation changed the perception that authentic Shakespeare could only be staged in 63 Ibid. Kennedy, Dennis, Looking At Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance. (Cambridge University Press: 1993), Pg 314. 65 Ryuta, Carruthers, Gillies (eds), Pg 5 . 66 This movement has produced prominent Japanese theatre practitioners like Suzuki Tadashi, Ninagawa Yukio and Noda Hideki. 64 43 a fixed way. Imported productions like Trevor Nunn’s The Winter’s Tale, and Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1970s altered the way Shakespeare was approached in Japan.67 These productions showed the Japanese how Shakespeare could be performed without adhering to orthodox Western models, and provided them the freedom to interpret Shakespeare from a Japanese perspective. This could be the point where one-way cultural exchange (as seen in early Kabuki Shakespeare or Western-style adaptations) began to give way to interactive intercultural exchange. For instance, Peter Brook’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a white ‘empty space’ encouraged Ninagawa to take on a more experimental approach to Shakespeare. Brook’s influence on Ninagawa’s approaches to Shakespeare is evident in his response: Brook’s directorial tour de force in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream exercised a decisive influence upon my career as director. I wondered, with astonishment, if one could put on Shakespeare as freely as this – as freely as our contemporary plays. I felt released to realize that I could do anything I liked in staging Shakespeare.68 In contrast to Brook however, Ninagawa paid close attention to elaborate visual effects on stage, and incorporated recognizable Japanese elements into his performances. One of his famed Shakespeare productions was his 1978 production of Hamlet, where he adapted elements of Japan’s Dolls’ Festival to the play-within-theplay scene.69 In this production, Ninagawa used the Festival’s tradition of displaying a set of dolls representing the Emperor, the Empress, Ministers, Court ladies and others on red carpeted, tiered platforms, as a dramatic device on stage. Ninagawa replaced 67 Sasayama, Mulruyne, Shewring (eds), Pg 20. Ibid, Pg 21. 69 Ibid, Pg 22. 68 44 the inanimate dolls with live actors and actresses who were positioned on large tiers of the platform on stage to produce a beautiful tableau that made visual references to the old aristocratic society of Japan. Ninagawa’s attempt to integrate Shakespeare’s plays to a Japanese context, yet his close observance to the fidelity to the original play (he hardly changes the names of characters nor the locations in the play), demonstrates the efficacy of an intercultural approach to Japanese Shakespeare as Shakespeare is made familiar to local audiences without alienating global audiences. Ninagawa’s bold appropriation of Shakespeare exemplifies a shift in attitude towards Shakespeare. For instance, Ninagawa’s adherence to textual fidelity does not support notions of Shakespeare’s cultural superiority. On the contrary, Ninagawa’s eclectic approach to creating a Shakespeare performance that is both “Japanese” and “Shakespeare” reveals his ability to assert his own authority without fully dismantling Shakespeare’s. Kennedy terms Ninagawa’s intercultural approach, Shakespearean occidentialism - “a declaration of interest from an outsider who feels at liberty to appropriate Europe the way that Europe has traditionally appropriated Japan”.70 For Kennedy, Ninagawa is an ideal director for intercultural Shakespeare as, “he has neither a life-long commitment to the dramatist like Brook nor the belief that Shakespeare can revitalize the world of theatre like Mnouchkine. For him Shakespeare is useful exotic material, not sacred writ”.71 Could this be Japan’s subtle way of repossessing Shakespeare? And could the opening of the Tokyo Globe in 1988 perhaps suggest how Japan was slowly turning the tables on Western culture? The opening of the Tokyo Globe in fact moved Japanese Shakespeare to new and uncharted territories, as Japanese audiences and practitioners could watch and work with British and other foreign productions and directors. It acted as a site for cross-cultural, 70 71 Kennedy, (1993), Pg 315. Ibid. 45 inter-Asian, intercultural communication. Its policy of inviting non-British productions “encouraged Japanese audiences to question the “authenticity” and “canonicity” of British Shakespeare performance, and paved the way for new developments”.72 It is perhaps the subsidized British theatre companies which staged unconventional “English” Shakespeare, like Cheek by Jowl’s all-male As You Like It (1992) and Shared Experience’s The Tempest (1996) which was powerfully physical, that questioned the traditional Japanese view of ‘authentic’ British Shakespeare performance.73 At the same time, other foreign Shakespeare productions, like The International Theatre Institute’s King Lear (1997), and Ong Keng Sen’s Lear (1997) that was funded by the Japan Foundation Asian Center, reinforced the value of staging Shakespeare without his language. These performances showcasing Shakespeare in translation displayed an alternative approach to interculturalism in a larger Asian context that reacted against Eurocentric interculturalism, and proved that there is no single way of staging Shakespeare in Asia.74 The Tokyo Globe also created a ‘Hamlet boom’ in Japan, as the 1990s saw the staging of almost seventeen productions of Hamlet presented by Japanese and foreign theatre companies. The successes of these Japanese Hamlets relied on the ability of playwrights who followed Shogekijo’s practice of interweaving into the Shakespearean world scenes, histories, stories and situations of both the Japanese or Asian milieu.75 Shozo Uesugi’s Broken Arrow exemplifies this as Hamlet is represented as a Japanese prince in the Asuka period, who is never able to be mature and take action. This Hamlet represented the social situation of Japan’s economy in 72 Ryuta, Carruthers, Gillies (Ed), Pg 7. Kennedy and Yong (eds), Pg 306. 74 Ibid, Pg 315. 75 Sasayama,. Mulruyne, Shewring (eds), Pg 29- 30. 73 46 1980s, as the frantic energy on stage reflected Japan’s rapid expansion. Another outstanding production that demonstrates a different form of intercultural exchange between Japanese practices and Shakespeare is Kanadehon Hamlet written by Harue Tsutsumi and produced by Kiyama Jimusho in 1992 and 1994.76 This play, set in Tokyo in 1897, depicts a rehearsal of Japan’s first production of Hamlet that is to be staged at the Shintomi-za (an actual Kabuki theatre). However the Kabuki actors, knowing little about Western drama, are at a complete loss as they do not know how to perform Hamlet in the familiar style of Kanadehon Chushingura (a popular Kabuki play first staged in 1748 that dramatizes actual accounts of forty-seven samurais’ pursuit of revenge in Tokyo, 1702). The rehearsal is further pushed into confusion as the director who has just returned from America insists on all things Western, and the producer is faced with a large deficit and dies during rehearsal, thus leaving the curtains closed during the première of Hamlet while the play continues. This play emphasizes the similarities in theme, structure, character and plot between the two iconic dramas – Hamlet and Kanadehon Chushingura, and is noted by Tsutsumi in her introduction to Kanadehon Hamlet.77 As revenge plays, both Hamlet and Chushingura have an avengerprotagonist: Hamlet, princely son of slain king, and Oboshi Yuranosuke, chief retainer of Enya Hangan, a feudal lord forced to commit suicide for having drawn his sword and attacked an official within the palace precincts. Both avengers devise a means to conceal their true intent from the villains: Hamlet fakes madness whereas Yuranosuke pretends to indulge in geisha parties. The villains, Claudius and Ko no Moranao, are 76 Ibid, Pg 35 - 36. Wetmore, JR, Kevin J, ““The Play’s The Thing” – Cross-cultural Adaptation of Revenge Plays Through Traditional Drama”. In Wetmore, JR, Kevin J(ed), Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: from Hamlet to Madame Butterfly, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Pg 246 – 247. 77 47 both corrupt old men who are attracted to the victims’ beautiful wives. Their attraction is one reason why the victims are killed and forced to commit suicide. Moreover, the plays’ minor villains, Polonius and Ono Kudayu, bear striking similarities. They begin as retainers of the victims – Polonius of the former king and Kudayu of Enya Hangan – but after the deaths of the victims they side with the villains, Claudius and Moronao. Both are killed by the protagonists while hiding as spies: Polonius is stabbed by Hamlet while eavesdropping on his conversation with his mother; Kudayu is stabbed by Yuranosuke as he hides under the floor of the Kyoto teahouse, trying to read Yuranosuke’s confidential letter.78 The interesting aspect of this play are the common traits uncovered between these two popular classical tragedies – firstly, they are both revenge plays where the protagonists seek vengeance for the death of their lords; secondly, both protagonists are made to devise a play so as to trick their enemies; and lastly, chief retainers (i.e. Polonius and Ono Kyudayu) while trying to protect their masters are killed as they hid behind covers.79 This example of Kanadehon Hamlet illustrates how Shakespeare can get assimilated in Japan, without either culture or performance form being dominant in the production. Instead, commonalities in the various performance elements of revenge drama were employed to make the foreign familiar. Kanadehon Hamlet, as Senda posits, signals the commonality shared between great masterpieces that have captured the hearts of audiences for centuries, and show that there is receptive soil for Shakespeare in Japanese life and customs. But more importantly, this self-reflexive 78 Tsutsumi, Harue, “Kanadehon Hamlet: A Play”, Pg 182. Taken from, Wetmore, JR, Kevin J, ““The Play’s The Thing” – Cross-cultural Adaptation of Revenge Plays Through Traditional Drama”. In Wetmore, JR, Kevin J(ed), Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: from Hamlet to Madame Butterfly, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 79 Sasayama,. Mulruyne, Shewring (eds), Pg 36. 48 production of Kanadehon Hamlet enacts the development of Japan’s relationship with Shakespeare. This self-reflexivity is highlighted in the end of the opening scene, where the actor playing Hamlet concludes the scene by striking “a mie pose to the crack of wooden clappers. The stage suddenly lights up to reveal the interior of the Shintomi-za in Tokyo, June 1897”.80 It is in this instance, as Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr observes, that the audience is reminded that though they are watching a restaging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the style is distinctively Kabuki, from the mie, the wooden clappers, the performance space, and the costume of the actor playing the Ghost which is a “whitish costume [that] resembles that worn by ENYA HANGAN in the seppuku scene of Chushingura […]”.81 Shakespeare and traditional Japanese performance forms are made to stand alongside each other in this production, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is not reduced to a storyline, and Kabuki is not regarded just as an aesthetic, instead, this scene sees the merging of both Hamlet and Kanadehon Chushingura, which is a performance mode underscored in Tsutsumi’s stage directions in Kanadehon Hamlet: “All of the movements and speeches in this and subsequent scenes from Hamlet reflect kabuki conventions”.82 More notably, Kanadehon Hamlet and the various examples of Japanese Shakespeare and reproductions of Hamlet cited identify the various degrees and levels of (inter)cultural exchange between Asian performance practices and aesthetics and Shakespeare. 80 Tsutsumi, Pg 182. Taken from, Wetmore, JR, Kevin J, ““The Play’s The Thing” – Cross-cultural Adaptation of Revenge Plays Through Traditional Drama”. In Wetmore, JR, Kevin J(ed), Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: from Hamlet to Madame Butterfly, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 81 Ibid, Pg 187. Taken from, Wetmore, JR, Kevin J, ““The Play’s The Thing” – Cross-cultural Adaptation of Revenge Plays Through Traditional Drama”. In Wetmore, JR, Kevin J(ed), Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: from Hamlet to Madame Butterfly, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Pg 259. 82 Ibid. 49 With Japan’s extensive history of appropriating Shakespeare, it is no surprise that the first World Shakespeare Congress to be brought outside the Western world was held in Tokyo in 1991, as Japan’s appropriations of Shakespeare have not only been diverse but also interrogated the validity of ‘authentic’ and conventional Shakespearean performances and performative modes. This congress not only signified the change in Shakespeare scholarship as it started to study Shakespeare on a global scale, but as Minoru Fujita suggests, Shakespeare was no longer limited to geographical boundaries. The general theme for this fifth Congress was ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions’, and emphasized the growing need to address how Shakespeare’s plays are not uniformly received by audiences that are conditioned by different cultural and historical experiences.83 The next step in creating a critical framework for intercultural Shakespeare perhaps requires us to interrogate the dynamic relationship between Shakespeare and cultural traditions belonging to different contexts, and how the meeting of two cultures has already created performance conventions within intercultural Shakespeare performances that influences the ways we approach and think about interculturalism. 2.2. Shifting Shakespeare in China – The growth of a modern Chinese theatre. Unlike the manner in which Shakespeare that was forced into India by colonial education, and introduced into Japan by English literary scholars, Shakespeare was assimilated into China to fit the various needs of this nation.84 Counter to contemporary Western Shakespeare performances (by the likes of Tom 83 Fujita, Minoru and Pronko, Leonard (eds), Shakespeare: East and West. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Pg 1 -2. 84 Li, Ruru, Shashibiya: Staging Shakespeare in China, (Hong Kong University Press, 2003), Pg, 15. 50 Stoppard, Brecht, and Heiner Muller) that tried “to rediscover and reinvent Shakespeare’s modernity and contemporaneity”, Chinese Shakespeare performances “went to the opposite direction in an attempt to find or identify Shakespeare’s historicity in ancient Chinese culture and history”.85 This section will show how Chinese Shakespeare performances relate to a second category of the metadata template – Points of Reference. This category consists of two main sub-categories, 1) references that are related to Shakespeare (i.e. the degree of fidelity to Shakespeare’s original text, plot and character), and 2) the non-Shakespeare references a performance refers to (i.e. historical, topical, and cultural references and also includes references made to other performances and literary texts). The Points of Reference category illustrates how native Shakespeares are part of a larger historical and cultural context. Shakespeare has been used by the Chinese dramatists throughout history not only as an influential literary resource and touchstone of culture and literature, but also as an instrument to attack ideological and political systems. The period of the Democratic Revolution (1911-1949) exemplified how Shakespeare’s work became intertwined with the fight against feudal dictatorship, as Chinese dramatists used Shakespearean plays, like Macbeth and Hamlet, to satirize the warlords’ ambition to usurp state power.86 After the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), Shakespeare became a medium to communicate a change in China’s politics. The Inaugural Chinese Shakespeare Festival was used as a means to reintegrate China into the world’s cultural life as China declared its policy for absorbing Western culture. Hu Yao Bang’s (leader of the Communist Party) visit to Stratford-Upon Avon in 1986 85 Tian, Pg 215. Zhang, Xiao Yang, Shakespeare In China: A Comparative Study of Two Traditions and Cultures, (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), Pg 204 – 209. 86 51 was again another way to reinforce an international image of China as it reiterated China’s commitment to carry out its “open door” policies. These examples illustrate how the proliferation of Shakespeare’s works exceeds the stage as he penetrates into China’s cultural, social and political life. For instance, an article in The People’s Daily (the most widely read newspaper in China) in 1989, used Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to criticize the new Chinese businessmen: Lacking the temperament to be rich, the private businessmen in contemporary China have now found themselves in a predicament as to how to deal with their wealth and social status, which can be associated with what Shakespeare describes: He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, To groan and sweat under the business… (Julius Caesar 4.1.21-22) The incompatibility of their wealth with their personalities has resulted in an abnormal psychology for them.87 The frequent quotations of sayings, epigrams and maxims from various Shakespearean plays in publications, advertisements, lectures, speeches, and other forms of media to enhance one’s expressions of intellect and emotion shows how Shakespeare has become an integral part of Chinese life and a means to express the Chinese condition. Zhang Xiao Yang notes that Shakespeare’s popularity and approbation in China is due to Shakespeare’s influence in establishing and developing a modern 87 Xie De Hui, “Money, the Desperate Beast,” People’s Daily (Beijing), 27 February 1989, 7. In Zhang, Pg 206- 207. 52 Chinese theatre which centers on the practice of spoken drama; in addition, Shakespeare’s status as cultural icon and his proliferation into various domains of Chinese culture and life have made him a harbinger of the “New Culture” of China (this culture as Zhang terms it is “a combination of traditional Chinese culture with some elements of Western culture”).88 However, it can be argued that Shakespeare’s place in Chinese theatre cannot be entirely accredited to his status as the universal poet, but was cemented mainly by the translations of his texts, and that Shakespeare was employed simply as a convenient tool for new Chinese dramatists to introduce a new modern form of theatre to a public that was comfortable with traditional Chinese theatre. Like Japan, the loosely translated versions of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare was one of the earliest translations of Shakespeare in China.89 This was carried out by Lin Shu in the early 1900s, who proposed familiarity and similarity between Chinese culture and Shakespeare. Lin wrote in the introduction to Tales: It is always said that the reason Europeans are superior to us is that our knowledge is limited and our outlook old-fashioned; that we prefer the old to the new, and like talking about gods and spirits. As a result, our nation has become weak and has deteriorated day by day. Those young people in our country, the reformers, thus try their utmost to seek the new. They slander their ancestors and abandon the past. They blindly follow the new. I think that following the new is not wrong. But if we reckon that whatever the Europeans have done and said is utterly new to the Chinese, we have overpraised the Westerners and have also defamed ourselves to an exaggerated extent.90 88 Zhang, Pg 13. Li, Pg 11 -13. 90 Ibid, Pg 13. 89 53 Rather than highlight cultural differences like the radical reformers of that time who valued Shakespeare for his foreignness, Lin suggested that Shakespeare’s stories of gods and spirits corresponded with Chinese culture and were appropriate to illustrate China’s context. Lin’s approach to Shakespeare and his translations attracted many Chinese theatre artists to Shakespeare who were looking to create a modern Chinese spoken theatre; as Shakespeare’s plays offered this new dramatic form “a ready-to-use repertoire” of fantasy worlds and romantic storylines which the traditional theatre audiences were accustomed to.91 Though this form of cultural correspondence seems relatively superficial, the association of Shakespeare’s textual relevance to China’s cultural context set up by Lin demonstrates an early attempt to create some sort of intercultural relationship between Shakespeare and China through translation. Lin not only made Shakespeare available to the public, but also influenced the early development of a new genre of Chinese drama (a precursor to Huaju, or spoken drama) that we typically see today in modern Chinese theatre. The development of the Huaju genre in China’s theatre is a pivotal point when discussing Chinese Shakespeare, since Shakespeare’s growth in China developed alongside an emerging Chinese modern theatre. As Li Ruru posits, the variation of Shakespeare performances that we see today in China would be very different if the initiative to create a new theatrical form had not existed.92 Huaju developed through the need for a vehicle that could introduce new radical ideas suitable for changing Chinese society, as traditional Chinese theatre conventions were becoming obsolete and regarded by the new dramatists as merely ornamental and plain entertainment. And though Shakespeare was a key resource used by this new theatre form, theatre in 91 92 Ibid, Pg 17. Ibid, Pg 23. 54 the 1920s endured the impacts of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which stimulated a cultural movement that aimed to adsorb Western culture and abandon Confucius tradition. The reasons which made Shakespeare popular as a ready source to introduce Huaju to a Chinese public that was accustomed to traditional Chinese theatre became the same reasons for the decrease in professional Shakespeare performances, seeing that Shakespeare’s stories about “gods and spirits” were regarded as too outdated for a theatre that wanted to represent social issues and problems. Instead, Chinese playwrights looked to Ibsen, Shaw and Gorky as inspirations to stage realism and naturalism in Chinese theatre.93 It was also during this period that Huaju began to flourish since it was seen as the suitable performance form to assimilate Western models of realistic and naturalistic theatre. The development of Huaju caused theatre companies during the late 1930s to borrow greatly from the Stanislavski System of acting. Huaju also influenced by Japanese Shingeki (albeit most of what they emulated was based on hearsay). Ironically, it was the influx of too many Ibsen-style works that led to Shakespeare’s return. Tian Han (the first person to fully translate a complete Shakespeare play, Hamlet, in 1922) wanted to use Shakespeare again as his plays would stand out from what was proliferating in Chinese theatre then. Tian Han’s full Shakespeare translations encouraged the Chinese public to stage more Shakespeare performances which generated the growth in Shakespeare performance reviews. This helped increase the public’s understanding of Shakespeare, which help to boost the appreciation of Shakespeare’s artistry and language.94 This was a significant change as Shakespeare was no longer just associated with being “a writer about gods and spirits”. Shakespeare’s status as the hallmark of culture and literature was cemented by 93 94 Ibid, Pg 24. Ibid. 55 Chinese literati and further secured by the literary theories of Marx and Engels (discussed later). The 1930s and the 1940s were a very important period for Shakespeare performances in China, and also a significant time for the consolidation of the Huaju genre. As China saw much unrest due to the Japanese invasion and civil war between the Nationalist Party government and the Communists, dramatists at that time recognized the need to improve national morale, and the Chinese theatre became a convenient place to do that. For instance, for Japanese-occupied areas, Shakespeare offered plays that were politically safe and suitable for non-controversial interpretations, and Shakespeare’s status of high culture and artistic greatness made him a “playwright who could be accepted by people from opposing political standpoints”.95 Shakespeare performances afforded a space for practitioners that was void of social and political meaning and significance. An interesting production of Macbeth which was titled The Hero of Turmoil (1945) by director Huang Zoulin changed the way Huaju could be approached, and many aspects of this performance still resonate (although more radically) in contemporary performances like Lin Zhaohua’s Hamlet. Huang was the only Chinese practitioner at that time that studied Shakespeare and had experience in directing in Britain. He had a great interest in Brecht and aimed to re-conceptualize Huaju through his own experience with Western forms of performance. His training was almost like a mixture between apprenticeship in the traditional theatre and a Westernized drama school, as trainees had to participate in all facets of the production, and the professionals were both performers and tutors for classes. This perhaps was the first instance of practiced and 95 Ibid, Pg 31. 56 performed interculturalism, as practitioners and trainees could learn and experience Western culture not from a distance, but had to integrate it into a workable Chinese performance form. Shakespeare’s Macbeth was also adapted to China’s history in Huang’s production, and Macbeth’s character was modeled after Wang Deming, a historical figure of the Five Dynasties period in China (907-960) so that the performance would remain relevant to the audience at that time.96 The audience who had experienced turmoil and chaos during the War could readily relate to this version of Macbeth. Huang’s preference for simplicity over complexity in The Hero of Turmoil has impacted the approaches to Huaju, as he used props and performers to change the mise-en-scene of the production. Here, Huang remarks, “we used props to change scenes rather than changing the set…This is a play that belongs to both Shakespeare and the traditional Chinese theatre. They both are created in a limited space but result in the infinite”.97 Huang’s statement suggests the emergence of an intercultural approach to Shakespeare, and as mentioned, his style of staging Shakespeare can still be witnessed in Chinese Shakespeare performances today. Huang’s Macbeth exemplifies the importance of studying Shakespeare performances in China to trace the relationship between Shakespeare and the historical development of Chinese theatre. The transportation of Shakespeare to the Chinese stage has caused Shakespeare to undergo modifications based on China’s political and social climate, and in addition helps us to re-view the significance of Shakespeare and his texts within Chinese contexts. As Barbara Hodgdon asserts, it is in the difference and redesigning of Shakespearean adaptations that audiences are enabled to re-see what has been culturally, historically and ontologically understood, 96 Ibid, pg37 Huang Zuolin, “Producing Shakespeare in China”. In Chinese Literature, Winter issue, (Beijing: Publication Centre), Pg 205. Ibid, Pg 38-39. 97 57 thereby allowing one to experience Shakespeare in different ways.98 For instance, the earlier influence of Confucianism in Chinese social life and national identity had impacted the reception and production of Hamlet in China. For many, Hamlet was regarded as a great Confucian hero and was often held in the same esteem as prominent Confucian political figures.99 Hamlet’s ardent disapproval of corruption in the court and strong sense of political responsibility positions him as a Confucian exemplar. The Chinese were inclined to justify Hamlet’s melancholy by associating it with youfen (worry and anxiety), a quality shared by all Confucian heroes who are faced with problematic situations and the tension between moral and political ideals and the corrupt reality of their society. Here, Hamlet’s positive traits and the dramatic context of Shakespeare’s Hamlet become aligned with the principles of Confucianism, as the Chinese were expected to honor their political and familial duties. Another Hamlet (1942) by Jiao Juyin, who studied Theatre Studies in France during the war, not only carried with it patriotic sentiments, but also Jiao’s desire to show that China was still part of the civilized world culture.100 As Jiao claims, “the character of Hamlet is like a mirror, a lesson to us people who are living in the period of the AntiJapanese War…So, the conclusion we can draw from the tragedy of Hamlet is that victory in our Anti-Japanese War will depend on the joint action taken by the people all over the country, and also more on immediate actions taken by the people without any hesitation”.101 Jiao’s Hamlet was staged specifically in a Confucian temple (a sacred place for most Chinese intellectuals), and with the added design of constructed and preexisting pillars and twenty-four feet long curtains hanging strategically around 98 Hodgdon, Barbara, “Re-Incarnations” In Aebischer, Pascale, Esche, Edward J. and Wheale, Nigel (eds), Remarking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genre and Culture, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Pg196. 99 Zhang, Pg 213- 214. 100 Li, Pg 33. 101 Ibid, Pg 32. 58 the temple, Jiao’s set was transformed into the mysterious and conspiratorial Elsinore. In one scene, Hamlet deep in thought, was made to walk along an extended pathway towards what would have been the shrine of Confucius in reality, and seemed to provoke the question – could he find his answer from the Chinese sage?102 Jiao’s Hamlet appeared to be a cautionary tale for the Chinese public during the war, as Jiao remarks, “[Hamlet] hesitated not because he is a coward. His hesitation is caused by his love for truth […] We the Chinese people are often too cautious about everything and as a result we lose courage. In the end we can do nothing”.103 These examples of the re-presentation and re-contextualization of Hamlet in China illustrate how changing ideals and ideologies get projected onto Shakespeare’s text by the desires and needs of the nation. After World War II, as Marxism started to influence the social and cultural practices of the Chinese during the 1950s and early 1960s, Shakespeare became an increasingly important cultural figure in China. Shakespeare was a significant writer for the Soviet critics and theatre, and Chinese literary scholarship tended to follow after the “elder brother”, the Soviet Union.104 Following an orthodox Marxist approach, a main focus of Chinese Shakespearean criticism at this time questioned who Shakespeare wrote for, and Bian Zhilin the leading Shakespearean scholar during this period, claimed that Shakespeare “had written for the people, not for the ruling class, and that Shakespeare opposed the feudal system in the early part of his career and exposed the evils of capitalism in the later part.”105 This was a perspective that was not shared by most Anglo-American scholars of the mid-century. The influence 102 Li, Pg 34. Ibid. 104 Kennedy (ed), (1993), Pg 297. 105 Quoted in Qi-Xin He, “China’s Shakespeare,” The Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): Pg154. Ibid. 103 59 of Marx and Engels began to alter the reception of Shakespeare in China, and Shakespeare’s plays like The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens were used to criticize the evils of capitalism’s obsession with wealth. The use of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens was not a surprise as Shakespeare was Marx’s favorite classical writer, and he had previously cited this play in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1884.106 In fact, stage presentations kept in line with the dogma Marx and Engels adopted. Li suggests that Engels’s introduction to Dialectics of Nature has shaped and influenced the general attitude towards both Shakespeare and the Renaissance in China, since the 1950s.107 Engels notes that the Renaissance ‘was the greatest progressive revolution that mankind has so far experienced, a time which called for giants and produced giants – giants in power of thought, passion, and character, in universality and learning.’ These sentiments were reiterated in Chinese articles about Shakespeare’s plays and in records of directors’ production notes, as Shakespeare was termed ‘the Renaissance giant’ and his corpus was said to reflect ‘the progressive forces of the time’. Although this closed socialist state was mainly antagonistic to the West during this period, Shakespeare was once again adapted to suit the ideological and aesthetic values of Marxism and the taste of the proletarian revolutionaries.108 However, after China broke from the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, Mao Tsetung’s doctrine became the dominant discourse that served as political and cultural guidelines for the nation, as all literary and artistic activity had to adhere to strict party regulations. Shakespeare scholarship and performances were no exceptions, as the 106 Taken from the website: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm. McLellan, David (ed), Karl Marx : selected writings, (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2000). 107 Li, Pg 44 -45 108 Zhang, Pg 239 – 247. 60 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 stopped the study and reproduction of almost all artistic materials. Chinese theatre was to be dominated by ‘revolutionary model operas’ and many forms of theatre were banned because they were denounced as decadent and artists were sent to work in factories and in the countryside.109 China was thus made into a cultural desert for nearly a decade. The end of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s, however, saw the decline of Mao’s and Marxist ideological influence, and a renewal of interest in western culture and radical social transformations. Shakespeare began to flourish again. The new humanist philosophy adopted by China after the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s reshaped the attitudes towards “Chinese Shakespeare”, as Shakespeare’s works were assessed and understood from the perspective of human nature and rights coupled with the socio-political contexts of contemporary Chinese society. The Chinese could now approach Shakespeare with artistic freedom as previous dogmatic interpretations of Shakespeare’s work were abandoned. The drastic changes to China’s political, social, cultural and economic infrastructure opened another avenue of association with Shakespeare and his world. For many Chinese critics, the contemporary Chinese society bore a strong resemblance to the Elizabethan age.110 The comparison with the Elizabethan period was due to China’s transition from a feudal system (though termed a socialist system) to a modern industrialized society. The enthusiasm for Shakespeare and his characters increased as the Chinese saw Shakespeare’s plays as a mirror of the modern state of China. Shakespeare’s works addressed the “struggle between old and new social forces, the corruption of political power, the temptation of money, the conflict and compromise between personal 109 Li, Pg 50. Zhang Xiao Yang, “The Staging of Shakespeare and the Artistic Taste of Our Times”, Foreign Literature Studies (Wuhan) 1 (Spring 1989), Pg 28- 38. 110 61 passions and moral order, the emergence of new ideologies and values.”111 Shakespeare once again became a nationalist vehicle of dominant thought as China took a humanist approach to life and focused on the importance of the individual rights, needs and creative potentialities of the Chinese people. The skepticism depicted in Shakespeare’s plays particularly appealed to the Chinese young people who had “anti-tradition” attitudes which stemmed from the disappointment felt towards the failure of Marxism-Maoism. The face of Huaju was to transform again to accommodate the changing ideals the new generation had about Chinese history and Chinese theatre. Lin Zhouhua with his contemporaries like Gao Xingjian and Hu Weimin represented a younger generation of practitioners and theorists, who attempted Huaju very differently from their predecessors. This new generation of theatre practitioners was exposed to Western avant-garde theatre and was less restricted to Chinese official ideologies and theatrical modes. They rejected the Chinese imitation of the Ibsenite and Stanislavskian tradition, and pursued a nonillusionist theatre of open theatricalism, conventionalism (jiadingxing) and “primitivism”.112 Hamlet again became a suitable Shakespearean character to portray Chinese discontent as he represented uncertainty and stood for the hero trapped in a fractured and dying society. The sentiments: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” [1.4.90] could readily be identified with, especially after the tumultuous period experienced by China before the 1990s. Similarly, Lin’s Hamlet (1990), analyzed in chapter three, not only offers a Post-Cultural Revolution perspective of China that represents the failures and calamity felt by the people during that arduous period of change and reform, but also points towards the new direction of 111 112 Zhang, Pg 241. Tian, Pg 178. 62 contemporary China and Chinese modern theatre. Shakespeare in China has shifted and transfigured according to China’s changing political and cultural circumstances. Chinese Shakespeare presents a very interesting example of how the study of intercultural Shakespeare performances in Asia cannot be removed from history, as China’s transformation from a monarchy in the Qing Dynasty, to a Republic, and later to a Communist state has impacted the many re-presentations of Shakespeare in the past and influences the Shakespeare that China knows today. This reminds us that the change in theatre and the attitudes towards Shakespeare appropriations are always tied to political ideologies and cultural agendas, and do not represent straightforward examples of artistic progression. 2.3. Singaporean Shakespeare – Locating culture within the contexts of “New Asia”. Singaporean Shakespeare performances pose very interesting examples for the study of interculturalism within the contexts of a ‘New Asia’, and play a large part in Singapore’s history of establishing an official language, an identity, and a local theatre. Creating a cohesive national identity in a young nation like Singapore was a necessity, as its multiracial society and its history of being part of Malaya and once a British colony meant that people in Singapore were divided by their separate cultural identities and displaced by the changes of their citizenship. For Singapore, the search for and the representation of a “Singaporean-ness” in theatre only took flight after the 1970s. Before that as Max Le Blond posits, English-language theatre was largely dominated by expatriates, and “shackled by a colonial consciousness and a colonial 63 view of reality.”113 Singapore’s history of establishing a multicultural/ multiracial, modern, independent nation-state has not only influenced the construction of a Singaporean identity, but has also influenced the ways Shakespeare is represented in the modern Singaporean context. As interculturalism places culture at the center of its ethos, it is a term not easily explained in the Singaporean context, as its migrant society is made up of a myriad of people displaced from their homeland, and in this sense, native culture(s) in Singapore is already twice removed. Unlike China and Japan that have very distinctive traditional and modern performance styles and practices, Singapore does not possess traditional Singaporean art form(s) (only traditional art forms belonging to the different ethnic groups), neither has Singapore developed a modern drama like Shingeki and Huaju that has been adapted from Western performance models and made typically Singaporean. This very simple question - “where and how does Shakespeare fit into the Singapore context?”, can perhaps be answered through this historical overview of the development of theatre and the Arts in Singapore, which at the same time provides us with greater insights to the attitudes towards interculturalism and Shakespeare in Singapore. After being expelled from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965, Singapore was left to face the challenges of creating a nation, especially having a predominantly Chinese population, in an otherwise Malay-dominated region. Without any natural resources, the industrialization and modernization of Singapore’s commercial sector and communication systems were regarded imperative to the success of the republic.114 The Arts during these years were placed on the backburner, and as the then Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew famously claimed, “poetry was a luxury we 113 Lindsay, Jennifer (ed), Between Tongues: Translation and/ of/ in Asia, (Singapore University Press, 2000), Pg 91. 114 Lo, Pg 10 –25. 64 cannot afford”115. Due to Singapore’s colonial heritage, it was no surprise that English was used as the favored working language of the state administration and the lingua franca of Singapore’s trade internationally. Language in Singapore represented close ties to one’s ethnic and cultural background, so English was also regarded as a neutral linguistic bridge between the four main ethnic groups in Singapore (i.e. Chinese, Malays, Indians, and ‘Others’). The use of language as a tool in contemporary Singaporean intercultural Shakespeare performances to communicate cultural identity and divergence is also a common trend and will be discussed later. Though English was adopted as the official language in Singapore once it became an independent nation-state in 1965, establishing a local English-language theatre in Singapore was never a simple process. The theatre scene in Singapore during the 1930s consisted mainly of colonial theatre groups, and the emphasis was on staging successful London plays in Singapore.116 Most of the groups like the Changi Theatre Club, Naval Base Drama group and Rowcroft Theatre were set up after the Second World War, and comprised mainly British troops stationed in Singapore. They remained till the British pullout in 1971. There were other nonSingaporean groups formed after the war which also staged mostly British plays, revues and musicals, like The Singapore Amateur Dramatic Group (1935), The Repertory Theatre (1938), and The Singapore Stage Club (1945) which is a company that still exists today. As the oldest theatre company in Singapore, The Stage Club is made up of mostly American and British expatriates and was heralded as being the most active theatre group in Singapore prior to the mid-1980s. Though its mission statement posits that the company aim is to present “the best of theatre in the English 115 Ibid, Pg 37. Birch, David, “Singapore English Drama: A Historical Overview 1958 -1985”. In Nine Lives: 10 Years of Singapore Theatre, 1987 – 1997: Essays commissioned by the Necessary Stage, (1997), Pg 22. 116 65 language”,117 it is surprising that for the last sixty years, it has only staged less than twenty Shakespeare productions (most of which are literature texts studied in schools). The first Shakespeare performance staged by the amateur group was Twelfth Night in 1947, and it was only until the 1990s that more Shakespeare plays were performed. It can be inferred that since English was only made the official language of Singapore during the late 1960s, these earlier Shakespearean productions staged in the late 1940s were performed mainly for an expatriate and English-educated public. In fact, when a production of Hamlet was staged in Victoria Theatre in 1945, Singaporeans were only allowed into the theatre as ushers, and it was only during the late 1950s that Singapore drama groups were allowed to perform in the Victoria Theatre too.118 Locally-written English drama started to surface, as more local theatre groups like The Experimental Theatre Club (1961) and Centre’65 (now disbanded) started to form in the 1960s, and were eager to create more performances that were relevant to the Singaporean context. One of the founders of The Experimental Theatre Club, which was started by a group of undergraduates, Kiru Joseph comments, “We cannot be Singaporean if our values belong to a different country with a different context of human experience and therefore a different message. The club’s attitude will continue to be Singaporean. It will inject into its attitude a greater determination to create a Singapore theatre. It will continue to keep a sharp vigilance against being trapped by the quicksands of irrelevant drawing room drama, nor muck of puerile bedroom scenes, nor the rigor mortis of incomprehensible avant-garde.”119 Ironically, out of the forty performances staged by the club before the mid-1980s, only seven were written 117 Taken from The Stage Club’s official website, http://www.stageclub.com/index2.html. Fernando, Lloyd, “Theatre” in Write 1, (1957, Pg 8). In Nine Lives: 10 Years of Singapore Theatre, 1987 – 1997: Essays commissioned by the Necessary Stage, (1997) Pg 25 -26. 119 The Experimental Theatre Club ‘Three in One’ souvenir programme, 1972, Pg 7. Ibid, Pg 25 -27. 118 66 by local playwrights. Joseph explained that the club would only produce local English-language plays that were of a high standard, and this highlighted the lack of available local plays for theatre companies to stage. Though more English-language plays were introduced in the mid-1960s, English drama still held a sensitive position in the local performance environment as English drama was seen to belong to the expatriates, and this continued till the mid-1980s. In fact little attention was paid to local performances as expatriate dramas were dominating the local newspaper reviews at that time. Singapore always had a schizophrenic approach to the concept of culture and identity as it changed from being under the British rule and a part of Malaya to its sudden separation from Malaya in 1965. This history of displacement is very much linked to the question of language and the shortage of English drama in Singapore. Before Singapore gained independence, Singapore was to adopt Malay culture as the basis for its national culture, and Malay was seen as the official language in Singapore. After 1965 however, language and cultural identity became increasingly important issues to the independent and developing nation-state. The need for local playwrights to adopt British models of literature was problematic when they attempted to write in English; as these forms of English dramas (also known as ‘Commonwealth Literature’) could not fully portray the non-standard English-speaking Singaporeans it was writing for, and earlier English dramas that did try to present non-standard varieties of spoken English tended to sound artificial and forced on stage.120 The paramount view during the 1960s was that “cultural integration is part and parcel of the process of social and political integration” in Singapore, and the Arts, especially in English, did not seem 120 Ibid, Pg 28 -29. 67 like useful means to unite the majority of Singaporeans who were Chinese, Malay and Indian. The place for English was in the classroom, as it was used as a bridge language between the different ethnic groups. Shakespeare during this period was also mainly used as an educational tool in schools. In a speech for the opening of the “Shakespeare and His Age” exhibition at the British Council Centre on the 30th of July 1979, former Minister of Culture, Mr Ong Teng Cheong, highlighted the significance of Shakespeare’s presence in Singapore: Shakespeare, the poet and playwright, is known to every secondary school child in Singapore, and to many others who were exposed to "literature" at some stage in their lives. The British claim Shakespeare for their own, though he rightly now belongs to the whole world. The influence of this man - the greatest of mankind, as one social historian called him -is wide-ranging. […] I see this exhibition as an important part of the British Council's heavy involvement here in the teaching of English, and its aim of promoting the knowledge and enjoyment of English literature overseas. There is a large and growing enthusiastic public interested in Britain's artistic and cultural achievements. Performances by the London Shakespeare Group here in April and more recently England's one-man theatre Brian Barnes both presented under the auspicious of the British Council were played to packed audiences. My hope is that there will be more British artists to come and perform here. I am very happy to be able to officiate at the opening of the "Shakespeare and His Age" exhibition. I look forward to more cultural contacts of this nature.121 121 Taken from the Singapore Archive, http://www.a2o.com.sg/a2o/public/html/ 68 Although Mr Ong still spoke about Shakespeare in a rather traditional sense (i.e. Shakespeare as representative of Western culture and literary genius), his remarks about how Shakespeare “rightly now belongs to the whole world”, perhaps signals a slight change in attitude towards Shakespeare in Singapore. This perspective brings up questions of cultural authority, and suggests how Singapore was trying to break away from the shackles of “colonial consciousness”, a state which Max Le Blond claimed Singapore theatre was plagued with till the 1970s. It is interesting to see how Shakespeare was starting to be regarded as a cultural point of contact in Singapore, rather than a source of cultural imperialism, and underscores a certain sense of choice when interacting with Western culture in a once colonized state. Like many developing Southeast Asian countries, Singapore’s economic development was facilitated by rapid urbanization and modernization, which altered traditional social structures and the lifestyles of the people. To counter the negative effects of modernization and westernization, Singapore’s government started to focus on cultural development so as to promote the formation of a national identity, and to attain a developed nation status. By the mid-1990s the government had begun making plans to transforms Singapore into a global city for the arts and the cultural capital of Asia with world class arts infrastructure.122 The development of Singapore as a Renaissance City with a culturally vibrant and modern Singaporean artistic scene also signaled the paradigm shift of Singaporean theatre’s assertion of its (multicultural) identity within a global context, as the government pushed to position Singapore as the ‘New Asia’ – a nation that was secure in its Asian identity while being open to the 122 See Ministry of Information and the Arts, Renaissance City Report 1977 at http://www.gov.sg/mita/rennaissance/ES.htm. In Lo, Pg 39. 69 West.123 Accordingly, Singapore was to be developed into a leading arts and cultural hub of Southeast Asia. It can also be argued that Singapore’s nationalistic ideologies supporting the formation of a Renaissance City are motivated by economic agendas, as the appropriation of certain Renaissance sentiments, for instance, "the spirit of creativity, innovation and multidisciplinary learning and of socioeconomic, intellectual and cultural vibrancy", really points towards creating a knowledge-based economy that is fuelled by economics. To Bharucha, this formulation of a “cultural renaissance” adapted by Singapore’s government reduces the renaissance to merely an adjective and qualifies the economy rather than culture.124 According to this argument, Asian identities and histories like that of Shakespeare equally become cultural commodities that work to benefit Singapore’s economy. Despite this, the conception of a hybrid cultural identity for Singapore and the progress of local markets towards economic globalization also marked the growth of cross-cultural collaborations and an international and regional focus in local productions, which were spearheaded by the intercultural works of TheatreWorks, the Asia/World Theatre in Research Circus and Theatre OX. So even though interculturalism can be regarded as an industry that is highly influenced by economics and global capital, these aspects are in turn needed to fund the interests and proliferation of cross-cultural/ transnational/ intercultural productions (this is especially so for Singapore, a nation that once could not afford the time nor the finances for the Arts). The danger of this to intercultural Shakespeare is that not only does New Asia begin to represent cultural capital, but that Shakespeare will stand for 123 Ibid, Pg 177 – 179. Bharucha, Rustom, “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization”, Theatre Journal (Assn for Theatre in Higher Education) (Baltimore, MD) (56:1) (Mar 2004), Pg 6. 124 70 “the most lucrative capital that the world of theatre has known in its entire history. He is the ultimate brand of almost any global cultural enterprise, extending beyond theatre to the more lucrative sites of tourism and public spectacle”.125 Intercultural Shakespeare performance, if regarded only as a commercial vehicle for a nation’s economy, then runs the risk of becoming a Trojan horse that hides larger issues pertaining to cultural imperialism, commoditization and imbalanced intercultural exchanges. It is important to introduce The Flying Circus Project developed in 1994 by TheatreWorks under the direction of Ong Keng Sen, so as to make clear the context in which Ong creates his intercultural works and the implications of inter-Asian interculturalism. In the essay “Encounters”, Ong elaborates on the purpose and impetus for creating such an international project: The Project is an ambitious large-scale laboratory that brings together diverse Asian artists—documentary filmmakers, drag queens, visual artists, rock and computer musicians, disk jockeys, modern dancers, and actors, as well as ritualists and other traditional performers. For four weeks, different cultures, aesthetics, disciplines, and of course, individual personalities encounter each other in a series of training classes, workshops based on improvisation and reinventing traditional art forms, discussions, and lectures. Thus far, three laboratories have brought together artists from India, Korea, China, Tibet, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore in a process that I call “cultural negotiation,” with no view to end-product or final presentation. The Project 125 Ibid, Pg 8. 71 has also included a few “guests” from Europe and the U.S.A. The question posed by the Flying Circus Project is, “Can we, as artists from Asia, bring another perspective and forge a different relationship to intercultural performance than what has developed in the United States for instance?126 Ong’s response to interculturalism emphasizes the importance of process in intercultural performance (rather than the “end-product” or “final presentation”), and sees the need to communicate different cultural practices and performance forms through an extended period of cross-cultural dialogue between people from various cultural backgrounds and disciplines. He approaches interculturalism through “cultural negotiation”, which is an attitude that guides his intercultural performances. The initiative to approach and articulate interculturalism differently from Western forms of intercultural performance marks a significant distinction within the field of intercultural performance studies, as Ong proposes the possibility of offering a perspective that takes into account the different cultural and historical contexts Asian performances stem from. This aim to reexamine and interrogate the complexities of “cultural negotiations” can be seen in his intercultural Shakespearean productions (i.e. Lear, Desdemona, and Search: Hamlet) that not only signal the changing attitudes towards Shakespeare in Asia after the end of colonialism, but more significantly, call attention to the possibilities of a plural (Singaporean) identity. Search:Hamlet (discussed in greater detail in the following chapter) illustrates the imperatives of Singaporean theatre to establish and re-imagine national identity through the process of performance on a global stage. The analysis of Ong’s 126 Ong, Keng Sen, “Encounters”. In TDR - The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies, (Fall, 2001), Pg 126. 72 Shakespearean production aims to understand how Shakespeare gets (re)written into the narrative of a multiracial/ intercultural national identity, and for what purposes Shakespeare is cited in the Singaporean context. However, Ong’s initiative to co-opt and appropriate Asian perspectives, cultures, art forms, histories and identities in his “New Asian” intercultural performance model can also be criticized by some like Bharucha for being a model of “Asiacentricity”, which to Bharucha is really the flipside of Eurocentricity.127 Though it is necessary to construct and re-contextualize Asian intercultural Shakespeare performances within a framework that takes into account different Asian contexts, Asian intercultural discourse should not be exclusively Asian or an inverse form of Western theories, as interculturalism when encountering Shakespeare onstage already presupposes the meeting of at least two very different cultures. Dissimilar to Ong’s intercultural Shakespeare performances which are mainly designed for the global festival circuit, Mohammed Najib Soiman’s Ma Ma Yong: About Nothing Much To Do (2008), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, shows a different kind of Singaporean Shakespeare, one that is not heavily sponsored, or meant for an international audience. This performance does not deal with Singapore in the context of New Asia, but engages with Singaporean identity at a simpler ideological level. Shakespeare’s play gets turned into a comedy staged by patients in a psychiatric ward, directed by Fatimah, a former English Literature teacher, who has, according to hearsay, healed a number of patients in her ward. Here, through the act of performance, Shakespeare’s play seems to reflect the ritualistic and spiritual qualities of Mak Yong theatre which is a dominate performance form 127 Bharucha, Rustom, “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization”, Theatre Journal (Assn for Theatre in Higher Education) (Baltimore, MD) (56:1) (Mar 2004), Pg 6. 73 employed in this production. I will focus solely on the use of language in this performance as a way of demonstrating how identity is performed in Singaporean Shakespeare. In the playwright’s message, Soiman notes that in this performance all the characters, places, dialogue, and timeline had been altered to accommodate her needs, and that this Shakespeare’s play was chosen because it shared similarities to a number of classical Malay tales. The initial lines, which were delivered in a mixture of Malay and Singlish immediately signaled at the director/ playwright’s approach to Shakespeare, as the use of language, like Singlish, for instance, a hybridized linguistic idiom that mixes vernacular colloquial English with the ethnic languages of the population, mainly Malay, Chinese and Chinese dialects,128 immediately positioned this performance within the local context, since Singlish is regarded as a low form of speech often used in informal situations and avoided in formal or international contexts: Got the idea from William Shakespeare An English tale made to a blunder We rojak129 it into all sorts of genre We name ourselves the proud owner Hehehe Much Ado About Nothing Is the original story we telling About Nothing Much To do is what we showing Hope all enjoying looking how we playing 128 Courtney, Krystyna Kujawinska and White, R.S., Shakespeare’s Local Habitations, (Lodz University Press, 2007), Pg 144. 129 “rojak” – a local Singlish slang for mixture. 74 Shakespeare becomes a source for cultural appropriation as the performance uses a variety of performance forms (i.e. Mak Yong musical-drama, Bangsawan acting and Wayang Kulit) 130 and languages (English, Malay, Singlish, Mandarin, Hokkien and Kelantanese) to transform Shakespeare’s play into a localized comedy. The performance with its use of traditional gamelan instruments to play contemporary tunes like the theme song to the movie, Mission Impossible, or its inclusion of a Manga-inspired cartoon puppet to the Wayang Kulit scenes, Ma Ma Yong: About Nothing Much To Do, becomes an amalgamation of high and low art, popular culture and traditional theatre. Shakespeare’s text then becomes an anchor that stabilizes the multiple signs and references the performance signifies and intertextualizes. It is perhaps these familiar dramatic modes and languages that make the performance uniquely Singaporean and affords the director ownership over this new cultural reproduction and “original story”. By using a mixture of local vernacular and an obvious lack of standardized World English, this performance reasserts a new sense of cultural authority over Shakespeare’s text, as the drastic changes to Shakespeare’s language are a reaction to the history of English in Singapore which Shakespeare is a part of. There are two instances in the performance where I am confronted with and question the use of language as a paradigm to locate identity. Firstly, there were certain points in the performance where Malay actors would recite their lines in 130 According to Mohamed Ghouse Nasuruddin, Mak Yong theatre consists of various elements of dance, music and dialogue, and is performed on festive occasions like weddings, the Sultan’s birthdays, and also as a form of celebration for the end of a harvesting season. Mak Yong plays tend to be episodic in structure and music in Mak Yong theatre serves ritualistic, structural and dramatic functions; Bangsawan acting adopts a representational acting style, and the performances tend to focus on fantasy and historical themes, for instance, myths that deal with gods, fairies, kings and commoners; Wayang Kulit is a form of shadow puppet theatre that originated from Southeast Asia. Taken from, Mohamed Ghouse Nasuruddin, Traditional Malay Theatre, (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2009), Pg 35 – 36, 86, 1 – 10. 75 Mandarin, and Chinese actors would do the same in Malay. The interchanging use of language seemed to reinforce the actors’ cultural/ racial identity, as attention was drawn to the incongruous relationship between identity and language. While language is often tied to identity and nation building discourse(s) throughout Singapore’s history, the use of language in this production served to challenge the stable relationship between language and identity, as ethnicity and cultural identity was clearly not represented through the languages the actors spoke. Secondly, the performance which was predominantly in Malay with Singlish/ English subtitles, made me aware that understanding the language is different from understanding the performance, particularly since it was a comedy. For me, the hectic pace of the performance and the multiple-role playing did little to enhance Shakespeare’s play as I felt it became overly slapstick and the original plot often got lost in the action; however, to my Malay friend who was beside me, the performance was a success. Much of this has to do with the language, since most of the punch lines were in Malay, the English translations could not capture the comedy that is dependent on the use of language. The constant reading of the subtitles also made it harder for me to fully immerse myself in the onstage action; and though I recognize the Singaporean-ness of the performance, I am also reminded doubly of my insider/ outsider status, as the characterizations of the characters and the style of comedy were familiar, yet the language created a distance between me and the action for the most part of the performance. This perhaps is the Singaporean condition – a perpetual dislocation of what is local and foreign, what is familiar and what is not, and finally what we are unable to properly define as national identity in a multicultural society. 76 The vast and different representations of Shakespeare across these different Asian cultures illustrate that the different modes of engaging with and approaching Shakespeare are determined by the force of history, performativity, and identity. We are reminded by the different faces of Shakespeare in diverse cultures and the ongoing study of intercultural Shakespeare in projects like A-S-I-A, that Shakespeare does not only exist in one form and this pushes us to reassess what we already know, and redefine and discover what is new, what is native and what is not easily explained in intercultural theatre. The manipulation and appropriation of Shakespeare and his texts to suit the environments he is transferred to highlight the need to reevaluate the significance of Shakespeare in the modern context. The history of these various permutations of Asian Shakespeares echo or rather challenge what Jon Kott has asserted 40 years ago, as Asian Shakespeare performances not only affirms the claim that Shakespeare is our contemporary, but urges us to discover how and question why he has been made current and relevant. As Poonam Trivedi suggests Shakespeare’s ubiquitous presence “exists throughout the world in a state of constantly renewed ‘otherness’”;131 and it is the distinction between ‘English-language Shakespeare’ and what it is not that has increasingly become the impetus behind the proliferation and flourishing success of present-day interests surrounding Shakespeare studies. To Trivedi, it is these “diasporic Shakespeare(s)” that signal culture’s cosmopolitanism and hybridity, and Shakespeare’s continual significance, but more importantly, it is these other Shakespeare(s) that help expand Shakespeare as a cultural field. Similarly, W.B Worthen in Shakespeare and The Force of Modern Performance reinforces the idea 131 Trivedi, Poonam essay “Reading ‘Other Shakespeares’”. In Aebischer, Esche and Wheale (eds), Pg 56. 77 that, on one hand, globalized Shakespeare is sustained by intercultural Shakespeare(s) (performed and made current by the variety of languages, stages and audiences) through the attraction of Shakespeare as global commodity and capital. On the other hand, intercultural Shakespeare represents the resistance to European imperialism by realizing the contestatory possibilities of theatrical performance.132 As seen in this chapter, intercultural Shakespeares are not just demarcated through geographical distance but also through temporal and historical difference. Thus, the interaction between Shakespeare and Asia changes and shifts as the meanings of culture, national identity and history continue to be (re)defined. As such, interculturalism should not be assumed as the harmonious mixing of cultures and performance traditions or a definitive model of cultural practices and exchange, but an on-going process that can help us understand the changing paradigms of the nation and identity through theatre in the global age. 132 Worthen, Pg 122. 78 Chapter 3: The Play’s the Thing: Identity and intercultural discourse in Asian Hamlet Performances. Interculturalism is a critical theory, an attitude, a practice, and a style that is often diverse and contradictory in nature. In performance, it becomes representative of the dynamic relationship and interaction between two or more cultures, theatre traditions, semiotic systems, histories and identities. As seen in the previous chapter, the transport of Shakespeare to Asia has also witnessed the exchange between different cultural and national identities, and what seem to be the fundamental principles of interculturalism also alert us to what is truly at risk – the final reproduction that determines who is left the greater stakeholder in this cultural transaction. Thus, the relationship between “Shakespeare” and “Asia”, because of their histories and traditions, will always be a complicated one. Interestingly, it is the history between Shakespeare and diverse Asian nations (e.g. communism, colonialism, or westernization) that has also become the material and motivation for current Asian Shakespeare performances. Therefore, contemporary Asian Shakespeare performances serve as in-between spaces that help us bridge the past and the present, simultaneously filling the gaps between foreign cultures while using difference to preserve, recreate, and redefine individual identities. Due to their diversity, these local re-productions underscore the need to adopt performance as a research methodology to understand and widen the discursive field of intercultural Shakespeare, as “Shakespeare is made to signify anew”.133 133 Massai, Pg 8. 79 This chapter aims to bring together intercultural theory and practice through the close analysis of three distinct performances of Hamlet in Asia. The study of these Asian Hamlet performances allows us to re-examine and interrogate the dynamic intercultural relationship between Shakespeare and specific historical, cultural, sociopolitical, and dramatic contexts, and enables us to investigate the current condition of globalized “Shakespeare”. These performances not only exemplify the intercultural productivity of a Shakespearean text, but more critically, illustrate how Shakespeare and intercultural discourses are internalized and reconfigured by the nations and cultures that consume and re-produce them. Hamlet/Hamlet when restaged by three different cultures demonstrates how (intercultural) identity is constructed through the subjectivity and iconicity of Hamlet’s character and the performativity of Shakespeare’s text. Paradoxically, what Catherine Belsey perceives as the inability to secure and understand an “essential Hamlet” is precisely what translates well on the intercultural stage: Alternatively mad, rational, vengeful, inert, determined, the Hamlet of the first four acts of the play is above all not an agent. It is as if the hero is traversed by the voices of succession of morality fragments, wrath and reason, patience and resolution. In none of them is it possible to locate the essential Hamlet. In this sense Hamlet is precisely not a unified subject134. The usability and transferability of Hamlet to other foreign cultures and stages stems from this particular performative value the text offers to the interrogation of (performed) subjectivity, as Hamlet is constantly under construction and never 134 Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance drama, (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), Pg 41-42. 80 essentialized. It is through the three fundamental constituents of the subject, as noted by Bernhard Greiner, namely self-reflection, introversion and play-acting, that “Hamlet becomes, as a paradigm for the play within the play, a paradigm of the subject.”135 These qualities of the play enable intercultural performances to not just be straightforward adaptations of the play, but serves as a discursive means to explore and re-interpret concepts of identity and the performance of identity. The diverse permutations and re-presentations of Hamlet/ Hamlet in intercultural performances enact and signal at the complexities of signifying the elusive intercultural subject, thus epitomizing the possibilities and difficulties of configuring a defined identity. One prominent feature of this particular Shakespearean play is the extensiveness of Hamlet’s soliloquies in the play that produce the reflexive and meditative nature of the text. Hamlet’s appeal to inwardness and interiority in his search for answers and personal motivations opens the play to a variety of interpretations and production choices.136 This sort of representation of Hamlet as a modern subject and this iconic character’s appeal to interiority provides directors and actors space to re-define and re-invent Hamlet. It is perhaps through these pockets of void meaning between knowing and not knowing, action and inaction that an intercultural voice can be heard. Hamlet’s voice then becomes one that questions and interrogates the purpose of performance in the formation of an inter-cultural identity on stage. The unstable quality of Hamlet’s subjectivity in this sense maps well onto the indeterminate status of interculturalism. Hamlet’s privileging of interiority over the external world has made him “the first fully developed subject in literature” as he 135 Greiner, Bernhard, “The Hamlet Paradigm”. In Fischer, Gerhard and Greiner, Bernhard (eds), The Play Within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B.V, 2007), Pg 4. 136 Mousley, Andrew, “Hamlet and the Politics of Individualism”. In Burnett and Manning (eds), Pg 70. 81 has been frequently appropriated to represent “an image of man in the modern world”,137 and accordingly makes him a fitting figure to usher in the new developments made in intercultural theatre. The historical overview of Shakespeare in Asia has demonstrated how the “national” is rewritten into the history of local Shakespeares through the interactions between different systems of cultural signification and identification, and the negotiation between cultural and political authority. The continual reproduction of new meaning that arises from local Shakespeare performances emphasizes the need to assess the different strategies used in performance to construct intercultural identity that derives from an Asian perspective. The relationship between performance and identity is further heightened as contemporary Asian Shakespeare performances not only raise the questions of Asia’s place in Shakespeare studies, but what intercultural Shakespeare does to our understanding of Asia.138 3.1. Kurita Yoshihiro’s Hamlet (2007) Watching Kurita Yoshihiro’s Hamlet (an installment of the Ryutopia Noh Theatre Shakespeare series) for the first time, I was immediately made aware of the cultural distance between this Japanese version of Hamlet and a conventionalized Shakespearean performance of Hamlet. This distance was created by the visual representation and language of the performance, which instantly foreground the 137 Foakes, R. A., Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Pg 167. 138 This idea of adopting an Asian perspective when engaging with performance studies and how that perspective influences performance research, and the effects of performance research on our understanding of Asia was taken from the discussion – Performance Studies in Asia: A Roundtable, organized by the Asian Research Institute (Singapore), and chaired by, Rivka Eisner, Hwang HaYoung, and Paul Rae from the Theatre Studies Programme, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. 82 Japanese-ness of this Hamlet as it began with a bald-headed Hamlet in a kimono inspired costume sitting at the center of a traditional Noh stage. The Noh theater, costumes and the lone presence of a Japanese Hamlet played by Kohchi Hirokazu, may, at first glance, seem like a straightforward translation of a Shakespearean text to a Japanese context. However, the re-conceptualizing of Hamlet to fit a traditional Noh stage can itself be an intercultural process, as creative choices become a way in which cultural interactions take place. For instance, the transportation of Shakespeare to a traditional 6 meter square Noh stage defined by 4 pillars and an entrance “bridge” (hashigakari) walkway that traditionally does not permit decorations or elaborate lighting effects already requires a negotiation of the staging strategies between the traditions of Noh drama and conventional Shakespeare performance styles.139 The structure of the Noh stage and the staging rules of Noh drama, therefore, not only became the physical framework that guided staging decisions, but also became the framing devise for this cultural re-production. The representation of Shakespeare on a traditional Noh stage already signals two very different modes of dramatic presentation – the former being dramatic realism, and the latter, a traditional art form that is governed by ritual and ceremony. The historical background of the Noh theater as a sacred ceremonial space for ritual dances meant for gods emphasizes the fundamental difference between representation on/of a Noh stage and a conventional proscenium stage. The dramatic context and conventions of Noh, as mentioned in the previous chapter does not allow a realist play like Hamlet to be performed straightforwardly. Therefore, to retain the significance of Shakespeare’s language and adhere to the performance traditions of Noh, Hamlet, a Shakespearean 139 Yokouchi, Kensuke, “A meeting of Eastern and Western classics: The Noh-staged Shakespeare of Yoshihiro Kurita”, in An Artist Interview, (The Japan Foundation, 2005), Pg 1. From the website, http://www.performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/0503/art_interview0503e.pdf. 83 text noted for its extensive soliloquies, had to be re-contextualized to fit this highly ritualized and ceremonial art form that is characterized by few words, movement and an empty stage. Despite the fact that Shakespeare scholars like Northrop Frye had already begun to draw similarities between Shakespearean and Noh drama since the mid-20th century, by paralleling the transformative quality of reality and fantasy and vice versa in Shakespeare’s plays to the transformation of the shite character in Noh drama (the moment when the shite disappears off-stage and reenters as a ‘new’ and ghostly character in the second act of a Mugen-Noh), and the use of the waki (a character that remains mainly in the sidelines and is a representative of the audience as he raises questions the audience might have asked themselves) is also seen by Frye to be a similar narrative device used by Shakespeare;140 this Japanese Hamlet seemed to be working within a framework that does not rely simply on textual similarities between Shakespeare and Noh drama, but instead used the dissimilarities of performance styles and dramatic forms to explore new possibilities for intercultural Shakespeare performances. When asked in an interview in The Japan Times about how he mediated between the context of Noh, the importance of Shakespeare’s words and the challenges of presenting Shakespeare on a Noh stage, Kurita replied: As Shakespeare is such an English classic, when we Japanese actors try to perform it from our very different cultural background, it just doesn’t fit naturally and easily become nonsense. So I try to create an original work that takes advantage of Japanese aesthetics and makes the best use of Japanese actor’s way of moving. […] To create a beautiful stage, we scrape the surplus off the original to reveal a minimal, simple Noh-style production. We express 140 Takenaka, Masahiro, “A Voice from the Beyond- Ritual and Epiphany in Noh and Shakespeare”. In Fujita and Pronko (eds), Pg 105 - 106. 84 his world with actors’ bodies and their few words on an empty stage, and this helps to feed the audience’s imagination.141 This Noh-style Hamlet , rather than try to remain faithful to the conventional staging practices of (Western) Shakespeare performance (the easiest choice would be to stage a traditional Shingeki-style Shakespeare), reinvented realist Shakespearean drama through the conflicting semiotic systems of Noh drama, in what Kurita attempts to foreground as “Japanese Shakespeare” - “the Shakespeare production as only Japanese can present them”142. Here, Kurita displays a desire to stage Shakespearean productions that make use of Japanese performance techniques that focus on the actor’s body to (re)present the imaginary world Shakespeare conjures with his words. Kurita asserts that it is the cultural negotiation between the foreign dramaturgy of Noh plays and Shakespeare’s plays that has given him the insight into the non-realist nature of Shakespeare’s drama. Thus, it is out of finding an alternative representation of Shakespeare’s plays to suit the Japanese context and local performance traditions, as Kaori Kobayashi writes, that a “new epistemology” (Martin Orkin’s term) for Shakespearean drama can occur, one that is “adjust[ed] by local knowledge”.143 Although Kurita had to adhere to certain staging conventions of Noh drama, his use of both traditional and modern Japanese art forms, like Shingeki, Karakuri Ningyo (traditional Japanese mechanic dolls), Joruri (a type of recitation or narration that accompanies puppet play/ a form of ballad drama), and the incorporation of a live 141 Taken from an interview by Tanaka, Nobuko, Filtering Shakespeare with Noh, in The Japan Times, Aug 17, 2006. 142 Kobayashi, Kaori, “From Drama to Ritual—Ryutopia's The Winter's Tale”. In Shakespeare Studies, Vol 46, (2008), Pg 95. 143 Orkin, Martin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (London: Routledge, 2005), Pg 4. 85 pianist who played Western music, indicated the possibility of hybridity in contemporary Japanese Shakespeare performances, especially since he worked within and without the guiding principles of Noh, and Shingeki (two very different and distinct performance forms). While it is not surprising that a traditional Japanese art form like Joruri would be used in this performance’s re-interpretation of The Mousetrap, as it is typical of Hamlet performances to adopt an older performance form to correspond to Shakespeare’s adaptation of an older theatrical form (elaborated in chapter one), the incorporation of both traditional and modern performance styles/ forms do more than just transport Shakespeare’s text to a different cultural context. By placing Shingeki on a traditional Noh stage and mixing it with other traditional performance forms, the Shingeki form is already transfigured as it is removed from the historical context (i.e. Japan’s history of westernization and modernization) of its origin. This modern form of Shingeki differs from the performance style of Shingeki in the early 20th century, as it does not adopt Western mimicry. Instead, Kurita’s use of the Shingeki acting style and vernacular Japanese when mixed with the stylized choreography of the Karakuri Ningyo and the formalized dramatization of narrative in Joruri, modifies Shingeki as art form and resituates its position in history (i.e. its relationship with “authentic” Shakespeare), as it is now used as a bridge between traditional performance forms and Western realism, rather than seen as a form disconnected from performance traditions like Noh and Kabuki. The collective use of various performance forms in Kurita’s Hamlet does not just point towards the hybridization of Asian and Western forms, but actually reveals the hybridism that can occur between the “traditional” and “modern” performative modes of Japanese theatre to create an intercultural performance that not only demonstrates a study of culture between two different locales but within the same location. It is in this way that the 86 notion of “culture” can be regarded as an “ongoing historical action” that is continuously evolving.144 What is reproduced, therefore, is something unique and original, as Kurita remarks, “My hope was that this marriage of Shakespeare’s plays with the Noh theater would produce a new mixed breed of original Shakespeare that could not be experienced in Britain or anywhere else in Japan, just on our stage.”145 Furthermore, the subtle referencing of traditional Noh characters and their symbolic representations layers onto Shakespeare’s original another level of textual interpretation and expressive possibilities. For instance, Hamlet seems to embody both the shite and waki character in Noh drama. As other characters did not acknowledge Hamlet’s presence while he sat onstage throughout the entirety of the performance, Hamlet seemed to resemble some characteristic of the shite (which is the main character) who is often disguised as a ghost of the raging phantom of a warrior who died in battle, or a ghost who is tied to earthy life because of unresolved angry emotions (i.e. love, jealousy, rage, the desire for revenge, etc). Likewise, Hamlet’s position onstage as the sole and direct narrator to the audience seemed to also have traces of the waki, as this secondary character in Noh drama is typically onstage as an observer to witness action, which is usually a narrated memory of past violence.146 Following this, there seems to be a multiplicity to Hamlet’s character, which reiterates the instability of locating a stable identity, a theme present in Shakespeare’s text. Additionally, Hamlet as both shite and waki (i.e. ghost and observer), creates a highly spiritualized world on stage which reaffirms an interior 144 Schechner, Richard, “Intercultural Themes”. In Marranca and Gautam (eds), Pg 308. Yokouchi, Kensuke, “A meeting of Eastern and Western classics: The Noh-staged Shakespeare of Yoshihiro Kurita”, in An Artist Interview, (The Japan Foundation, 2005), Pg 2. From the website, http://www.performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/0503/art_interview0503e.pdf. 146 Information on Noh characters in Takenaka, Masahiro, “A Voice from the Beyond- Ritual and Epiphany in Noh and Shakespeare”. In Fujita and Pronko (eds). 145 87 mode of performance, “that unlike Western theatre tradition [which] is geared towards a kind of extroversion”,147 encourages the representation of Hamlet’s interiority through the cultural signification of Japanese identities. Though Hamlet’s psychological state and performed madness is greatly tied to Shakespeare’s use of language (most apparent in Hamlet’s lengthy soliloquies), the image of this Japanese Hamlet sitting constantly at the center of the stage as the action takes place behind him intensifies not only the psychological state of Hamlet but the dramatic dimension of Shakespeare’s fiction, as we can never be sure if what we are seeing is reality or just the mad workings of Hamlet’s mind and imagination. Hamlet’s stillness and isolated body on stage (i.e. the character does not directly interact with other secondary characters) underscored the character’s interiority and inwardness, as his tense and still body seemed to embody Hamlet’s inner-conflict and his inability to take action. Interestingly, the self-reflexivity of role-playing and theatricality in Shakespeare’s text is heightened in this performance by the use of the Karakuri Ningyo (mechanical dolls), who not only play the performers in Hamlet’s Mousetrap, but also become an extension of Hamlet’s state-of-mind (e.g. in contrast to Hamlet who remains still for the whole performance, their movements would quicken as Hamlet became agitated by the mention of his father’s murder) and actions (e.g. the mechanical dolls were the ones who carried out the act of murdering Polonius). The three doll-like characters played the different parts of Hamlet, for instance, the avenger, the actor, and the silent observer, and through them Hamlet was able to act on his passions. In this sense, the Karakuri Ningyo, as Hamlet professes – “Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” 147 Flynn, John J, “Transiting from the “Wethno-centric”: An Interview with Peter Sellars”. In Marranca and Gautam (eds), Pg, 190. 88 [2.2.462 -463], not only tell the stories of our times but become the driving forces that produced the change and action in this cultural re-production of Hamlet (most apparent in the ending). A very pronounced point of departure in Kurita’s Hamlet besides the constant positioning of Hamlet on stage, is the way in which the performance ends. In most intercultural performances, the ending scene in particular becomes a crucial moment where contemporary directors can leave their imprint on Shakespeare as rewriting the ending to Shakespeare’s original (which in effect changes the play’s meaning(s) significantly) serves to re-assert one’s creative and cultural authority. More notably, an altered ending in intercultural performances can signal the possibilities of different and alternative re-readings of Shakespeare so as to broaden the interpretative scope of Shakespeare’s text. In this way, the degree to which Shakespeare’s endings are modified becomes a measure of the extent of intercultural exchange and negotiation that occurs in a performance, and can also be representative of an overarching intercultural approach towards Shakespeare in performance. The final duel scene in Kurita’s Hamlet maps the Hamlet story onto the fall of Troy, by intercutting the narrative of Priam’s slaughter into the duel scene between Laertes and Hamlet. The parallel between these two narratives serves as a deliberate mirroring of the situation of one story in another, and through this comparison, Hamlet is raised to the epic grandeur of the Trojan story,148 and becomes the mythical tale of the fall of society. The repetition of the ‘fall of Troy’ narrative performed in the ritualistic and formalized style of the Karakuri Ningyo breaks the linear seriality 148 Johnson, Arthur, “The Player’s Speech in Hamlet”, in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 13, No.1 (Winter, 1962), Pg 22 -23. 89 of Shakespeare’s plot and marks this moment as a deliberate act of cultural grafting, where different cultural references intersect to generate a hybridity of histories that signify multiple meanings.149 This fracture in the performance where “the time is out of joint” [1.5.190], suggests once again another instance of the blurred lines between performance and reality, a theme pertinent in Hamlet, and also makes cultural allusions to the conventions of Mugen-Noh (fantasy Noh) in which the action on stage can be seen as a vision or dream of the waki - Hamlet. In effect, the highly stylized performance of the ‘fall of Troy’ by the Karakuri Ningyo during the duel scene becomes the ritualization of Hamlet’s death, where Shakespeare’s realism is formalized and framed through Japanese aesthetics and performative modes. It is through this repetition of the performative that the performance becomes a site for renewed interpretations, as even though the final scene of Kurita’s Hamlet seemed to be a replaying of what we have seen before, the scene in repeat translates into something very different. Kurita’s Hamlet not only readjusts our expectations of conventional Shakespearean performances, by releasing Shakespeare from the mode of realist drama and re-presenting Hamlet through a Japanese perspective and dramatic context, thereby giving the text new meaning. The mixture of Noh and Shingeki in this intercultural Hamlet draws attention to the continuities and discontinuities of Japanese culture, identity and history, but most of all, alerts us to the expressive possibilities of traditional and modern Japanese theatre as it continues to interact with the foreign - Shakespeare. 149 Though not directly referencing Shakespeare, Homi K. Bhabha’s ideas on hybridity and cultural difference in the essay “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”, have been very helpful to this section of my paper. In Bhabha (ed), Chapter 16. 90 3.2. Lin Zhao Hua’s Hamlet (1990) The opening scene of Lin’s Huaju Hamlet highlights this intercultural performance’s emphasis on (re)presenting the current state of (post-Cultural Revolution) China while at the same time reasserting cultural and artistic authority in a rather straightforward textual adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (as the written script remained faithful to Shakespeare’s original text). Departing from a conventional staging of Shakespeare, and the use of traditional Chinese art forms, Lin’s Hamlet opened to a sparse and almost empty set, where the only distinctive props on stage were a barber’s chair (which was used as the King’s throne and a bed) and fly bars with multiple hanging fans looming overhead. The shadows formed by the rotating hanging fans made circular vent-like shapes on the backdrop of the stage, and created the likeness of an underground space, a prison or a grave perhaps (as Hamlet in this production repeats the line, “Denmark’s a prison”[2.2], and the imagery of graves and death are recurring motifs in Shakespeare’s text). The grey colored backdrop and stage floor not only reinforced this image but also worked to set the dreary and grim tone of the play. Like the original text, this too began on a staid note and hinted at the darker days in China’s past when China was a country made to isolate itself from the rest of the world. This initial serious tone of the play was however juxtaposed with the humorous bantering of the gravediggers (whose scenes opened all five acts of the play), who adopted the distinct Chinese performance genre of the cross-talk, a traditional performance form of comedic dialogue performed typically by two people. Part of the penultimate scene [5.1] was performed as the opening scene of Lin’s Hamlet where the two “cross-talking” gravediggers discussed the profession of 91 gravediggers which was performed in full and translated in Mandarin. This departure from the structure of the original text is very telling of how this production engages with intercultural negotiations without being overly compromising of its autonomy as a new (Chinese) Shakespearean adaptation while at the same time always compromising with Shakespeare’s text. The restructuring of Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be regarded as a blatant transgression of the original but the fidelity to the written text suggests how the production tries to assert Lin’s new interpretation without dismembering Shakespeare’s original completely. The use of the cross-talk convention and spoken vernacular Mandarin at the beginning for example, immediately marked the Chinese-ness of the performance; while on the other hand, the image of two gravediggers and the translated Shakespearean text also served as a constant reminder of Shakespeare’s presence. Yong Li Lan and Robin Loon in an SAA seminar paper given in 2007, “Appropriation, the appropriate, and intercultural Shakespeare performance”, asserts that the deliberate dramaturgical reordering not only drew attention to Lin’s adaptation as an independent and distinct Hamlet but also simultaneously acknowledged its source;150 thus leaving Shakespeare’s Hamlet dismantled and intact at the same time, as the greatest difference Lin makes is in the way he remembers Hamlet and re-narrativizes (his)story. The intercultural interconnectivity between Shakespeare and this contemporary cultural re-production, in this instance, highlights the ongoing process to establish links not only with different cultures and performance traditions, but also the past and present. This form of intercultural negotiation and the assertion of cultural authority through the re-interpretation and retelling of Hamlet are reinforced through the 150 Yong, Li Lan and Loon, Robin in the joint SAA 2007 Seminar paper, “Appropriation, the appropriate, and intercultural Shakespeare performance.” 92 representation of Hamlet, or in this case, Hamlets. The fractured portrayal of the great Shakespearean hero, Hamlet, in Lin’s production, exposes “Hamlet” as a construct and challenges the character’s iconicity since multiple actors stepped effortlessly into the role of Hamlet throughout the performance. In the marriage scene between Claudius and Gertrude [1.2] we see the morphing of two Hamlets, as the actor playing Claudius exchanged places with the original ‘Hamlet’, in the soliloquy, “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt…”[1.2.129]. Here, the actor playing Claudius changes seamlessly into Hamlet while the actor playing Hamlet assumes the role of Claudius. The change would be almost unnoticeable if one did not know the lines in Hamlet well, as ‘Hamlet’ moved subtly to ‘Claudius’s’ position beside Gertrude and delivered the lines, “No jocund health that Denmark drinks today…”[1.2.125]. Another instance of this switch of roles takes place during the delivery of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy ‘To be, or not to be…’, where the actor playing Polonius becomes ‘Hamlet’ too. The famous soliloquy is dissected and shared between the actors playing Hamlet, Polonius and Claudius, and in so doing de-romanticizes Hamlet’s introspective look on morality, courage and duty as this speech is shared by the evil King and the shrewd Polonius151. These instances of role sharing suggests that there is no one way of playing Shakespeare’s iconic hero (as all three actors differ in their physical appearance and the way they deliver their lines), while at the same time reasserting the notion that China’s Hamlet carries with him the weight of his country’s history. An extract from the programme notes highlights Lin’s approach to creating multiple Hamlets in his production: 151 Li, Pg 90. 93 Everyone is Hamlet…Hamlet is one of us. In the street, we may pass him without knowing who he is. The thoughts that torture him also torment us every day. The choice he needs to make is also the one we face every day. ‘To be, or not to be’ is a question of philosophy, but is also a concrete matter, big or small, in our everyday life.152 This notion of Hamlet as everyman was first voiced by William Hazlitt at the beginning of the 19th century as he remarked that ‘it is we who are Hamlet. The play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history.’153 Like Hazlitt’s identification of Hamlet, Lin’s re-conceptualization of Shakespeare’s iconic hero releases Hamlet from the text and a particular history, thus allows him to be a free-floating signifier that originates from different histories, and assumes and reflects multiple points-of-views. Hamlet is thus identified with the problems of the age, not only in Europe and America, but likewise in China, and this is the added value of the dissemination of Shakespeare to other localities and histories. As Shen Lin suggests, “Legitimacy lies in demonstrating that the value of Shakespeare is always local and timely, not universal and timeless. And this value can only be found when the theatre is willing to risk presenting a Shakespeare thematically in tune with contemporary Chinese reality.”154 Thus, the traits of Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius collided on stage to create a multifaceted and unconventional ‘Hamlet’, one that was made relevant to the contemporary conditions of the Chinese Man, and transported Shakespeare’s play to a different historical context. Lin’s ‘Hamlet’ took on the characteristics and mindset of the other characters - Hamlet’s desire for revenge, obligations as a son and his inability to take action, Claudius’s ambitious nature and unscrupulousness, and 152 Extract in Li, Pg 89. Howe, P.P (ed), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, (21 vols., London: Dent, 1930-4), Pg 232. In Foakes, Pg 15. 154 Kennedy and Yong , Pg 435. 153 94 Polonius’s slyness and distrustfulness; thereby presenting a paradoxical Chinese Hamlet that is both the Renaissance hero and the villain, and could at the same time be seen as honorable yet devious – at the core of this is the enigma of Hamlet’s identity. This new ‘Hamlet’ seemed to reflect the state of China during the late 1980s, especially in the wake of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the rise of capitalism and Western modernity in China. Like earlier Chinese productions of Hamlet that reflected China’s situation (e.g. productions that used Hamlet as social critique or political propaganda), Lin’s multifaceted Hamlet showed that no one type of ‘Hamlet’ could embody the ideals and memories of a nation which was undergoing so many drastic social changes and economic reforms. By not adhering to the structure and conventional staging of Hamlet, this Chinese Hamlet/Hamlet was re-conceptualized to accommodate Lin’s perspective of everyday life in his society. The finale of the play by Fortinbras (played by the actor who was Polonius) in a professional businessman suit then perhaps echoed the new Chinese identity defined by capitalism where ‘everybody now wants to make money or to win prizes or lotteries.’155 Additionally, the presence of multiple Hamlets served as a Brechtian alienation device where audiences were confronted with the act of performance and were made to take notice of the actor and his cultural identity. As James L. Calderwood suggests, Shakespeare has already created in Hamlet a character that is very conscious of his dual identity and Hamlet is able to express both sides of himself, “almost as though he were an actor at a rehearsal”. This is heightened as Hamlet puzzles over the fact that as a character he is fully equipped for revenge, but as an 155 This quote was taken from an interview between Li Ruru and Lin Zhaohua. In Li, Pg 92. 95 actor he is not allowed to proceed with the deed.156 Hamlet’s question, “What would he do, had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?” [2.2.560-562], then maneuvers the audience to take notice of Hamlet as character/actor - not just as a character acting the necessary parts for revenge, but also the actor playing Hamlet on stage. The performative act of role-playing was accentuated by the interchangeability of the actors playing Hamlet, as the character/actor exchanges on stage heightened the performance of identity (both of Hamlet’s performed identities and the actors’ individual identities). This interpretative distance thus emphasized the act of performance which is very valuable in intercultural theatre as it draws one’s attention to an actor’s ethnicity, language, locality and ultimately his foreignness. For a production that doubles the effect of role-playing and performance due to its role-sharing device, the play-within-the-play scene was a likely location to intensify the use of this metatheatrical element emphasizing the relationship between performance and the construction of an (intercultural) identity. Although the scene resembles that of the original, the climax of the Murder of Gonzago takes on a Brechtian performative as Polonius’s demand: “give o’er the play” [3.2.268] initiates the re-staging of the murder of Gonzago. Besides this obvious change from the original text, The Mousetrap was further marked by its liveness, as the reenactment of the murder of Gonzago was once again executed by the actor playing Claudius (not Lucianus) who poured the poison into Gonzago’s ear and seized the crown, thus highlighting the act of re-staging “that constitutes both this scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the intercultural relation to Shakespeare’s plays […] metatheatrically, this mutual substitution and conflation of re-enactment, original, and restart that took 156 Calderwood, Pg 32. 96 place presented a characteristic move of East Asian intercultural Shakespeare – a takeover of the creative act of origination.”.157 Here, “time is out of joint” [1.5.189190] as the performance in a performative act of re-play traveled back in time to (re)produce Hamlet’s imitation of the King’s death as Claudius’s own live reenactment of his murderous act. Through this extra-theatrical device, reality becomes pure performance and the force of performance is reaffirmed. The re-winding and repeating of the scene is highly performative and it not only draws attention to the act of performance, as it reenacts not only Lin’s manipulation of the text, but also performs the intercultural (re)production of this version of Hamlet - which is simultaneously a re-production and an original. Lin’s unconventional and intercultural approach towards the re-staging of Hamlet is further emphasized by the self-reflexive modes used in the performance. For instance, the reinterpretation of the ghost of Hamlet’s father as a director sitting on a high chair giving commands to Hamlet on a loudhailer seemed to be analogous to Lin’s own role as the director, who like the ghost of Hamlet’s father is responsible for the action in the performance. Metaphorically, the disappearance of the ghost in this intercultural production can perhaps be connected to China’s own fractured history as this production comes at a time where China’s founding “fathers” have passed, hinting at the need for building new performative modes and cultural lineages. In an interview, Lin was asked about his thoughts towards the melting of the East and West in modern performances, and responded: "I think that East is East, and West is West, that cannot be changed; but went on to say that the meeting of these 157 Yong and Loon. 97 two cultures "is important to the future development of Chinese dramas."158 Lin’s employment of a more relaxed and understated acting style in this performance differed greatly from the demonstrative and operatic histrionics that had characterized Huaju drama in the past,159 and points towards the further development of this Chinese performance form that had been long associated with the dissemination of Shakespeare in China. The performance of his Hamlet can be regarded as that meeting point between separate cultures and performance traditions. The mixing of the Chinese language with non-traditional Chinese performance forms, and the unconventional and experimental staging of Shakespeare coupled with a fully translated text, all point towards a non-dialectic attitude in Lin’s intercultural work. The intermingling of differences and similarities between two separate performance cultures in Lin’s Hamlet (a process that does not position either as a dominant signifier of meaning) denotes the possibility of dialogue between two cultures on a single stage. Furthermore, the ahistorical set and costumes that were disassociated from any recognizable historical period (and this can be regarded as a strength of the performance, as the performance can be released from any definite historical referencing and made to signify beyond the Chinese context) and the radical alterations to the structure of Shakespeare’s text all invite audiences to initiate their own interpretations of a performance that does not provide ready frames of references. By not championing one particular form, Lin’s Hamlet does not try to make one culture stand out more than the other; instead, his experimental and avant-garde approach to Shakespeare shows how two different performance forms can create a single intercultural product that offers multiple interpretations. Although Shakespearean representations have changed throughout China’s history due to the 158 159 http://spanish.china.org.cn/english/NM-e/115200.htm Kennedy and Yong (eds), Pg 423. 98 changing political and ideological shifts in the Chinese society, it can also be considered that it is the contemporary circumstances of China that have led to this unconventional reading of Shakespeare, thus continually reinforcing his current usefulness in a country still in transition. 3.3. Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet (2002) Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet, a co-production between Face to Face, Denmark and TheatreWorks, Singapore, was conceptualized as a site-specific performance that was staged at the Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark, as part of the Hamlet Sommer Festival in 2002. This production of Hamlet was the final installment of Ong’s three-part Shakespeare series and consisted of an international cast and crew, with artists and designers from 11 countries in Asia-Pacific and Europe.160 When asked the reasons for not renaming his Shakespeare performances since they have been drastically reworked, Ong replied, “Without the reference to a standard, this reinvention would not be a political action, hence my insistence on “appropriating” Shakespeare to say something else.”161 Ong’s reinterpretation and representation of Shakespeare to ‘say something else’ seemed to intensify in this final installment, as the disappearance of the central character, Hamlet, echoed Ong’s search for new meaning in Shakespeare’s original through intercultural performativity. One such instance is the short performance set in the dungeon of the castle by Charlotte Engelkes (from Sweden) which was in total silence. Engelkes’ performance was light and playful, as she sat and rolled on a small staircase, danced, ran through walkways and at times “played dead” and hid in cracks in the wall. This performance was very different from the role of the Storyteller she played later in the second half 160 161 This information was taken from the website, http://www.kit.dk/WebPix/hamletpresskit.pdf Ong, Pg 132. 99 of Search: Hamlet, which had her in a dominant speaking role. Here, the Shakespearean text was not the focus, instead the performer and her performance was pushed to the foreground. Without the presence of a verbal script, I had to find other means to relate to the live performance unfolding, though I tried hard to connect her performance to some textual reference in Hamlet and I found myself constantly asking, “Where is Hamlet?”. While her performance continued, I came to realize that in my need to root Engelkes’ performance in textual relevance, I had missed the point of the performance, as the search for Hamlet became the central motivation for the interculturality of the performance, since the active engagement between performer, audience and space gave shape to the possibilities of a new Hamlet text, one that was not dependent on “words, words, words”. The purposeful removal of Hamlet forces both the performers and the audience to reinvent and reinterpret Hamlet/ Hamlet through an intercultural activity that reengages with ‘other’ histories, cultures, and contexts in/through performance. As performance is used in Hamlet to uncover the true nature of things - ‘the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as t’were the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the his form and pressure.’ [3.2.20-2] – and through Hamlet’s advice to the Players, we witness his ideas on theatrical theory which to Shakespeare’s protagonist’s should be examined within their own context;162 performance was also mobilized in Search:Hamlet to question the reality it mirrored, and more significantly, performance was viewed as a reflection or an impression of a particular historical context. This was a prominent issue in Ong’s re-conceptualization 162 Scolnicov, Hanna, “Mimesis, mirror, double”. In Scolnicov and Holland (eds), Pg 94. 100 of Hamlet as he reassessed the identity of Hamlet and Hamlet’s relevance to today’s society within the framework of the diverse cultures and performance traditions he worked with – “Who is Hamlet in our times, in our cultures, in our communities? When you bring a cast originating from many cultures together, obviously everybody has a different image of Hamlet, and a different perception of what is Hamlet’s role – who is Hamlet in their countries? Is it the young man or young woman who is fighting for animal’s rights or a resistance fighter in Timor – he could be a Hamlet.”163 So even though Hamlet was absent during the performance, his presence was reiterated through the reinterpretation and re-presentation of the other characters and cultures on stage. Metatheatrically, the pronounced subjectivity of the diverse re-imaginings of Hamlet through the specificities of different cultures, identities and histories, reflected the current nature of intercultural performances – one that cannot be easily defined and performed. Characteristic of Ong’s earlier intercultural Shakespearean productions, Lear (1999) and Desdemona (2000), Search: Hamlet also interrogates pertinent issues surrounding cultural exchange, identity, and history within Asian intercultural performances. Ong’s comments about his motivations behind creating an “Asian Lear” three years prior are telling of his approaches to interculturalism and cultural identity: In this production of Lear, I have attempted to search for a new world, a new Asia. This new Asia will continue to have a dialogue with the old, with traditions, with history. But this spirit should contain the youth and freshness 163 Scavenius, Alette, ‘Searching for Hamlet: an interview with the director’. Taken from the production website, www.theatreworks.org.sg/interviewks.html. 101 that the present world so desperately needs as it progresses into the new millennium. Harmony is not what I seek but discord. A discord which will be symbolic of the complexity of the new millennium. There are no simple answers anymore. We have to deal with difference as we face the new millennium. We can no longer hold onto simple visions of the outside world and “the other.”164 Unlike Lear that was based on discordance and division to demonstrate the complexities of intercultural interactions and the performance of a plural identity which was highlighted by performers speaking in their respective languages and performing their roles in traditional art forms, like Noh, Beijing Opera, and classical Thai Khon dance; Search: Hamlet points towards the possibilities of intercultural negotiation between modern performance forms and traditional Asian theatre through the process of performance. There were moments in the performance where the motivations of characters and actors would overlap and intersect to demonstrate intercultural interactions. For instance, Laertes’ protectiveness over Ophelia in Shakespeare’s text was reinterpreted and (re)presented through Laertes (played by a Malaysian martial arts performer) teaching Ophelia (a Pop-rock composer and singer from Denmark) martial arts techniques and gestures. The process of Ophelia’s education on stage exemplifies the type of cultural exchange generated through a multicultural, transnational production like this, as the performance itself became a platform for intercultural learning and dialogue. 164 Ong, Keng Sen, “Lear: linking night and day,” The program for Lear, Pg 5. In Ryuta, Carruthers, Gillies (Ed), Pg 8. 102 Although there still seems to be a search for what Ong terms as a “new Asia”, Search: Hamlet encompasses a “new world” that is at the crossroads of East and West, past and present, modern and traditional. The premise for the performance’s interculturality was thus represented through the event, the space, and the performative text. By situating this intercultural version of Hamlet at the Kronborg Castle in Elsinore the audiences were immediately reminded of the historical link between the present performance and the original imaginative world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The performance as part of the Hamlet Summer festival at Elsinore and its title, Search:Hamlet, framed the live event as a metaphorical search for origins, as it reflected the intentions of the many visitors who came to Elsinore every year. The castle’s attraction as the “originary site” of Hamlet, as Yong Li Lan posits, “was selfreflexively treated as an empty frame that mirrored that desire – for the trace of an authentic Hamlet, for the originary scene of the play – that stands in Hamlet’s place at Kronborg every year.”165 However, by having an absent Hamlet in a performance space that purposefully evoked memories of the original text and locality, audiences were confronted with a need to devise alternative ways with which to understand Hamlet, and render the desire to locate an origin as an impossibility. Additionally, the projection of the blueprints of the castle on the castle walls at the end of the performance underscored the motivations of Search: Hamlet as the structural foundations were turned inside out and concrete designs outside in. This strategic use of the Kronborg Castle as “the castle [that] was the original setting which inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet”,166 seemed to signal the desire to inspire a new Hamlet text (that is both Shakespeare and Asian) - one that shares a history with past Hamlets, but also contains the histories and identities of its diverse cast and audience. As W. B. 165 166 Kennedy and Yong (eds), Pg 390 -391. Taken from the website: http://www.kit.dk/WebPix/hamletpresskit.pdf 103 Worthen posits, contemporary Shakespearean performances open “a historicizing dialogue with the past because stage production today participates in the institutional continuity of the theatre industry”.167 Search: Hamlet is then both a search for the tradition and future of Hamlet through the dialogue setup between art forms, performance styles, and the interaction between its international audience and performers. Search: Hamlet can be divided into a two-part performance that takes place within and outside the Kronborg Castle – 1) the start of the performance comprised separating the audiences into smaller groups that watched different solo performances in various locations of the castle, 2) the second half was composed of an ensemble performance by all the performers on an elevated ramp-like stage in the central courtyard. On one level, the initial performance that took place in the Kronborg Castle framed as a museum tour emphasized the positionality of the international audiences as tourists visiting Hamlet’s original site. As well, the divergent mixture of performers and their cultural composition projected the world that comes annually to Kronborg in search of Hamlet – “the nationalities of Shakespeare around the globe”.168 On another level, more prominently in the second half of the performance, the viewing of the various forms of ‘cultural performance’ by the multicultural cast and musicians, further accentuated the act of cultural tourism, though this time ironizing the genre by disjointing Asian performance forms and styles in a European historic monument.169 The tourist framework not only underscored the historicity of the performance, but at 167 Worthen, W.B, “Shakespearean performativity”. In Bristol, Michael, McLuskie, Kathleen, and Holmes, Christopher (ed), Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The performance of modernity, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), Pg 122. 168 Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan (eds), Shakespeare in Asia, (Cambridge University Press, to be published in 2010), Pg 391. 169 Ibid. 104 the same time brought attention to the problematic representations of Asian identities in intercultural performance (elaborated later). The second half of the performance takes the form of a more typical staged performance. The audiences from the sole performances were led out into the central courtyard, and the various performers were positioned at different parts of the openair space. Like Hamlet that begins with multiple questions, the Storyteller started by asking the questions that loomed on everyone’s minds - Who can play Hamlet? Anyone who thinks about revenge today?, Anyone who feels the need to take action?, We are Hamlet. In the presence of a multicultural cast and an international audience, the question of “who can play Hamlet” bears more significance, as people were made aware that the choice of who to play Hamlet (either a Asian or a European performer) and what the iconic character was to represent in this intercultural performance, really becomes a question of cultural authority and autonomy. Not having a Hamlet, therefore releases the text from any binary modes or hierarchical structuring of the East and West dichotomy. The disappearance of Hamlet then is the recognition of the possible inequality of cultural exchanges, and the proposition of creating meaning(s) and identity through diversity and difference. The idea of searching for Hamlet and the interrogation of cultural identity is continued throughout the performance in a series of interview segments, that not only illustrate the desire to understand foreign cultures but the complicated process of understanding difference when “Asian-ness” is not represented through Asian exotica, and when these cultural voices demand to be heard on their own terms. 105 The first interview between the Storyteller and a Thai classical dancer emphasized the preconceived notions regarding Asian performance. She began by asking the Thai performer whether he would classify himself as a dancer, an actor, a performer or an artist and continues to ask him whether the dance he was performing was a “national dance”. The Thai dancer continued to dance around her and does not answer. She continued to ask him whether his shaved head was for religious reasons and “does it have a meaning”. Though the Storyteller’s questions seemed straightforward and factual, they revealed the complexities of understanding performance styles and forms that have a history tied not only to culture but nation. These questions redirected the search for Hamlet and made the audience confront their own cultural presuppositions about Asian traditional performances, and more importantly, Asian identity. Furthermore, the interview also highlighted the assumption that a dance by a Thai performer automatically meant that the dance was a national dance, and that every sign was a signifier of the national and cultural. This demonstrated the problems of how traditional Asian performers are considered as merely vehicles or symbols of “Asian-ness”. This is further emphasized in the second interview as all the Asian performers (who do not speak throughout the rest of the performance) come on stage to tell the Storyteller their personal stories in their native tongue. Instead of trying to understand them, she hides her confusion by playing the theme song of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather over their speeches. This not only shows the reluctance to understand foreign cultures on a deeper and personal level (where performers are recognized not only for their art but their personality/ identity), but also signals the need for communication that does not depend on the knowledge of English and the reliance on national stereotypes (especially in the case of intercultural performance). 106 This performance that was created through a series of rehearsal workshops had artists “develop their characters by utilizing their individual disciplines and their specific cultural backgrounds”.170 Actors were not cast based on gender or physical appearance but on the premise of how well their individual performance styles could (re)present Shakespeare’s characters. Audiences were made to engage with the different performance forms directly and actively so as to understand the story being told on stage since English was not always used to communicate Shakespeare’s narrative. These diverse Asian performance forms not only translated Shakespeare’s characters and text physically, but offered another mode of storytelling, and a different dimension to understanding Shakespeare’s original text and characters. For instance, Pichet Klunchun, a Thai classical dancer from Bangkok, Thailand, used the feminine and graceful Thai classical Khon dance form to create a Gertrude that was silent and obedient to the actions of Claudius. The feminine and gentle quality of the Khon dance was used as a performative device to interpret and re-present Gertrude through movement and style, instead of through the use of language and text. Likewise, Laertes who was performed by Aida Redza, a contemporary Martial Arts dancer from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, displayed strong and decisive moves which created a powerful image of a protective and honorable brother; and an anguished and tormented Ghost was re-presented through contorted and fractured movements, and was performed by Carlotta Ikeda, a Butoh dancer and choreographer from Japan. The performance forms and styles of these Asian art forms embodied the personalities of the characters, and called attention to the performative nature of constructing identity through embodied performance and bodily expressiveness. These non-verbal representations by the Asian performers differed from the European and American 170 Taken from the website: http://www.kit.dk/WebPix/hamletpresskit.pdf 107 performers who spoke (English) or sang throughout the performance, and instead performed Shakespeare through physical expression. The representation of Shakespeare’s characters through Asian dances rather than verbal articulation, mixed with the use of English, pop-music and contemporary references (i.e. The Godfather), demonstrates the possibility of interpreting Shakespeare’s text through contrasting performative modes and idioms on stage.171 The hybridization of the different performance forms and styles perhaps signal the formation of a performative world that projects the condition of modern communities that increasingly work within the logic of the global. The global, in this case, as suggested by Fredric Jameson, should not be regarded only as a process that erases local differences – “It is essentially standardization that effaces the difference between the center and the margins. And although it may be an exaggeration to claim that we are all marginals now […] certainly many new freedoms have been won in the process whereby globalization has meant a decentering and a proliferation of differences.”172 Though he warns interculturalism may not guarantee a productive response to the issues of cultural dominance and marginality, hybridity can be seen as a strategy to subvert/dismantle the binary structures of Asian and Western cultural systems in intercultural Shakespeare performances. These two parts of the performance work together to bring the audience through the processes of intercultural exchanges and artistic creation within an intercultural performance and emphasized the need for intercultural communication, while at the same time, attempting to establish an intercultural product (the stability 171 Kennedy and Yong (eds), Pg 394 -395. Jameson, Fredric, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue”. In Jameson, Fredric and Miyoshi, Masao (eds), The Cultures of Globalization, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), Pg 66. 172 108 of this final performance- product is constantly being challenged). Although Search: Hamlet was conceptualized by a Singaporean director, it cannot be strictly classified as a local Singaporean Shakespeare performance. Recreating Shakespeare’s Hamlet through a series of workshops, an international cast and crew, and having adopted art forms from other South East Asian and Western countries, Ong’s Hamlet refuses a precise definition and cultural classification. Perhaps it is the openness to interpretations and multiplicity of cultures in Search: Hamlet that constitutes its value as an intercultural Shakespearean performance, as it reflects what Richard Schechner suggests as an ideal intercultural system, one without “the overarching and the underpinning universals […] ever achieving harmony, ever combining stability with continuously shifting relations among and in the midst of many different items”.173 Search: Hamlet enacts and embodies the struggle and contradictions of forming a new Asian identity – one that is both local and global (perhaps in this sense, Singaporean), and as Ong notes of his other intercultural projects, “the contradictions of traditional and contemporary are exposed rather than glossed into unity”,174 where hybrid genres and identities are never assumed as taken-for-granted notions. This unconventional intercultural production of Hamlet not only shows the different ways of conveying a Shakespearean text without his language, but also introduces alternative ways of reading and relating to Shakespeare and Asian tradition, now that they are both removed from their original contexts. Though one can criticize the performance as being a cultural museum of foreign art, Ong’s refusal to display a stable and defined performance illustrates the processes and complexities of producing and creating intercultural performance, as the clearly demarcated lines between the Self and the Other are slowly dissolving. Search: Hamlet showcases the value of keeping 173 174 Schechner, Richard, “Intercultural Themes”. In Marranca and Gautam (eds), Pg, 312. Schechner, Pg 310. 109 traditional art forms traceable to a distinct cultural area and the risks of intercultural performances inadvertently reinforcing national stereotypes. It is in this way that nonwestern performance cultures avoid becoming a library of cultural resources and materials, but rather a force that can create new narratives of Shakespeare and Asia. Being so far removed from the cultural, performative and semiotic systems of the West, Shakespeare in Asia affords us the critical distance necessary to understand and theorize the changes to the signification and identification of Shakespeare’s texts and identity. As seen, these cited performances refuse to be easily classified as traditional or modern performance styles or forms, and instead, become symbolic referents of the world beyond the stage. As Yong asserts, “by displacing Shakespeare’s text into cultural forms in which his work and status are implicated through the history of his introduction into Asian cultures, each production mobilizes fictions of the intercultural as the terms through which a spectator re-authorizes his or her cultural identity”.175 Notably, these case-studies demonstrate how Shakespeare is appropriated by different cultures to become native materials, while at the same time, the act of borrowing Shakespeare likewise re-makes native cultures and performance traditions176. The diverse cultural reproductions of a single Shakespearean text, his language and themes, and the resulting alternative meanings and representations of Hamlet/Hamlet as redefined by the divergent contexts Shakespeare is transported to, signals us to look closer at how interculturalism as a theory and a practice alters the interactivity between foreign cultural systems and identities. These intercultural performances reveal how cultural exchanges can likewise exist within a single culture’s historical and traditional structures/systems, consequently shifting the 175 Yong, Li Lan, “Shakespeare and the fiction of the Intercultural”. In Hodgdon, Barbara and Worthen, W. B. (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), Pg 548. 176 Schechner, Richard, “Intercultural Themes”. In Marranca and Gautam (eds), Pg 313. 110 framework of intercultural performance. These Asian Shakespeare performances as paradigms of identity and discourse, therefore, have not only changed our perception of “culture” and “nation”, but equally challenge the limits of interculturality. Since local Shakespeare performance as a mode of (inter)cultural production are increasingly “invoked to define the current stage in the history of the afterlife of Shakespeare’s works”,177 it is imperative that we consider what kind of afterlife Shakespeare is living when revived by Asian contexts and histories. 177 Massai, Pg 3. 111 Chapter Four: What is Intercultural Shakespeare? When I hear a director speaking glibly of serving the author, of letting a play speak for itself, my suspicions are aroused, because this is the hardest job of all. If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it. Peter Brook178 Asian Shakespeare performances have shown that Shakespeare can be heard and seen through different forms of textual and theatrical performances. Additionally, they challenge old approaches to Shakespeare which “start with the linguistic text, and in English”, and by doing so, produce new approaches to Shakespeare that contest his dominating position in the global market.179 Intercultural performances create performance texts that can bring another dimension, or rather a different dramatic context to Shakespeare and his texts, through the use of mise-en-scene, Asian art forms, performance traditions, foreign languages, and even theatrical architecture. The transportation of Shakespeare to different localities see him shifting through divergent and unfixed historical, social, cultural, and dramatic frames, far removed from his own origin; and the translation of Shakespeare’s text to be made relevant to modern Asian societies, then is also the re-performance and re-production of new meaning(s) purposefully set at a critical distance from the site of origin while perpetually referencing the original - Shakespeare. It is because of this relationship between the original and the foreign that cultural identity and authority are reasserted 178 179 Brook, Peter, The Empty Space, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), Pg 43. Ibid, Pg 158. Kennedy (ed), Pg 20. 112 and re-authorized through Asian Shakespearean performances. However, it is also due to this correlation that intercultural Asian Shakespeare performances run the risk of being trapped in the binary structure of the West and East. It is imperative, therefore, to not focus simply on the dissimilarities between Asian Shakespeare performances and conventionalized “English” Shakespeare performance, but to examine how intercultural performance becomes a bridge that connects these two distances together. The close analysis of Asian Hamlets in chapter three demonstrated how Asian intercultural Shakespeare performances challenged and reshaped the meaning of “authentic” Shakespeare and the concept of a stable cultural identity. In effect, it is these two components working together that generate the intercultural performativity and productivity in Asian Shakespeare performances, as both Shakespeare and Asia are redefined and repositioned in relation to one another. Intercultural performances thus afford the space for the clashes, the incompatibilities and the contradictions to mix and mingle, and finally it is through the differences between cultures that identities are signified and re-produced. The analysis of the history and development of Asian Shakespearean performances has shown us how Shakespeare’s usefulness and presence in Japan, China, and Singapore has been a result of very different socio-political, and historical circumstances. It also demonstrates how there is a history of the intercultural, both in performance and in discourse, and it is through this analysis that the necessary historical dimension and critical perspectives can be formed to address the developments in intercultural studies and practice.180 Though the reasons for transporting and the models of translating Shakespeare varies from culture to culture, 180 Tatlow, Anthony, Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), Pg 30 -34. 113 Shakespeare, as seen in this thesis, has been used constantly as a means to, articulate, construct, reinforce, reproduce, re-perform ideologies of national and cultural identities. Despite the fact that these reincarnations of Shakespeare reiterate the specificity of local Shakespeares, they also strengthen the concept that these seemingly isolated examples are part of a larger context of a “globalized” Shakespeare. Studying the particularities of Shakespeare in Japan, China and Singapore, not only destabilizes Shakespeare as the center of local Shakespeare appropriations and his universality, but more importantly, dismantles the unified idea of Asia and undermines the monolithic (often Westernized) frames of watching Asia and Shakespeare, thus widening the discursive field of traditional Shakespeare scholarship. These performances enlarge our understanding of Shakespeare, but due to the subjectivity and positionality involved in the reception and the research of Asian Shakespeares, watching Shakespeare can often lead to misunderstandings. As the value of intercultural performances are not only determined by intercultural activity, but also intercultural spectatorship, misunderstandings, or rather, misreadings, can lead to intercultural dialogue and enquiry as we challenge and try to relate to what we do not understand through our own experiences. Anthony Tatlow posits, that there is a different kind of urgency and need to understand (inter)cultural appropriations we encounter, so much so that “when we now seek it out, we come up against an appropriation of our ‘own’ culture, which we then reappropriate in our act of interpretation, as we could never have done without the passage through the foreign”.181 With this said, intercultural spectatorship not only helps us relate to the foreign via our own cultural position and contexts, but it also draws attention to how the self is likewise a product of cultural attitudes and ideological structures. As 181 Ibid, Pg 60-63. 114 discussed in the earlier chapters, the performance on stage is not just an isolated event, but a complex negotiation between multiple contexts and frameworks, involving the performance, the audience and the live theatrical event that accumulates to the question – how do we make sense of what is being shown to us? As much as the A-S-I-A project tries to encourage a comparative approach to intercultural research, this process is not going to happen easily, as even though anyone can watch intercultural Shakespeare, not everyone can “talk” about him, as this requires specialized and educated knowledge. Interestingly, an initial step to bridge that gap between cultures and foster intercultural research practices, A-S-I-A has placed a lot of focus on translations, not only of the performance text for the different Asian Shakespeare productions, but also for the metadata material. So, as much as foreign Shakespeares have utilized other ways of approaching Shakespeare, through the visual and the representational, a key way to widen the scope of comparative research is also through the use of (non-English) language, so that the distance between the native and the foreign can be shortened. Perhaps, what is imperative now, is not defining what intercultural Shakespeare is, but what intercultural Shakespeare does. The study of the diverse intercultural strategies employed by divergent cultures (as seen in chapter three) serves to formulate a methodology of performance research, which focuses on process rather than product. So although the contexts and the implications of each performance are different, we can still interrogate and examine the ways in which intercultural Shakespeare performances modifies not only Shakespeare but the culture that appropriates him. Interculturalism, as established in this thesis, is an ongoing process that will incessantly change as cultures continue to re-define themselves, as the concepts of 115 ‘culture’ and ‘nation’ are constantly in the process of construction, since histories and geographies of the Self are continuously encountering that of the Other, especially in the global age. What the term can signify now is the practice, the dialogue, the exchanges between cultures, both within a locale and beyond borders. Therefore, for practiced and performed interculturalism to be more global in its affiliations, Asian intercultural forms and theories must start to hold a more significant position in intercultural discourse. Though interculturalism as examined cannot be designated with a complete definition, the interrogation of the problematic issues of (inter)cultural reading and intercultural Shakespeare performances can bring us closer to a firmer grasp of the concept. Concluding with a personal experience, a recent Shakespeare performance comes to mind. While watching Sam Mendes’s The Winter’s Tale (2009), which was a joint trans-Atlantic theatrical venture for Brooklyn Academy for Music (BAM) and the Old Vic in London, produced by The Bridge Project, I found myself thinking, “so this is what Shakespeare is supposed to sound like”, but as the play progressed I found myself searching intensely for some sort of hidden or added meaning embedded in the mise-en-scene, the costumes, and the characters/actors on stage, and asked, “ how is Shakespeare re-envisioned/ re-imagined in this production?” While the production did modernize Shakespeare’s play as Sicilia became England and Bohemia became America, the use of English and American accents to demarcate geography on stage and its all-western cast, served as a reminder that this production was part of the Anglo-American history of producing Shakespeare. When comparing this production to the other intercultural Asian Shakespeare performances I have watched, I felt this performance while charged with a verbal ferocity and set amidst a captivating mise- 116 en-scene that transported Shakespeare to another era, it failed to make a sound (in Brook’s words). In retrospect, I realized that what I was looking for was really what I have grown to be accustomed to when watching intercultural Asian performances – the desire to witness the performative possibilities and complexities that can arise from intercultural interaction(s), exchange(s) and incoherence between two (or more) distinct cultures. I am not advocating that only intercultural performances have the transformative qualities to re-present Shakespeare in ways that we have never seen before, but perhaps, Asian Shakespeares can say much more as they are not weighed down by the cultural and traditional baggage of conventional Shakespearean performance. The intercultural negotiation/ interaction between two or more very different and often contradicting performance and cultural systems can conceivably enable new expressive and interpretative dimensions to Shakespeare’s play, but also alters the ways one can approach Asian performance traditions.182 This international touring performance being part of a three year trans-Atlantic collaboration between high-profile producers and exceptional performers (e.g. Rebecca Hall and Simon Russell Beale) from America and the UK, exemplifies the need to produce a Shakespearean performance that can travel as a representative of Anglo-American Shakespeare. This idea that touring Shakespeare performances can be regarded as international representatives of native cultures and identities, thus leads us to the pressing problems that can arise when there is an over-determined expectation and desire to see expressive/ performative possibilities and (inter)cultural exchanges take form in intercultural performances. As much as there is a value in conventional 182 Tatlow, Pg 68. 117 English Shakespearean production to carry on the tradition of “Shakespeare”, Asian Shakespeare performances are thus valued for their unconventionality, foreignness, and difference. 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Shakespeare is particularly useful as Asian Shakespeare performances can be placed alongside Shakespeare, and seen as a driving force that can enable the expansion of Shakespeare as a global cultural field On the other hand, Schechner asserts that not all intercultural performances present utopian ideals and aim for integration, and they may instead expose the complexities and possibilities of performances... intercultural performances can start to include any performance that simply has an international cast, transnational production crew, or are multicultural adaptations/ productions, that do not take into account the distinctive cultural interactivity and exchange(s) that can take place in intercultural performances For instance, Julia Holledge and Joanne Tompkins characterize intercultural performances as “the... representations of Shakespeare in Asian theatre as a means of understanding Shakespeare from a different perspective, the danger of generalizing and exoticizing Asian Shakespeare as a non-verbal/physically expressive form (that can release “Shakespeare” from his words) and defining Shakespeare through /as his language, is the reification of binary structures between East and West, performance and text... native Shakespeares, by tracing Shakespeare’s mobility through the frames of cultural, social, topical, political, and historical contexts and references A- S-I -A s performance metadata provides empirical evidence necessary for formulating a methodology to analyze and study Asian intercultural Shakespeare performances so as to encourage comparative and collaborative research between differing Asian cultures... Shakespeare”, but Criag Dionne and Parmita Kapadia warn that this international showcase at the RSC Theatre may not necessarily “produce a genuine pluralism”.8 Instead, Dionne and Kapadia assert that the RSC’s intentions behind inviting international Shakespeare productions to perform at the old RSC Theatre’s final season (as it was to be torn down and replaced by a larger arena-style playhouse) was motivated... Jacqueline, Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore, (Hongkong University Press, 2004), Pg 1 8 Asian performance forms and traditions used in performances this way may very well reduce Asian Shakespeare to an elaborate all-you-can-eat-Asian Exotica buffet with plenty of artificial flavoring but consisting of no real substance, leaving Shakespeare as the star ingredient that holds... Two: Asian Shakespeares – (Re)engaging History Through Intercultural Shakespeare Performances There is no single reason for or approach to Asian appropriations of Shakespeare This chapter will show how the transference of Shakespeare to Asian nations like Japan, China, and Singapore are conditioned by historical, cultural, and political circumstances, and also influenced by different performance traditions,... reworking(s) is always made to signal at history, or what has come before, and intercultural Shakespeare performances more often than not signal at the present-ness of a new cultural interpretation Following Pavis’s definition of hybridization, “Shakespeare” in intercultural Shakespeare performances is immediately cancelled as a (re)source for cultural reproduction, and traditional Asian art forms may also run... reassesses the ways in which Asian Shakespeare performances have reshaped, reconfigured and re-performed context(s), and Asia’s relationship with text (Shakespeare) Before I begin elaborating on A- S-I -A, it is necessary to address my individual positionality As metadata editor, I have access to a multitude of perspectives and materials from Shakespearean scholars, practitioners, and researchers, and the experience... experience of watching, collecting and editing various Asian Shakespeare 40 41 Ibid, Pg 236 Kennedy, Pg 301 30 performances and metadata materials has alerted me that my cultural position at times locates me as an insider to certain performances (due to language and knowledge), but more often than not, I am reminded that I am still an outsider to other forms of Asian Shakespeares (also due to language and knowledge) ... performance as a critical paradigm to examine the developments and limitations of existing intercultural Shakespeare studies As Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia assert, local Shakespeare performances... Shakespeare Scholarship on what Shakespeare, Asian Shakespeare, intercultural Shakespeare and contemporary Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation is, or rather, can be Therefore, it is imperative... of interculturalism have affected and effected our understanding and theorizing of past and present Asian (intercultural) Shakespeare performances For instance, is there value in naming Asian