1.2: Theatre as a Global and Cultural Practice

What is clear is that theatre is not the invention or property of any one culture. While the word theatre is ancient Greek in origin, the practices it names—live, embodied, collaborative storytelling—exist across time, geography, and tradition. As stated already, theatre studies have too often centered Western traditions—particularly Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, and 19th- and 20th-century European realism—as if these were universal benchmarks. But this view overlooks the complexity and richness of global performance practices. Performance traditions such as Wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppetry), Japan’s Bunraku puppetry, the Iranian ritual drama of Ta’zīye, the griot storytelling traditions of West Africa are all examples of theatre—or theatre-adjacent forms—that challenge Eurocentric attempts to categorize them.[i] These traditions do not simply resemble Western theatre; they are complete and coherent systems of performance with their own theories, aesthetics, and cultural functions.

 

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[i] A griot is a West African storyteller, historian, and musician responsible for preserving genealogies, histories, and cultural memory through oral performance. Griots demonstrate how storytelling traditions can function simultaneously as education, history, and performance.

Taking a more capacious view of theatre means dismantling binary patterns of thinking—Western vs. non-Western, written vs. oral traditions, colonial vs. postcolonial. These oppositions may have been useful to scholars in the past, but they often obscure more than they reveal. As African literature scholar Dennis Walder acknowledges, “nothing is more likely to enrage certain writers than to hear themselves described as ‘post-colonial’” (Walder 1998, 1). The term itself, though intended to mark resistance and recovery, can end up reinforcing the very systems it seeks to critique. Having been colonized, are these artists now and forevermore postcolonial? Must we always define their work in relation to empire, even when it speaks to entirely different concerns? Rather than flattening cultures into fixed oppositions, we can recognize global performance traditions as already hybrid, fluid, and cosmopolitan. No tradition is pure. Histories of migration, trade, and resistance have shaped theatre globally—Yoruba opera mixes indigenous forms with European instrumentation; experimental Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal’s Teatro do Oprimido repurposes ancient Greek tragic structure for grassroots activism, and so on.

Understanding theatre as a global and cultural practice also means asking critical questions: Who defines what counts as theatre? Whose stories are preserved and passed down? Whose practices are studied, funded, or celebrated—and whose are ignored or erased? Theatre history is a game of a few pieces; fragmentary evidence of performance often survives because it was valued somehow by the dominant culture at the time. But sometimes pieces survive by accident as in the case of uncomprehending colonial accounts of indigenous ritual performances. New discoveries are still being made in unexpected locations. For example, in 1963, researchers discovered 400 lines from a play by the Greek comedian Menander on papyrus that had been used to wrap a mummy. As students and scholars of theatre, we must observe not only the currents of creative collaboration that flow through and define a theatrical performance but also those of power: the cultural, historical, and institutional forces that have shaped what we study and how we study it. To study theatre globally is to enter a conversation across cultures, to recognize both difference and connection, and to expand our understanding of what theatre can be—and what it can do.