Abstract:
The artistic treatment of cultural otherness is at the core of this project.
Deploying Emmanuel Levinas' notion of irreducible otherness (alterity),
Nowhere-ness examines hidden assumptions about cultural otherness in
performance. Generally, understandings of cultural otherness are based on
recognisability and ultimately difference through representation. Alterity,
however, cannot be accounted for in these terms and remains excessive to
representation. An important question then arises, namely, “can a performance
treat cultural otherness other than through representation?”
In response, I suggest a strategy in which the issue of incompatibility
between irreducible otherness and representation can be bypassed. As long as
visible and recognisable differences are regarded as reference to otherness,
alterity is reduced and serves the “self-same.” Instead of focusing on
exterior otherness, Nowhere-ness shifts perspective to “inside otherness” thus
directly confronting “sameness.” This otherness within shines on the
fundamental uncertainty of the self. This is linked, in turn, with
contemporary media-influenced life where we appear to “float” in a sea of
global cultural ingredients. In this environment, our cultural identities are
neither “clear-cut” (attached to a particular culture) nor plural. Our ways of
living “now” and “here” cannot be discussed only in relation to a particular
location and time. A singularity of now and here cannot be contained by
geographical terms: it belongs to “nowhere.”
My concern for the practical work is to highlight media influences in
communicative exchanges between different cultures, by focusing on the
singular encounter between the audience and the work, which is manipulated by
technological mediation. The Australian audience and the Japanese performer
thus encounter each other at the “nowhere-land” of the singular performance
site, reflecting their own hidden “nowhere-ness.” This nowhere-ness then may
be understood as a sense of the self before it is recognised and
differentiated through cultural, ethnological and racial terminologies.
Date of completion: March 2002
Institution: University of Technology, Sydney
Supervisors:
Norie Neumark
Cathryn Vasseleu
Examiners:
Philip Auslander
Henry M. Sayre
Joanne Tompkins
