Contextualizing the Debate

International theatre research has long studied the world before undergoing its revolution from the inside. Should the world study back or, rather, perform back while striving for recognition? The intercultural debate of the 1980s and 1990s implied the possibility of a democratic interweaving of performance cultures across the globe. Still, the task of postcolonial scholarship is further complicated by the existing body of world theatre histories. Our performance cultures are hardly visible in the “universal narrative of capital – History 1”, typically edited out, and otherwise often only mentioned on the borderlines between absence and presence. Europe has always been the silent referent in world theatre history. With rising demands for further democratizing the discipline, new modes of writing theatre history from below have emerged with an earnest desire for inclusion. Obviously, “third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate.” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attempt to interrupt the totalizing thrust of History 1 is immediately caught in a double bind and was soon problematized by Rustom Bharucha in the margins of his seminal essay “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare”. Chakrabarty’s “historicist debt to Europe had overpowered his critique of Eurocentricity, so much so that (in my reading, at least) Chakrabarty ends up ‘provincializing Bengal’” rather than Europe.

We are constantly reminded of Frantz Fanon’s conclusion in The Wretched of the Earth, where he repudiated the degraded ‘European form’ and called for something different: “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe […]. For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.” Fanon’s reliance on theoretical Marxism, however, soon undermined his oppositional writing. Unlike Fanon, Chakrabarty ends up proclaiming “an anti colonial spirit of gratitude”: “provincializing Europe cannot ever be a project of shunning European thought. For at the end of European imperialism, European thought is a gift to us all. We can talk of provincializing it only in an anti colonial spirit of gratitude.” Such spirit attracts our attention to an ambiguous compromise that is complicit with the radical West in its critique of Eurocentric underpinnings of consumerist modernity, along with the “universal narrative of capital – History 1.”

This is precisely where the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi’s concept of double critique is effective in problematizing the very notion of the binary: Khatibi’s call is similar to Fanon’s but his strategy deconstructs rather than reverses the language of Manichaeism. His line of questioning disrupts all sorts of binary definitions of Self and Other, East and West. It is essentially a critique that weaves in and out of philosophical lines of influence belonging to both the East and the West. By casting the West as the Other, Fanon runs the risk of homogenizing the multifold West into one single entity. Perhaps it is a tactical move on Fanon’s part in an effort to counter what he sees as Europe’s lack of differentiation of “silent societies” she commonly categorizes as ‘Third World’, ‘under-developed’, or ‘developing’. Khatibi’s call for a pensée-autre (a thought of difference) is a third path toward decolonization, a double subversion that strives to elude “wild difference”. This pensée-autre is a way of re-thinking difference and identity without recourse to essentialist absolutes and “isms”. It is an “archeology of silence” and a resistance of recuperation within a closed system. The thought of difference requires a radical rupture to “escape its own theological and theocratic foundations which characterize the ideology of Islam and of all monotheism.” Meanwhile, it claims to stand on a different ground than the West; “for we want to uproot Western knowledge from its central place within ourselves, to decenter ourselves with respect to this center, to this origin claimed by the West.” The transgressive effects of such a critique as a subaltern form of deconstruction are already apparent in its transformation rather than passive borrowing from the radical West. “The Occident is part of me, a part that I can only deny insofar as I resist all the Occidents and all the Orients that oppress and disillusion me.”

Double critique 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.e. the global South as opposed to what Spivak calls “the Feudal North in-the-South”. It also calls for re-thinking the Maghreb, the home country, and considering it for what it currently is: a container of multiple identities, a sedimental layering of cultures past and present, in permanent flux between moments of conviviality and tragic sublimity. The Maghreb has long been at the crossroads of civilizations, a point of intersection for various encounters, coveted by different powers, notably Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Spaniards, Portuguese, English, Arabs and Turkish. Double critique is a decolonizing archeology that leads to an examination of the binary concepts of East and West, Occident and Orient, and the philosophical, metaphysical, and theological traditions propagated in each domain. This double-edged critique encompasses a deconstruction of critical discourses on performance that used to speak in the name of the Arab world but was informed by a deeply rooted Eurocentrism. In the meantime, the second critique is a reflection on the ‘politics of nostalgia’ and how the Arabs view their performance cultures. Double critique is an effect of a plural genealogy wherein one stages his/her confrontation of Self and Other, East and West. Khatibi often refers to himself as a ‘professional foreigner’. The question, here, is very much related to the location of exile in any attempt to restore the postcolonial subject to his/her humanity. Throughout his lifetime, he tried different genres of writing in an ever-lasting attempt to exile the consciousness of exile.

But the outbreak of World War II disrupted his plans and tied his fate to Buenos Aires, where he disembarked. Twenty-six years and 332 days in Poland; twenty-three years and 226 days in Argentina; this is Gombrowicz’s tally on his return journey, when the two ships meet in his imagination and he becomes his own asynchronous vis-à-vis.

In 2011, in a charming house, that has already been nick-named “Villa Verflechtungen” or rather “The Interweaving Villa”, two flights of stairs, one originally intended for servants, the other for their masters, are the threads that combine three floors of offices and leisure rooms. A house built at the beginning of the 20^th century, it is situated in the vicinity of pharmacists, biologists and zoologists near the Botanical Garden with its fascinating collection of microscopic samples. The immediate neighbors are beekeepers. During wintertime they host up to 30 populations, i.e. 600,000 of bees that in spring time will whisper about their secret knowledge in neuro-biology, on the brain and maybe share with the scientists how they organize long-distance flights without losing orientation.

The initial owner of the house was a retired cavalry captain by the name of Friedrich Bugge. At the time of construction, he was executive director of the Swakopmund Trading Company. Swakopmund by the way, now an amiable seaside resort in Namibia with the architectural aura of a North Sea bath, was once the capital harbor of the former German colony South-West Africa. The company’s task and challenge was to entangle Berlin and Hamburg in the dealings with a distant corner of the world and make an orderly state out of this supposed no man’s land, a bare and hostile landscape inhabited only by semi-nomads, farming or breeding animal stock.

In 1904, as many as 4,500 Germans had already settled all over South-West Africa with the Swakopmund Trading Company at the peak of its commercial operations and on the brink of fulfilling its hopes and aspirations. However, the uprising of the indigenous Herero and Nama in South-West Africa at about the same time marked the beginning of a three year long war and slaughter. It was a de facto genocide: one tribe was driven onto an arid steppe, the few wells surrounding them were sealed off by members of the Imperial German Protection Force and 50,000 to 60,000 people died.

An early, self-chosen official program: The Freie Universität Freedom Award presented to the former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, on 15 November 2010. The ceremony: respectful, polite. The speeches recall the courageous foundation of the institution: the protests, the determination, the unwavering quest for intellectual freedom and independence of ideological ideas that in 1948 already were beginning to strangle the re-opened University of Berlin (now Humboldt University) in the Soviet sector. Robinson describes her recent visit to a Palestinian refugee camp as a member of The Elders, a group of retired, independent statesmen who can speak freely and boldly. She turns to the few students present and encourages them, “Follow what’s going on, because it’s your generation!” When did university lose its glamour? Its verve? Its strength?

As scholars, we strive for accuracy. In our particular field of research, for a culture of new differences, linking overdue historical clarifications with new forms of performance. We embark on voyages to undiscovered lands and discover unrepresented, prosperous objects of scientific interest as we still share avant-garde hopes; yet we resemble gold diggers, colonial explorers or greedy children grabbing at samples of strange cultures and their expressions. They are merely mutations of our selves meant to sustain our own existence. On this ostensible path to turning ourselves into polygamous souls, we are more than ever in need of writers, artists and scholars – who with eagle eyes watch, analyze, consult and interfere in the process of transformation.

Once a week, in the afternoon the house is open for illustrious guests: all experts finding common ground in their deep concern for cultural policy. They are invited for high tea, apogee of the British Empire, while it rains heavily outside, flooding the fragile banks of piled sand. Sailors, condemned to do nothing while waiting during a calm, started interlacing the ropes lying in their hands, thus weaving their fancywork. Now, is this a calm or a turmoil?

To Gombrowicz, Berlin was like Lady Macbeth – constantly washing her hands. Now, the city is a greenhouse of ideas, famous for its voids: artificial, leftover or bankrupt while breathtaking neighborhoods as the hysterical skyscrapers at Potsdamer Platz and the ponderous Martin Gropius Bau make perfect platforms for red carpet events. What’s the fuss all about, then? With so many histories of migration, travels and encounters already within ourselves, how can we distinguish between what has been borrowed, digested or excluded and what will be eternally different?

When the indigenous people of South-West Africa made it to a German stage it was in form of a burlesque, written in 1909 called “Punch as Herero”. However, no Herero character was in the cast. The story went like this: Punch is getting drunk in a tavern when his money runs out. He solves his quandary with the help of some black shoe polish. Thus, in blackface, he acts out the part of a savage cannibal. And so he drinks on, paying for his beer with the entrance fees of the curious crowd.

Upon his departure in March 2010, Khalid Amine gave an interview about his time and experiences at the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures.”

Further information on Khalid Amine’s work at the International Centre for Performance Studies in Tangier, Morocco, can be found here.

Besides these motifs, I would like here to emphasize work and effect of the interface of translation. In both processes – of translating and interweaving, which are interrelated on several levels – there is no place for the illusion of a pure and immediate consonance, because their dynamic and their forms of connection are rather to be seen as the procedure of a negotiation and as its tentative result.

Translations make us remember that in interweaving spaces we roam from difference to difference. Their transitions are not only to be understood linguistically, but culturally in a broader sense. What matters is much more mediation, which can be experimented through diverse detours and which effectuate deviation and transformation ever and ever again. Such processes are only made possible – and this is the kind of interweaving I would like here to stress – when the involved actors assume the transformability of their premises and agree to put them at risk. The outset of the oscillating space for assemblies and new arrangements depends on the assumption of this sense of one’s own unstableness and therefore precariousness.

A dimension of how far translations can reach I received through interchanges among Amerindians known as Waiwai in Northern Amazonia, not only because of their dense interrelated cosmos and their amazing linguistic talent, but above all because of their conviction that a direct relation – as for example the one through eye contact, which is so important in Western ways of relating – is only an uncultivated and therefore minimal relation. Their translations provide and take care of the life and, to be more precise, the afterlife of a relation whilst engaging with its ripped and fringe laterality rather than with its permanence.

This kind of indirect lateral relation can be connected with the conceptual image of detour as described in the work of Hans Blumenberg, where Umweg (detour) appears as the device of excellence of cultural creations. In this approach detours are means of divergence and plurality in the face of the homogeneity promoted by the institutionalization of the shorter and more direct way. While from the point of view of a straight calculation detours are censured because of their imbalance of means and ends, Blumenberg sees in them opening forms of experience that permit diversity on the world and, even more, the diversity of worlds. Detours discover uncountable trajectories between one point and another and this not only in the cartographies of space, but also in the ones of culture, as can be seen in eminent cultural inventions such as metaphor and translation.

A task of translation could be followed by looking ethnographically at the state of emergence of the performance collectives, at their concrete negotiations and compromises, retreats and advances, pacts and strategies, tests and adaptations made by every new configuration. It seems to be crucial to investigate the transactions at work between the agents rather than the outcomes of such movements, their solidifications. Being able to be described as an afterlife through translations or as a life in constellations, this kind of togetherness broadens the range of possible relations experimented in the social performances of interweaving cultures.

This work we call performance has formed the line of my life, and yet it catches a fish that is very slippery to hold. After years of learning, yearning and tossing & turning I’ve finally accepted the inevitable: that the kernel of performance is chaos. It is the chaos of energy unbounded, unformed and uncharted; the chaos of stuff that can’t be possessed or controlled, but can only be passed onward with a momentary eccentric imprint. It’s the energetic chaos of eternal attraction and repulsion, and the still, centered chaos of seeds and storms. It hypnotically reflects what we all are and could be.

From these coordinates/vectors I’ve been thinking about interweaving performance cultures, and have arrived at a new locus:

1. Performance was, is and must always be concerned with the moment, and only the moment, of transcendence. Otherwise it gets seduced by, and transformed into, politics, education, high philosophy, religion, consumerism, ritual and/or entertainment.

2.a. This transcendence is a moment that we, audience and performers, can live and exult in only for a heartbreakingly temporary time.

2.b. Then we are responsible, obligated and (in)sanely motivated to carry the memory, tactile sensations and context of that “transit-story” experience into each of our daily lives.

2.c. Our lives respond to this glimpse of otherness by becoming fuller, broader, emptier, more translucent, funnier, nodally excited and much more mysterious.

3.a. Of course — politics, education, high philosophy, religion, consumerism, ritual and/or entertainment play formative roles in the temporal-cultural regions immediately before and after performance.

3.b. Of course each human is more or less “colonized” by history, mass culture and the real and illusory powers of larger issues and influential forces.

3.c. Of course performance represents and recapitulates the infinite and fissionary clash of individual and cultures (at least in the pre- & post- transcendence zones).

3.d. And of course, there will always be those dualities – before and after, habit and surprise, me and us, why and of course — that wrap around mysteriously luminous (or darkly beckoning) centers

4. And so, just because we are all human (at least until the next major mutation evolves a post-performance-species) there are perhaps five ways to deal with these thoughts as a performer (or a creator/imaginer of performance).

5.a. Seek to rebuild existing structures

5.b. Seek a leveling discourse among power centers

5.c. Seek/create/isolate new particulates of performing “stuff” that have never been used before and (re)build structure

5.d. Seek/create/isolate new particulates of performing “stuff” and release them raw into the winds of a howlingly busy world

5.e. Seek: the small, forgotten oases where mistaken and untaken mingle and flow.

And this is the message to the future that a research institute called Interweaving Performance Cultures can contribute:

To notice and note all the above, archive it, re-sort and report, argue and assay; and tell the stories, old and new, connective and disruptive, of potential transcendental power. By providing a kaleidoscopic series of windows and doors through which to glimpse the performative nucleus, the Forschungskolleg “Verflechtungen von Theaterkulturen” offers a much needed viewing-thinking-proposing-sampling-colliding-analyzing-storytelling-reflecting-enriching space – let’s call it a topography of performance’s architecture.

To further reflect on performance’s architecture, an “imaginary” monologue by Ludwig Wittgenstein is appended here.