Alternatives: Debating Theatre Culture in the Age of Con-Fusion, Peter Eckersall, Uchino Tadashi and Moriyama Naoto

Abstract

Alternatives: Debating Theatre Culture in the Age of Con-Fusion, Peter Eckersall, Uchino Tadashi and Moriyama Naoto (eds.), No. 11 in the series Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures and Performances(Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang 2004).

During the 1990s, there were many performance productions that dealt with the issue of cultural difference in Australia. It is possible to say that, to an extent, they were an artistic response to official Australian multicultural policies and the right-wing political reaction sometimes called ‘the Hanson phenomenon.’ Although their styles and approaches vary, a common concern for the artists who focused on these issues was to express their voices from the position of a non-white or a non-English speaking background, against mainstream white Australian society. Some artists asserted cultural differences, using a technique and style of ’storytelling’ in the form of narrative-based theatre. Some works questioned and challenged the representations of the cultural other with the intention to reveal the power structure in the dominant representational system in Australia.

However, after achieving some degree of presence in the Australian performance scene in the mid-1990s, these counter-hegemonic cultural performances seemed to reach a dead end. It can be said that by repeating the same kind of criticism of mainstream Anglo-Australian values, the initial impact on the audience was lost; that is, the excessive repetition devalued the initial form of criticism. An alternative direction in theory and practice for a continuing discussion of intercultural performance was and is definitely needed, especially now in the age of terrorism, when the rhetoric of simplistic cultural dichotomies can prevail.