Interview with Erika Fischer-Lichte 

1. Amine: The international debates on the politics of intercultural theatre practices have not only critiqued such artistic ‘syncretism’ and negotiations, but articulated an optimistic belief in the achievability of a common “interweaving” across worldwide performance cultures.  Erika Fischer-Lichte is justly and internationally acclaimed as an exemplary demystifier – the thinker who has provided unsurpassed critiques of Eurocentric intercultural performance elements that lurk in the work of various Western theatrical enterprises that travelled East & South. We are constantly reminded of your critique: “The starting point for intercultural staging is thus not primarily an interest in the foreign – the foreign theatre or the foreign culture from which it is taken – but rather a situation completely specific within its own culture or a completely specific problem having its origin within its own theatre” (1990: 283). How would you contextualize your position within the intercultural theatre debate since the late 1980s?

Erika Fischer-Lichte: In the 1980s, the debate on intercultural theatre mainly focused on European directors, such as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Eugenio Barba, or American directors, such as Richard Schechner and Robert Wilson, who used elements from non-Western, mostly Asian theatre traditions in their productions in order to create new kinds of theatre. This way they continued a tradition initiated by European directors, such as Max Reinhardt, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov and Bertolt Brecht, to name just the most famous ones. In those times, East Asian theatre traditions seemed to open up a completely new dimension beyond psychological-realistic theatre. The question driving this was: Where can we find elements for a new theatre that can cope with the current social, political and cultural reality? This applied to the first decades of the 20^th century as well as the 1980s. In both cases, Asian theatre traditions were regarded as a source for one’s own experiments. The directors taking this approach, in turn, were highly praised for their innovations. The only non-Western director famous in the West for his intercultural productions was Suzuki Tadashi, whose Trojan Women proved to be a sensation wherever it was shown.

Being deeply dissatisfied with this situation, I organized a conference in 1988 bearing the title “Theatre – Own and Foreign” – in hindsight, I would not use this title today but I’ll come to that. For the conference I invited theatre scholars and artists not only from Europe and the United States, but also from Africa, Japan, China, India and Indonesia, who all had a lot to say on “intercultural theatre” in their own countries. In my view, this conference proved very productive. Without outside audiences and focusing on what each participant had to contribute, we debated the different kinds of problems originating in the numerous ways in which elements from different cultures were used and re-contextualized in the productions under discussion, to very different ends and purposes. In addition to the resulting publications with contributions from the participants – such as my own book “The Dramatic Touch of Difference” (1990) or Patrice Pavis’ “The Intercultural Performance Reader” (1996) – the most important outcome was the insight into the widespread dissemination of what we called intercultural theatre and the diversity of its practices and purposes.

2. Amine: Your research has created new horizons for both “the interweaving of performance cultures” and “interweaving cultures in performance”. The interweaving research project led by you transcends intercultural theatre aesthetics as a GLOCAL SPECTRUM with an incredible capacity to incorporate and integrate diasporic identities and migrating groups beyond national one-sidedness and internal otherness.

Erika Fischer-Lichte: Because of the insight mentioned above, I preferred to use another term instead of “intercultural theatre”: “interweaving performance cultures” or “interweaving cultures in performance”. Such interweavings today not only happen concerning the performance traditions of different cultures, but different kinds of performance traditions are interwoven within a single culture due to migration processes. This has always been true historically as well, though the situation today of course is much more complex than most scholars would have imagined even back in the 1980s. This is why today the use of the phrase “theatre, own and foreign” no longer makes sense. After all, from whose perspective are we defining what is one’s own and what is foreign? These categories don’t apply anymore. The introduction of the “interweaving” metaphor is a first step towards opening up the research on the manifold and highly diverse processes of interweaving performance cultures that we can witness all over the world. The term “intercultural theatre”, coined after the official end of colonialism, and claiming that all cultures meet on an equal footing, today seems rather misleading.

3. Amine: The interweaving project invites international case studies to explore the politics of globalization, looking at new paternalistic forms of exchange between West and East, North and South and the new diversities emerging from it. These case studies might be guided by the principle that processes of interweaving performance cultures are, in fact, political processes. The authors might explore the inextricability of the aesthetic and the political, whereby the aesthetic cannot be perceived as opposite to the political; rather, the aesthetic is the political.

Erika Fischer-Lichte: The relationship between the aesthetic and the political dimension in such processes of interweaving is, in fact, an intricate one. The term “aesthetics” for me does not refer to a theory of the beautiful, as it began in the 18^th century – but, rather, the sum total of the artistic means that are applied and affect the senses of the spectators. Processes of interweaving are aesthetic processes insofar as they combine elements and devices from different traditions, thus creating new relationships between them and partly changing them through this very process. The way single elements from different “origins” meet and become interlinked may have multiple effects on spectators not only from different cultures but even within a rather homogeneous audience. This aesthetic dimension turns out to be political in many respects – not only in such obvious cases as when an accusation of an illegitimate appropriation of elements from another culture is made, or that of a “contamination” of an otherwise “pure” performance tradition. The political dimension may go much further. It applies to the possibilities such an interweaving may open up for reflecting on the relationship between different cultures, particularly on the risk of neither falling into the trap of homogenization nor into that of essentialization. Both would mean the end of any productive encounter between artists, or between artists and audiences originating from different cultures. The aesthetic thus proves to be the political.

4. Amine: It is very clear from your eloquent responses, here and elsewhere, that the journeys of performance cultures are by no means processes of invasion, contamination, or even infiltration. Such journeys may actually be far more indirect, volatile, and informed by the shifting topography of detour. Despite the tensions and resistances which might occur during the initial processes of interweaving, “some kind of amalgam will eventually emerge”, as our colleague Stephen Barber once put it in the Arab Theatre Festival (Rabat, 2015), an amalgam that is irreducibly other than the so-called pure, original, and privileged form. In this context, can we think of interweaving cultures in performance as a first step in the intentional production of meaning and the production of difference from preexisting performance traditions?

Erika Fischer-Lichte: On the one hand, such processes of interweaving link back to particular traditions and, on the other, they are able to respond to the conditions set by the complicated transformations all societies are facing today. They may result in new forms of interconnectedness that do not require discarding one’s own traditions or thoughtlessly adopting those of others. These forms of interconnectedness will also bring forth new differences. Whether this entails the intentional production of meaning is rather doubtful. The different ways in which it will be evaluated and what meanings will be attributed to it by different collectives and individuals remains to be seen. Whatever emerges out of such processes will pose a challenge to everyone involved. Ideally, such processes of interweaving will function and be received as a kind of utopian Vorschein – a ‘pre-appearance’ of new modes of interconnectedness, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch put it. Also, in this regard, the aesthetic once again proves to be indissolubly linked to the political – in fact, it is by itself to be regarded as political.

5. Amine: Can we think of performance as a body of conjoined residues, each working together in a complex symphony of interactions? Can we think of the interweaving critique as a steppingstone to the inner self of performance practice, to its acquaintanceship with the whole of what it is, yet without falling into the over-reductionist trap of separating the constitutive elements of performance into ‘own and foreign’, as you so eloquently elaborated in many of your writings? Is it possible to envision a methodology of exploring performance diversity, topography, and mapping its ‘genetic’ traces as markers of human venture on earth without reproducing the same mistakes committed during the “Intercultural Theatre” era? Can this methodology be compared to DNA profiling in the field of biology today? DNA (or heredity in biology), the nucleic acid that is the genetic material determining the makeup of all living cells, is responsible for the transmission of hereditary characteristics from parents to offspring.

Erika Fischer-Lichte: In my view, performances are privileged phenomena or indeed processes that are ideally suited to allowing such a utopian Vorschein to become a reality to be perceived and sensed while participating in them – as performer and as spectator. If participants find ways to meaningfully relate all elements of the performance to each other, such a precious moment will emerge. It does not really matter whether the spectators will recognize the “origin” of the elements even in their transformation, as long as this does not fallaciously lead them to juxtapose their “own” with those of others. Rather, it is necessary that they recognize and experience the relationship between all the elements involved as something new that does not erase differences but uses them for the production of new differences that speak to them. Such a process does not allow for any kind of (self-)exoticizing or (self-)orientalizing, but instead opens up and negotiates new ways of sharing this world as a common space. In fact, in such performances the age-old idea of performance as “tua res agitur” (it is a matter that concerns you) and of the stage as the symbol of the world would come true in an unprecedented manner. This is just the opposite of a performance that uses elements from different cultures for purely economic reasons, i.e. of a festival-hopping performance as an international commodity. Instead, such a performance will challenge the spectators of whichever culture in which it is taking place to reflect on difference(s) and to negotiate them in diverse and unpredictable ways.

6. Amine: In line with your inspiring Interweaving project, I believe that cultures absorb material vestiges, remnants, echoes, remains and tattoos of a silent history that is quite literally inaccessible until subjected to an archeology of silence and a process of transcription or translation. Double critique, for me, re-evaluates that very landscape and highlights the multiple crossroads and palimpsests of interweaving and underlying acts of arché-writing. It is a double-edged weapon that is sometimes directed against itself as an “untreated difference”. It calls for re-thinking the hegemony of the West and the subordination of the East, the Orient, the Third World, or any number of other names used by the West to designate areas that are not the West, I mean the global South as opposed to what Spivak calls “the Feudal North in-the-South”. Do you see that this critique is badly needed in certain regions today, such as the Arab world?

Erika Fischer-Lichte: The history of encounters and exchanges between different cultures – individuals as well as collectives – goes back to ancient times. It already applied to the early cultures we know of, such as the Mesopotamian cultures, Egyptian culture, East African cultures or pre-Columbian, Mayan cultures. Such encounters left an imprint and changed the status quo but are nowadays forgotten and buried under the call for uniqueness. Such ‘uniqueness’ usually emerged as the result of diverse exchanges – i.e. of processes of interweaving. This is how, in different parts of the globe and at different times, highly developed cultures came into being, resulting in a multifocal landscape of cultures that contradicts and is opposed to the dichotomy of “the West and the rest”. Nowadays, sadly, such processes are easily forgotten and negated in order to uphold the ideology of one’s own uniqueness and purity. Therefore, the double critique you are demanding is indeed urgently necessary today in order to help people remember. This holds true for all cultures – there has always been a give and take. Such processes of remembrance will lay bare the fact that the hegemony of any single culture and the subordination of others, in particular the hegemony of the West or of “the Feudal North-in-the-South” cannot be legitimized, let alone justified. The dichotomy of “the West and the rest” – as so many others – has collapsed. Processes of interweaving cultures in performance are one of the factors that led to and exposed this collapse. The relationship between all cultures has to be reconceived and renegotiated. Dichotomy has been replaced by interconnectedness resulting from a process of give and take. No clear leadership role can be identified in this process. Rather, we have a mutual or reciprocal response. It can be compared to what happens in an improvisation between, say, a flutist from one culture and a dancer from another – it develops as an ever-changing mutual response to each other. Double critique is therefore badly needed today in most parts of the world, including the Arab world. Ideally, interweaving performance cultures or interweaving cultures in performance articulate such a double critique and invite or even demand from the performers and spectators alike to spell it out and reflect on its consequences.