ABSTRACT
The Arabic performance-related concepts workshop, conducted by the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” in Berlin, is part of a large project initiated by Erika Fischer-Lichte in 2008 to underscore the linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity of academic discourses on theatre and performance across diverse performance cultures around the globe. The project rests upon three major premises: (1) the possibility of achieving a democratic interweaving across worldwide performance cultures; (2) a collaborative rethinking of the intercultural paradigm and its configuration of “the other on the outside,” a rethinking founded on reciprocity as both vision and negotiation of power/knowledge; and last but not least (3) an invitation to practise a double critique as a way of saying and doing whereby the North and South come to terms with their age-old Manichaeism and finally recognize their permanent interweaving and zones of contact and friction within specific historical contexts.
