Abstract
The twentieth-century modernist use of Asian theatre cannot be isolated and relegated to the history of Western theatre, and must be treated as an integral part of the twentieth-century modernist movement in Western theatre. Its legacy had a direct impact on the theories and practices of Western intercultural theatre in the second half of the twentieth century, and today, it continues to haunt those developed in the twenty-first century. Unlike the founding fathers of modern Western theatre featured in this book, who had not seen an Asian theatre performed on its native soil, their heirs, such as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Eugenio Barba, had the fortune of experiencing and studying at least one of the Asian forms performed on its native soil. Their use of Asian theatre, however, was undergirded by the same mechanism and dynamic of displacement conditioned by their redefined intercultural relationship with Asian theatre.
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Antonin Artaud, “Préface: Le théâtre et la culture” (Artaud 1978b, 14). Artaud’s preface was most likely written after his 1936 Mexican trip (276, n. 1). In his preface, Artaud noted that “all magic cultures [are] expressed in appropriate hieroglyphs” (13), but nowhere did he mention the Balinese or any other Asian theatre. In his essay, “Le théâtre et la peste” (1933), Artaud argued that, like the plague, the theatre is a disease in the human anatomy that needs to be shocked and destructed in order to reveal and exteriorize “the depth of latent cruelty” (Artaud 1978b, 29). Again, in this easy, written after his experience of the Balinese theatre, Artaud did not mention any form of Asian theatre.
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According to Barba, “Defining one’s own professional identity implies overcoming ethnocentricity to the point of discovering one’s own centre in the ‘tradition of traditions’” (Barba 1999, 267).
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Tian, M. (2018). Conclusion: A Haunting Legacy. In: The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97178-0_11
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