CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Nation, Community and the Construction of Place in Contemporary Theatre

Organiser: Alyce von Rothkirch

Monaco, Pamela (Mississippi Valley State/USA) HISTORY PLAY AS DOCUDRAMA
One of the trends in the past twenty years in American theatre has been the development of a new type of history play that is constructed as a type of docudrama. Emily Mann, Anna Deveare Smith, and others bring to audiences national issues of inhumanity, intolerance, or cultural misunderstanding through plays written and performed based on community interviews with those involved in the issue. Going into the community or communities, the playwrights gather information from multiple perspectives in order to put the national community on stage, in a quasi-legalistic fashion. Of particular interest is the use of space. Either using a limited cast to perform multiple roles (Execution of Justice, Laramie Project) or a single performer to play all roles (Fires in the Mirror), the body becomes the sacred space, representing the individual, but when performed in various stage settings, the individual is both of the community and is the community, making us both the one on trial and the jury of the trial. By examining the semiotics of the body, the presentation suggests that the plays' construction and staging implicates all of us by incorporating the personal and national body into the performance space through the physical.

Meisner, Natalie (University of Calgary, Canada)  THE FISH & BINGO PLAY: REGIONAL NATIONALISM IN CANADIAN THEATRE
There is a frequently noted correlation between the flourishing of theatre and periods of nationalistic fervour.  Examples include Greece during the Persian wars, France under Louis 14th, and China during the Cultural Revolution.  The Canadian equivalent could be located from 1967 (the year of our Centennial) to the mid-1980’s.  Canadian theatre of course existed long before Europeans arrived in North America with mystery plays and ritualistic performances by First Nations peoples.  In spite of this rich tradition combined with records and texts from performances by Europeans that span four centuries, the revered Oxford Companion to the Theatre as recently as 1957 --in an extreme case of damning with faint praiseallowed that Canadian dramatic efforts are  ‘probably no more amateur than were the first plays of medireview Europe.’ The relative invisibility of Canadian plays prior to this period was ensured in the practical sense by the fact that most theatres were owned by companies based in the United States who were, of course, interested in disseminating their own indigenous product.  Colonial practices ensured deference to European classics in large sectors of the viewing public.  In order to escape this double bind, Canadians finally began to solicit scripts written by and for Canadians.  This demand was supported by a governmental review and the creation of a national funding body that is today known as The Canada Council for the Arts.  There was an explosion of Canadian plays and Canadian playwriting along with an attendant belief that our stories were just as capable of stretching toward the eternal, universal truths so prized in the classics.  However as Linda Hutcheon among others points out, these ‘eternal universal truths turned out to be constructed, not found’ and rife with classed, gendered and racialized assumptions.

Mounsef, Donia (Yale, USA) WWF: WRESTLING WITH FRENCH: FRENCH THEATRE IN AMERICA
Aside from the obligatory number of French films that make it across the Atlantic every year, stamped with the quintessential hallmark of Frenchness by Gérard Depardieu or Catherine Deneuve, there seems to be a phenomenon developing since the early 90’s of a rise in interest in French theatre in translation and a significant number of French theatrical productions overseas.  Judging from the amount of programming and productions of French theatre in the United States in the past two years alone, one would think that the cultural wars have been won with a kind of a new seductive Liberté guidant le peuple luring spectators into a neo-Enlightenment, neo-universalist Moulin rouge.However, it is well known that theatre travels heavy, unlike film with its packageable rolls of 35 mm, theatre is bound syntagmatically to a space of representation, a particular audience, and a particular esprit du temps, also paradigmatically it is bound by a history of prior productions, a cultural familiarity with the subject matter and a certain intimacy with the language, none of which are easily transportable abroad.Taking into consideration the liveliness and breadth of French and Francophone theatres in Canada and the French Antilles, this paper examines the origins of this wave of theatre francophilia in the United States, by looking at dynamics of French cultural activism arising from the 1968 spectacular failed revolution and the way Frenchness is exported as an identifiable set of adoptable, contested, and transformed cultural practices. This paper explores issues pertaining to the codes by which French theatre is institutionalized both as nationalistic and globalized product and its relationship to French assimilationist ideologies of the “rayonnement” on the one hand, and to cultural counter-hegemony on the other hand which rejects the principle of the centre and asserts the vital quality of difference at the periphery.

Rothkirch, Alyce von (Swansea/United Kingdom) 'STAGING WALES': COMMUNITY, NATION AND THE QUESTION OF PLACE
The dichotomy of 'community' and 'nation/alism' is especially interesting when thinking about 'nations without states' (Guibernau) like Wales. In absence of a national identity based on civic institutions, 'community' has always been a (not unproblematic) defining factor in the Welsh national identity. The history of Welsh nationalist movements highlights the danger inherent in a nationalism based on a homogeneous idea of community based on language, religion and culture. The 1997 referendum was a turning point in a history of internal division  but even then the referendum was only won narrowly. My paper focuses on the discussion of 'community' and 'nation' in selected pre- and post-devolution Welsh drama in English. The plays deal with the difficulty of creating a positive Welsh identity which is not defined ex negativo and which adequately deals with the shifting allegiances in post-industrial Wales. Are the "Valleys [still] tribal" (Rowlands 97)? Does "a new Welsh mythology" (Thomas) help to overcome the more problematic notions of community?