After Appropriation

Author(s): Craig Latrell

Source: TDR (1988-) , Winter, 2000, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 44-55
Published by: The MIT Press

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 After Appropriation

Craig Latrell

We tend to think of "intercultural transfer" or "artistic borrowing" prima-

rily as a one-way phenomenon, something done "by" the West "to" other
cultures.' Much of the critical rhetoric surrounding this phenomenon has (at
least in theatre criticism) an accusatory tone, with Western popular culture
pictured as a sort of juggernaut, rolling over helpless local cultures, taking
what it wants and in the process ruining fragile indigenous art forms and ho-
mogenizing all culture, turning the world into a lowbrow combination of
Baywatch and Disney. In this view, Western culture (elaborating upon Edward
Said's [1978] famous construction of Orientalism) is inevitably depicted as
crass and unstoppable, while Eastern cultures are represented as refined, deli-
cate, passive, exotic, and spiritually superior to the West. The favored termi-
nology is military, with the West painted as a bellicose male (plundering,
pillaging, and raping) and Asia represented as a defenseless (and, by implica-
tion, female) victim. Thus, the dynamic of colonialism must necessarily be
played out in any interaction between Western artists and Eastern forms, and
the "traffic" in culture is represented as irrevocably one-way. In this article I
examine the representation of intercultural transfer in current theatre criti-
cism, and advocate a different, more flexible, and locally based model.
One example of criticism based in the binary opposition of Western and
Asian cultures is John Russell Brown's (1998) article "Theatrical Pillage in
Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic." Brown likens directors Peter
Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine (two of the past decade's most visible practi-
tioners of intercultural transfer) to "raiders across a frontier," remarking that
"they bring back strange clothes as their loot and try to wear them as if to the
manner born" (1998:9). The author decries the use of artistic forms from other
cultures on two levels: he feels that "foreign" forms cannot express the realities
of contemporary Western society; and, the presence of Westerners in other
cultures inevitably ruins the forms they desire to explore-they "leave wreck-
age behind them as they spread knowledge of ancient theatres among journal-
ists and tour promoters" (I I). In describing the dynamic of intercultural
borrowing, Brown repeatedly employs the language of war and violation,
characterizing intercultural experimentation as "looting," as if non-Western
performance genres were one-of-a-kind objects, too fragile to be played with,
adapted, or otherwise handled by outsiders. He portrays Asian theatres as
"defenceless against predators from another society," and denies the very possi-
bility of exchange, saying that it "cannot work equitably in two directions be-
tween two very different societies and theatres: West and East, modern and

The Drama Review 44, 4 (T168), Winter 2000. Copyright ? 2000

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

44

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 After Appropriation 45

ancient, economically advantaged and disadvantaged" (12). In other words, if

artistic borrowing between cultures cannot be accomplished "equitably" it
shouldn't happen at all.
Brown's solution to cultural pillage is to advocate the borrowing of only
the less visible elements of non-Western performance, such as audience-stage
relationships, or acting styles (for example, the use of improvisation during
performance). Such borrowings, he feels, are the "most practical and [will] do
the least harm" to the "target" cultures. Yet Brown does not seem to recog-
nize that these formal elements are as much expressions of a distinct sensibility
as any other aspect of a theatrical form: to condemn the borrowing of certain
aspects of non-Western performance while permitting others places him in
the position of cultural gatekeeper, deciding which elements are appropriate
for artistic experimentation by foreigners and which must be left alone for the
"natives" to practice undisturbed.
Yet it is not even Brown's argument so much as his method of representing in-
tercultural transfer that is so troubling. His is the latest in a long string of remark-
ably similar-sounding articles which have appeared over the past decade, including
those by Rustom Bharucha, Patrice Pavis, Carl Weber, Gautam Dasgupta, and
many others. These writers all foreground and perpetuate images of inequality and
victimization in interculturalism, centering on the perceived politics of the phe-
nomenon to the near exclusion of any other considerations. One can include here
such representations as Pavis's (1996:13) description of Western culture as i. Scene from the 1995 pro-
"Disneyland culture" (as opposed to non-Western "cultures of identity") and duction of Broken Birds:
Weber's (1991:28) characterization of Western cultural export as "a second colo- An Epic Longing, con-
nization." Even when writers admit the possibility that intercultural transfer might ceived and directed by Ong
take place in cultures other than our own, the phenomenon is still described as a Keng Sen, Singapore.
primarily political one, as for example when Christopher Balme asserts (following (Photo by Lilen Uy; cour-
Salman Rushdie's famous phrase "The Empire writes back") in his book tesy of Theatre Works Ltd.)
Decolonizing the Stage that "theatrical syncretism is in
most cases a conscious, programmatic strategy to fashion
a new form of theatre in the light of colonial or post-
colonial experience" (1999:2). In short, interculturalism
is portrayed as something that can only be "explained"
by inequities of power between East and West, and the
ultimate effect of such criticism is to keep the spotlight
firmly focused on the West--"their" attempts at
interculturalism must be motivated by "our" former
colonization. The idea that artists in other societies
might be using elements of Western culture for their
own reasons is rarely entertained.
But why should we deny to other cultures the
same sophistication and multiplicity of response to
"foreign" influences that we grant to ourselves in
viewing non-Western works? Why should we assume
that intercultural transfer is primarily a politically
based, one-way phenomenon-a cultural monologue
rather than a dialogue? While it's true that the global-
ization of Western culture (by which is usually meant
American movies, television, music, and fashion) has
in one way or another affected nearly every culture in
the world (and has no doubt accelerated the pace of
intercultural transfer), the process through which this
happens is likely more complicated than the simple
victim-victimizer narrative described above. Why not
start with the assumption that other cultures are not

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46 Craig Latrell

2-4. Broken Birds was in-

spired by the book Alku & just passive receivers of Western ideas and images, but active manipulators of
Karayuki-San: Prostitu- such influences, and that intercultural borrowing is not simply a one-way pro-
tion in Singapore (1870- cess, but something far more interestingly dialogic? Just as Western artists, such
1940) concerning Japanese as directors Peter Sellars, Peter Brook, Ping Chong, Ariane Mnouchkine, Julie
women who were tricked or Taymor, and many others take formal and/or narrative elements of foreign art
forced into prostitution forms and recontextualize them in their works, so too non-Western artists
(karayuki-san) in Singapore knowingly and self-consciously reinvent Western influences in novel, sophisti-
and other parts of Southeast cated, and sometimes humorous ways-and for reasons that are both politically
Asia at the end of the 19th and artistically motivated. Examples of interculturalism (including syncretism
century. Produced by and its resulting "hybrid" or "fusion" forms) are everywhere. Such forms
Theatre Works Ltd., Bro- abound (for example) in Indonesia, from the popular Jakarta form of music
ken Birds was performed called dangdut, with its Portuguese, Middle Eastern, and Indian (film music) in-
at Fort Canning Park, fluences, to television sitcoms blending Western conventions of realism with
Singapore, 1-18 March Javanese-influenced characters such as the transvestite clown. As Laurie Sears
1995. (Photo by Lilen Uy; has pointed out, even supposedly "traditional" forms such as wayang kulit have
courtesy of Theatre Works been commodified, co-opted and modified, with traditional wayang characters
Ltd.) appearing on television and in comic books. Contemporary Indonesian play-
wrights such as Nano Riantiarno blend elements of Western realism and
Brechtian devices with Javanese ludruk and references to mythic characters
from the Ramayana. Yet the lack of a critical vocabulary, along with the attrac-
tive simplicity of the binary-opposition model, have made it difficult to recog-
nize-let alone analyze-exactly what is occurring in these transactions.
Recent criticism in the visual arts suggests that one fruitful approach may be
to take a more localized view of the interplay between cultures. For example, in
his 1999 book Possessions, Nicholas Thomas (Director of the Centre for Cross-
Cultural Research at the Australian National University), examines the arts of
settler colonies, taking as his starting point neither the colonizer/colonized view
nor popular notions of globalization, "which suppose that art today is defined by

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 After Appropriation 47

the links between all parts

of the world" (1999:8).
Thomas's is a more specific
and dialogic point of view
of these communities. His
book, which he character-
izes as "anthropological art
history," examines the
workings of both colonial
and indigenous traditions
of art through local re-
sponses, rather than "so-
ciological abstractions"
(18). Taking a similar point
of view in her study of
Javanese wayang kulit,
Sears shows how "the ac-
tions of local [Javanese]
intelligentsias, 'as situated
social agents,' were im-
pelled by their own logics
and needs and how these
activities intersected, ob-
structed, or occasionally
meshed with Dutch efforts
to represent and control
Javanese literary and his-
torical productions" (Sears 1996:15). In their recognition that cultural ex-
change is a dialogue involving a variety of aesthetic as well as localized political
factors, these critics point the way to a more sophisticated approach to
interculturalism.

To take a very simple illustration of the way non-Western artists interact

with Western forms, the Minangkabau traditional music ensemble at the tour-
ist center in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, casually includes in its program a ver-
sion of a British disco hit (the ever-popular River of Babylon by Boney M)
played on the gongs, considerably altering the disco beat to fit conventional
Minangkabau rhythms. In doing so, the musicians are in effect changing the
borrowed Western form of disco music as much as they are being changed by
it; the resulting hybrid contains elements of both Western disco and
Minangkabau traditional music, but it is by no means a politically inspired
product. Far from abandoning or tainting formerly pure local forms, the
Sumatran musicians are assimilating new influences, and in the process inter-
preting what they borrow. Such complicated interactions between borrower
and borrowed are the rule rather than the exception, and narratives of passiv-
ity and neocolonialism have little place in this kind of creative activity.
The act of borrowing itself (no matter who is doing it) is an essentially cre-
ative and artistic one, and one that deserves to be examined as an aesthetic phe-
nomenon rather than simply as a demonstration of (or reaction to) political
power. As critic Marvin Carlson (1996) has pointed out, there are many differ-
ent relationships between the culturally familiar and the culturally foreign, and
this is reflected in the great diversity of artistic borrowing. Such borrowings
range from appropriation of the most visible and sometimes superficial elements
of an unfamiliar form (costumes and staging techniques, for example) to deeper
attempts at syncretism, and they represent different aesthetic goals on the part
of the artist/creator. What follows are analyses of three different types of inter-

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48 Craig Latrell

cultural transfer illustrating some of the different levels of borrowing possible

between cultures as well as the role that local cultures play in such borrowings.
Perhaps the most familiar type of intercultural transfer occurs when an artist
borrows performance techniques from a genre outside her own culture and in-
serts them into new performance contexts without regard to indigenous cul-
tural meanings. This is the sort of contextless borrowing which has been vilified
as looting, plunder, or pillage, and which is typical not just of such works as
Brook's Mahabharata (1989) but of television advertising, and music videos such
as those of Janet and Michael Jackson. Yet this phenomenon is by no means
limited to Western artists. To illustrate, I am going to draw examples from a
production called Broken Birds: An Epic Longing, presented in Singapore in 1995
by that country's major theatre company, TheatreWorks, and directed by Ong
Keng Sen, artistic director of TheatreWorks and later a colleague of mine at the
National University of Singapore. More recently, Ong has created a "pan-
Asian" King Lear in Japan, incorporating a wide variety of Asian theatre forms,
and he has also directed at New York's Public Theatre.
According to the program, Broken Birds was inspired by the book Alku &
Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore (187o-1940) (Warren 1993) concerning
Japanese women who were tricked or forced into prostitution (karayuki-san)
in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia at the end of the 19th century.
The piece was performed outdoors at Fort Canning Park in central Singapore,
on a long, sloping lawn, with the structure of the old fort serving as a back-
drop. Huge video screens framed the performance space, behind which a
dancer occasionally performed in shadow-puppet style, and on which a video
of a fictionalized interview with a surviving karayuki-san was projected. Nine-
teen actors participated, frequently performing identical movement sequences
and lines simultaneously or sequentially, in a cross between acting and dance.
The piece consisted of fragmented gestures, impressions, and scenes combined
in a nonlinear fashion, subsequently described by one of the actors (a student
of mine at the National University of Singapore) in a "review" as:

Characterised by an essentially non-realistic performance idiom with

non-linear and temporal structures. The interest was in creating a formal
work with a message, arranging and juxtaposing formal theatrical ele-
ments, encompassing action, gesture, architecture, character, repetition
and text, as well as exploring the frontier between dance and theatre.
From the process of creation to reception, from form to content, the in-
fluence of postmodern aesthetics was clearly discernible. (Tang 1998)

As one might guess from this description, Broken Birds owed more than a
casual debt to Western experimental performance techniques and critical con-
cepts. Postmodern borrowing notwithstanding, nearly every theatrical element
of Broken Birds was derived from techniques that evolved in the New York
off-Broadway theatre scene during the I96os and '70s and have since become
commonplace in experimental Western theatre. Many of these techniques are
enumerated in Richard Schechner's article "Six Axioms for Environmental
Theatre" (1968:41-64). The use of the exterior space at Fort Canning Park,
for example, illustrates Schechner's Axiom #3: "The theatrical event can take
place either in a totally transformed space or in 'found space.'" The lengthy
section of Broken Birds involving different scenes and monologues enacted si-
multaneously in different sections of the performance space followed
Schechner's dictum in Axiom #4 that "Focus is flexible and variable," and in
fact contained examples both of what Schechner calls "multi-focus" and "lo-
cal focus," i.e., many events happening at once, and events taking place which
only some of the audience can hear and see. The heavy visual emphasis of the

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 After Appropriation 49

piece, in which actors are no more important than any other element, is ar-
ticulated in Schechner's Axiom #5, "All production elements speak in their
own language" ("Why should the performer be any more important than
other production elements?" asks Schechner). Schechner's concept of actor-
as-visual element was further developed in what Bonnie Marranca called the
"Theatre of Images" of the 1970s, in works created by (among others) the di-
rectors Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, and the group Mabou Mines.
Director Ong borrowed these and other techniques and presented them in a
decontextualized fashion, without attempting to syncretize them with local
Singapore theatrical vocabularies (of which there are several), in precisely the
same way Western artists borrow elements of non-Western forms and present
them as aesthetic decoration. As with several of Ong's other experimental
pieces, Broken Birds was simultaneously sophisticated in its use of Western theat-
rical devices, and deliberately naive in its attempt to see what new meanings
could arise from these devices by placing them in an Asian context. Yet stripped
in this way of their cultural and historical contexts (a partial list of which would
include off-off-Broadway of the 1970s, Vietnam, hippies, free love, countercul-
ture, and '70s minimalist music, painting, and sculpture), these performance
techniques have no more meaning to a Singaporean audience than the move-
ments of a Javanese srinmpi dance have to the casual Western tourist. And just as,
absent its autochthonous meaning, the srimpi most often serves as a generic sign
of exoticism to the Westerner, these experimental theatre techniques also served
first and foremost as signs to the Singapore audience, in this case of trendiness,
sophistication, and intended seriousness. Perhaps, in fact, what I am calling
trendiness here served some of the same function for Singaporeans as exoticism
does for the Westerner, embodying generalized attitudes toward and images of
the "other" and demonstrating that one is "in the know." This is particularly
important in Singapore, where as William Peterson argues in his book Theatre
and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (forthcoming), Western cul-
ture is simultaneously scorned and held up as a model of excellence to be emu-
lated. In this type of borrowing, what is important (whether the creator is
Western or non-Western) is not what the novel element meant in its original
context, but what it now says about the creator and the audience, and in this
sense, the function of the imported technique has changed.
Yet in addition to the importance of borrowed elements as signs, the phe-
nomenon of borrowing itself is at the root of artistic change and growth. Artists
are attracted to novelty, and like magpies they take what looks bright or flashy
or interesting without really caring about the intended meaning. As Schechner
has pointed out, "On the individual level, it's hard for an artist not to steal, if
it's useful for their repertory of skills or if it suits. That is what artists do. Fun-
damentally, they are bricoleurs" (1996:45). This is not to deny that encoded in
such borrowings are attitudes toward other cultures (for example, derision, re-
sentment, the desire to position oneself in relation to one's own culture), and
that they can be set within the larger context of cultures redefining themselves
according to modernism, or as is most often the case today, the global influ-
ences of Western television and film. But it is perhaps less than enlightening to
see these borrowings only in terms of a discourse about power relations among
cultures. Overshadowing the codings and the discourse are the individual
artist's aesthetic motivations, in this case the desire to innovate by playing with
new techniques, or by finding an unfamiliar formal element around which to
construct a new object or performance. In the attempt to incorporate bricolage
into the discourse of modernity and interculturalism, it is important to remem-
ber that it is as much an artistic as a political strategy: artists are not morally ob-
ligated to present the "other" in a digested and contextualized fashion, and in
fact to do so defeats the aesthetic purpose of the borrowing. Calling bricolage

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50 Craig Latrell

?ilg-

5. & 6. Teaterjenjang
Padang's production of
Robohnya Surau Kami, ..........

Festival Istiqlaldakarta, In-

donesia, 1993. The perfor-
mance incorporated elements
from West Sumatran
randai. (Photo courtesy of
Teaterjenjang)

"pillage" has the eff

gether and imposin
My second examp
Arthur Miller's T
Jakarta's leading
Ismail Marzuki arts
production) is a ver
ating according to
utilizing a well-kn
existed for many y
theatres, Western
write their own r
Academy of Theat
staging such West
along with more m
Institut Kesenian J
Senior Lecturer), co
Indonesian perfo
Stanislavskian actin
translation, while a
genres from throu
work of realism, th
diences seem to ac
barely resembles th
tomed. Realism in
means something d
In Tenung, as well
attended in Indone
dramatic, by whic
guilt, and self-rec
based on my direct
far more interested
tion in a given scen
the utilization of
character's emotion

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 After Appropriation 51

much less important than its portrayal-the actor goes directly for the fireworks,
affecting large emotions in order to sway the audience even if the emotion is
too intense for the situation being enacted. Overblown emotions come out of
nowhere and disappear just as abruptly, and frequently actors come to the edge
of the stage for important moments, foregoing all attempts at natural behavior
to show off their emotional prowess in an almost operatic way. One sees this
style not just onstage, but also in virtually all dramatic television productions.
There are two possibilities here. Either leading Indonesian actors and acting
students are performing theatrical realism badly, or else the whole apparatus of
realistic acting has been subtly transformed into something distinctly Indone-
sian. In fact, this acting departs so radically from what we recognize as realism
as to constitute an entirely new genre, raising the possibility that each society
deems for itself what can pass as "realistic," depending on such things as soci-
etal attitudes toward emotion and pre-existing performance styles. Given that
the open expression of emotion is frowned upon in many parts of Indonesia
(particularly in Java), one might have expected that audiences and actors alike
would avoid emotionally hyperbolic acting, thereby lending acting the same
emotional refinement (halus-ness) seen at other formal social occasions and
ceremonies. Yet perhaps it is because of this avoidance of the showing of
strong emotion in everyday life that such emotions are permissible and even
sought-after in a performance setting: the otherness of the setting gives the
participants "permission" to emote, and such expressions are of the utmost in-
terest to audience members.
This acting style may well be the product of a blending of Western and
more traditional Indonesian performance styles, lying squarely between the
two and exhibiting characteristics of both. Such syncretism would account for
the impression that Westerners might glean while watching Indonesian acting,
that there is something familiar and yet odd about the style. Acting in much
(but not all) traditional Indonesian theatre-dance is simply not intended to
foster the illusion that the spectator is seeing a character made flesh, but in-
stead to represent the character, showing-as the editor of The Cambridge Guide
to Asian Theatre (Brandon 1993:II18) points out-its essence rather than a real-
istic portrayal. In light of the fact that many of the characters in traditional
performance are either mythical figures or gods, it is difficult to imagine an-
other sort of acting style taking root in Indonesia. This is not to suggest that
performers in traditional forms of dance-drama do not experience emotions
(they do), but that the direct experiencing of emotion counts for less than its

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52 Craig Latrell

portrayal. Thus these traditional, representational performance styles comprise

a vocabulary within which the tenets of realism have been reinterpreted by
Indonesian actors and audiences. In terms of Carlson's scheme of inter-
culturalism, Indonesian realistic acting could be described as a form whe
"The foreign and the familiar create a new blend, which is then assimilat
into the tradition, becoming familiar" (1996:83).
In this case, the elements of Western acting styles have been studied, bor
rowed, reworked, reinterpreted, and combined with pre-existing local sty
to produce something which is novel yet recognizable to local audience
What may have originally begun with the kind of contextless borrowing
scribed in the first example has here persisted and undergone a sea change in
something that can be used to express local realities. Perhaps, in fact, super
cial borrowing of the first kind must precede any sort of deeper reworking
a borrowed form: perhaps the borrowed form must begin to lose some of it
novelty and semiotic potency before it can be adapted or combined with loc
forms on a more profound level. Both kinds of borrowing--contextless a
syncretic-are equally important to the way art develops and changes, an
both are examples of how artists experiment with new ways of expressing r
alities through the introduction of unfamiliar formal elements.
If the first two examples have to do with the borrowing of formal or stylist
techniques, and how they may move from bricolage to syncretism, the last e
ample has to do with the incorporation of technology and staging, specifica
sound equipment and the shape of the performance space. Although techn
logical elements are not necessarily always Western in origin, they frequent
7. Randai performance,
serve as emblems of modernism, and in this respect serve a function similar
showing lingkaran, Palito the more purely formal elements described above. For example, those w
Nyalo, West Sumatra, In-
have attended performances of indigenous theatre in Southeast Asia have lik
donesia, 1997. (Photo by
noticed a propensity for the use of sound amplification equipment. This is p
Craig Latrell)

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 After Appropriation 53

ticularly true in tourist venues, but even in village performances amplification

is common. This is nowhere more apparent than in performances of West
Sumatran randai (a fusion of dialogue, religious poetry, music, and martial arts-
derived dance), where the use of microphones has inevitably led to alterations
in staging. In randai the dialogue scenes-which formerly contained a good
deal of footwork, bodily swaying, and frequent changes of position around the
performance space-now tend to be performed in a more or less stationary
fashion in order to accommodate the actors' use of microphones.2
Even with the small amount of movement that remains in these scenes,
there comes a time in many performances where the actors must stop and dis-
entangle microphone cords or tend to faulty equipment. This of course has
had the effect of changing both the nature of these scenes and the audience-
performance relationship, with the scenes becoming much less stylized and
dance-like. Despite the inconveniences involved, and the changes that the mi-
crophones necessitate, it has now become unthinkable to perform without
amplification, sheer volume and the semiotic appeal of the equipment out-
weighing artistic considerations. Sound equipment, which is usually not at all
necessary from the audibility standpoint, comes with a certain cachet and
"says" to the audience that the randai group is up-to-date and fully equipped,
and so it has evolved into a necessity. In this way it resembles the artistic bor-
rowing of the first, contextless type in that its importance lies in what is signi-
fied to the audience. Perhaps to make up for the relative immobility of
dialogue scenes, randai's fight scenes (in which microphones are set aside)
have become increasingly action-oriented, with one critic noting seriously the
influence of Sylvester Stallone on the length and flashiness of the fights. In this
way, the introduction of sound equipment has coincidentally yet profoundly
reshaped the form, which in turn has adapted itself to accommodate the
equipment.
Similar adaptations occur when the venues in which randai is traditionally
performed change. One of randai's most unique characteristics is the circular
shape (called the lingkaran) described by the dancers, within which the dra-
matic portions of the performance take place, with the audience gathered
around its perimeter. As I have pointed out elsewhere (see Latrell 1999), this
circular shape has numerous functions and meanings in randai, as well as serv-
ing as a potent symbol, and it binds randai in innumerable ways to West
Sumatran culture. Randai's lingkaran is an expression of the Minangkabau sen-
sibility, in which unity, cohesion, and return play essential parts, and this shape
and the audience-performance relationship it dictates both express and rein-
force these values. Randai has traditionally been performed in this circular
configuration on the village square, and even today randai festivals go to great
pains to create a circular performance area. Yet aside from village or festival
performances, randai is increasingly being performed on the proscenium-style
stage favored in civic cultural centers (many of which take as their model
Western theatre structures) or temporarily erected for special occasions (restau-
rant openings or weddings, for example). This change in performance venue
has serious implications for the meaning of the form and its place in society.
Once the form's performance space is altered, randai's essential circularity is
also disrupted, as spectators can no longer form a circle around the perfor-
mance, and the dancers themselves find it difficult to perform in a circle. In
the case of adaptations by contemporary theatre groups based on the randai
form (such as Padang's former Teater Jenjang), the circular shape is actually
discarded in favor of a single or double line of dancers, radically altering the
traditional relationship between viewer and performance as well as its symbolic
connections to the society. Yet audiences at these reconfigured performances
frequently respond to the loss of the lingkaran-instead of sitting or standing

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54 Craig Latrell

in rows directly in front of the performance, like a Western audience, audi-

ence members attempt to reconstruct the circular shape by arranging them-
selves in a semicircle around the performance. In this way they reestablish at
least some of randai's former relations to society and the circle's symbolic
meanings. Once again, the relation between the introduced element and the
theatrical form is complex and reciprocal, rather than simply one-way. Local
attitudes and customs take precedence over global politics. As cultural historian
James Clifford says, "Distinct ways of life once destined to merge into 'the
modern world' [have] reasserted their difference, in novel ways" (1988:6).
Describing intercultural transfer as appropriation, pillage, or plunder, or
seeing it only as an exercise in neocolonialism, has the effect of making all
such interactions seem the same, confirming what we already think we know
about the relative power of Western and non-Western societies. Yet as Fou-
cault reminds us, power is more complicated, localized, and provisional than a
simple victim-victimizer narrative would allow, and to apply this narrative to
intercultural transfer (as is frequently done) is to miss the reciprocal essence of
these relationships. Performance based on interactions between cultures is cer-
tain to proliferate in the foreseeable future. It is both more interesting and
more respectful to try and perceive the complex ways in which non-Western
forms reinvent themselves in the face of global culture than to try to make
these reinventions conform to a simplistic and possibly outdated narrative.

Notes

I. By artistic borrowing, I mean of course including in a work of art forms, techniques, or

technical elements that originated outside one's culture.
2. This has also been noted by Kirsten Pauka in Theater & Martial Arts in Sumatra (1998).

References

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1999 Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama. Oxford:
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Brandon, James, ed.

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Brown, John Russell

1998 "Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic." New The-
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Carlson, Marvin
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Clifford, James
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Latrell, Craig
1999 "Widening the Circle: The Refiguring of West Sumatran Randai." Asian
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Pauka, Kirsten
1998 Theater & Martial Arts in West Sumatra. Athens: Ohio University Center for
International Studies.

Pavis, Patrice
1996 "Interculturalism: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre?" In The In-
tercultural Perfomnance Reader, edited by Patrice Pavis, 1-21. London: Routledge.

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 After Appropriation 55

Peterson, William
forthcoming The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
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Said, Edward
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Schechner, Richard
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Sears, Laurie J.
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Tang Fu Kuen
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Craig Latrell is currently Associate Professor of Theatre at Hamilton College. He has

also taught at the National University of Singapore, University of Denver, and Cor-
nish College of the Arts. A former Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Indonesia, Latrell holds
a DFA from the Yale School of Drama. Recent publications have appeared in Asian
Theatre Journal and Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers and Tourists in
Southeast Asia, edited by . Forshee, Center for Southeast Asian Studies (University
of California, Berkeley, 1999).

8. Broken Birds was per-

formed on a long, sloping
lawn at Fort Canning
Park, with the structure of
the old fort serving as a
backdrop. (Photo by Lilen
Uy; courtesy of
TheatreWorks Ltd.)

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