Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY
The Use of Asian
Theatre for Modern
Western Theatre
Th e Displaced Mirror
Min Tian
Palgrave Studies in Theatre
and Performance History
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Emeritus Professor
Brown University
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Min Tian
The Use of Asian
Theatre for Modern
Western Theatre
The Displaced Mirror
Min Tian
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History
ISBN 978-3-319-97177-3 ISBN 978-3-319-97178-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97178-0
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For my twin daughters
A
cknowledgements
I want to thank the anonymous readers of Palgrave for their comments on
my manuscript and their recommendation for publication. I am particu-
larly grateful to two editors at Palgrave, Tomas René and Vicky Bates, for
their kind and enthusiastic assistance during the whole process of review-
ing, editing, and publication of my book.
Chapters “Theatre of Transposition: Charles Dullin and East Asian
Theatre,” “‘Welding the Unweldable’: Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Refraction
of Japanese Theatre,” and “How Does the Billy-Goat Produce Milk?
Sergei Eisenstein’s Disintegration and Reconstitution of Kabuki Theatre”
were previously published, respectively, in Comparative Drama (vol. 48,
no. 4, 2014), Asian Theatre Journal (vol. 33, no. 2, 2016), and New
Theatre Quarterly (vol. 32, no. 4, 2016). I want to thank the editors and
publishers of the three journals for their permission to use my work in this
book.
Translations into English are all mine if not noted otherwise.
vii
c
ontents
Introduction: The Displaced Mirror 1
International Dramatic Prospecting: Aurélien Lugné-Poe’s Use
of Asian Dramas 15
“In Our Two Selves”: Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig on
Japanese Theatre 43
“Sea-worthy must put to sea”: W. B. Yeats’s “Nō” and the
Japanese Model 69
“Free Transposition”: The Use of Nō by Jacques Copeau and
Suzanne Bing 99
Theatre of Transposition: Charles Dullin and East Asian
Theatre 129
“IT IS WE WHO ARE SPEAKING”: Antonin Artaud and
Balinese Theatre 153
ix
x CONTENTS
“Welding the Unweldable”: Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Refraction
of Japanese Theatre 177
How Does the Billy-Goat Produce Milk? Sergei Eisenstein’s
Disintegration and Reconstitution of Kabuki Theatre 211
“The ‘Asiatic’ Model”: The Brechtian Art of Refunctioning of
Japanese (Asian) Theatre 239
Conclusion: A Haunting Legacy 263
Bibliography 275
Index 303
Introduction: The Displaced Mirror
With ever-expanding economic and cultural globalization, intercultural
theatre in the last decades of the twentieth century and the early twenty-
first century has become an international phenomenon even more far-
reaching than it was in the first decades of the twentieth century. The new
century saw a flourish of new studies of intercultural theatre. These new
studies represent a growing movement to distance the current century
from the last one. The new century’s reactional movement that has gone
so far as to reject the concept of “intercultural theatre” and has produced
some new variants of theories or models in the theorization of intercultural
theatre, such as hybridization of intercultural performance, “interweav-
ing” or “networking” of performance cultures, and a variety of “new”
interculturalisms (Lo and Gilbert 2002; Knowles 2010; Lei 2011; Fischer-
Lichte 2014b; Mitra 2015; Cabranes-Grant 2016; McIvor 2016). These
new theories or models advanced as a displacement of those developed in
the late twentieth century propose new utopian visions for the practices of
cross/trans/intercultural theatre in the new century. However, by and
large, this new movement or displacement remains theoretically Eurocentric
and geopolitically Western-centred, and the historical divide remains
between the East and the West. Such being the case, it must be placed in
the historical context of the Western (Eurocentric) modernist interest in
Asian theatre and must be understood historically as an integral part of it.
The Western modernist interest in the traditions of Asian theatre began
at the turn of the twentieth century and was reinforced in the ensuing
© The Author(s) 2018 1
M. Tian, The Use of Asian Theatre for Modern Western Theatre,
Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97178-0_1
