On the Merits of Seeing, Studying, and Making Global Theatre

As humans, we are inherently live and exists in our isolated cultural traditions. Even in a
world of rapidly increasing globalization and instantaneous communication, there is a level at
which we manage to maintain our own regional practices, languages, and traditions, limiting, to
some degree, the experiences that we encounter to those that tend to happen around us. In artmaking, as in life, we re-create what is familiar to us. Why, then, do humans have a record of
seeking outside cultural influences? It seems that we seek, especially through artistic experience,
a constantly broadening lense through which to view the world. Endlessly unsatisfied, it is
human nature, it seems, to experiment with perspectives, world-views, creative forms, and
lifestyles, to find an ever truer, more universal, truth about ourselves.
In seeking to learn about intercultural theatre in particular, I can not say that the reason
differs. My personal interest in exploring the ever-form forms of the other comes from learning
about, to some extent, as in David Williams' article, the "others that are us," to find out more
about what we, what humans, really are.
It has been said by John Ruskin that to learn about a people, you should look at their
book of records, and the book of their of their arts, and that the only trustworthy book is the book
of their arts. I think that this must be true, and if we, ever curious and ever self-interested
humans want to learn about who the great, collective, "we," are, we want to, and need to, have an
understanding of the things that we all create. Theatre, a result of storytelling, oral tradition,
music, word, and dance, is a testament to all that humans are, and all that we have and will create,
and, I think, is one of the greatest indicators of a culture's great past and connection with the
future. In making art, and in making theatre in particular, we take up the burden of the storyteller,

and to be responsible storytellers, we have to understand not only the stories that have come
before us, but those around us, too.
As a middle-class American college student, for example, my exposure to puppet theatre
in general, and to traditional storytelling forms (outside of the western theatre practice,) was and
is relatively limited, despite the fact that I have constant to access to the information
superhighway with hundreds of pages of information about storytelling and performance forms
in the near east. I had no understanding, too of the conflict in Syria, the Lebanese civil war,
cultural values and traditions in the former Ottoman empire, and the reason that French is spoken
in Lebanon, Syria, and Morocco (a result of the 1918 French mandate for Lebanon and Syria.) I
had never considered any of these issues in my daily life, and I had no reason to begin. By
becoming immersed, by requirement of this project, in exploring the beautiful theatre forms in
that part of the world, I have begun to understand Lebanon's complicated political relationship
with itself, the refugee crisis in Beiruit and other cities, a and the humor and beauty that sets the
pace for the way that Near-easterner people see the world. Karagoz, the shadow puppet form,
follows a rigid paly structure that begins with a song and ends in an apology, and becomes racy
and political easily in between. No such performance form exists here, although it has strong ties
in Turkey and likely roots similar to that of the older wayang theater form in Asia. I would not
recognized these relationships in the Syrian/Lebanese political map without being exposed to
these performance forms, and I certainly would not maintain what understanding that I have now
of the cultural values and practices of outer Arabia that I do now. At the very least, it brings a
level of humanity and beauty to the region for the world that we often, in a contemporary context,
only see in war-torn ravages on the cover of Time magazine. Art, and art-making , makes us a all
recognize our similarities, if nothing else. It shrinks the world. As an example, the popular

conglomerate of al-hakawati stories, now known in English as the 1001 Arabian nights, is
popular world-over, despite its Syrian/Lebanese origins. While the stories reflect middle eastern
and Muslim values, with constant references to pleasing Allah, and behaving in some sort of
"right" way. While these cultural practices are not prevalent all over the world, there must be
some universal pleasure, or at least truth, found in these stories to keep them popular. Indeed,
humans separately created all of the stories and [performance forms that we did, so it shouldn't
come as a surprise that there might be a universal reality to them. It seems that the study of
intercultural theatre becomes the study of the way that our human perception of reality
manifested itself over vastly different stretches of land. Our desire to see and study what we do
not understand about the others (that are us, too,) in the world seems, then, only a natural
curiosity, and making intercultural theatre as a result the logical next step. If we are to believe in
the inherent value for theatrical forms, including our own cultural theatre-making practices, it is
no surprise that we desire to blend the new (for us) and the old, the far, and the near, in our
theatre-making practices, and this is a beautiful and productive practice, both for understanding
others, and, by extension, ourselves on a greater scale.