ABSTRACT

Performance, which is an act of imaging, imagining, and embodying the self, and thereby, the other, becomes a complex postcolonial stance when it is dealing with the intercultural, which, too, is an act of reimaging and reimagining the self via the other. The contours of image-making, fashioning of identity, like gender, are not fi xed, stable entities, but are constantly formed and reformed through performance.1 Intercultural performance, in the theatre, especially, is not just an act of self-expressivity, but also an intervention in the politics of cultural representation and identity. Intercultural theatre, with its modes of borrowing, refashioning and re-presentation, has become a much debated issue in twentieth-century arts: from being seen as a search for the new, “a resistance against standardization,”2 to providing a “culture of choice,”3 to being impugned as exploitative “cultural tourism.”4 Though East-West interaction and exchange in the theatre can be traced back to at least the late nineteenth century, it was Peter Brook’s multicultural production of the Mahabharata which effected a paradigm shift from Western liberal humanism to postcolonialism in the critical assessment of the intercultural.5