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Receiving Les Atrides Productively: Mnouchkine's Intercultural Signs as Intertexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Extract

In her analysis of interculturalist theatre practice, Erika Fischer-Lichte has developed a theory of productive reception, in which the subsuming of a source culture's codes and conventions into a target culture's production has a telos of solving problems (political, aesthetic, cultural) and/or of filling gaps. In The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Fischer-Lichte sites the practice's operation: ‘An intercultural performance productively receives the elements taken from the foreign theatre traditions and cultures according to the problematic which lies at the point of departure’. The theory also extends to the act of reception by the spectator in that it implies a reading which is non-oppositional between source and target cultures, which demands the interculturalist performance be read as a monoculturalist product. The Théâtre du Soleil's Greek tetralogy Les Atrides (1990–3), directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, is an example of intercultural performance with which one can engage Fischer-Lichte's theory in relation to the reading and classification of signs.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1997

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References

Notes

1. The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, edited by Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Riley, Josephine & Gissenwehrer, Michael (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990), p. 284.Google Scholar

2. Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 213.Google Scholar

3. See Kiernander, Adrian, ‘The Orient, the Feminine: The Use of Interculturalism by the Theatre du Soleil’ in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, edited by Senelick, Laurence (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), pp. 183–92.Google Scholar

4. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Semiotics of Theater (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 3.Google Scholar