4.1: Performing Across Cultures

Performance emerges from specific cultural, spiritual, and social frameworks. These contexts shape not only what is performed but how performers are trained, understood, and valued. In some traditions, performers are ritual specialists who mediate between humans and the divine. In others, they are storytellers preserving communal memory, comedians whose improvisation engages the political moment, or highly trained virtuosos whose artistry is passed down through specialized lineages. For example, in Japanese Nōh theatre, performance is inseparable from Buddhist and Shinto religious practices transmitted across centuries. In West African griot traditions, performers serve as oral historians, genealogists, praise-singers, and social commentators. In Yoruba egúngún masquerade, performers embody ancestral spirits whose presence reaffirms communal bonds.[i] Indigenous Australian songlines or dream tracks use performance to carry sacred geographical and cosmological knowledge. Performance in these examples exists not only to entertain but also to sustain and reshape communities, to preserve or challenge the status quo.

Different cultures hold distinct aesthetic ideas about what constitutes “beauty,” “realism,” “believability,” or “good acting.” These ideas are informed by religion, politics, and gender roles. For example, due to restrictions on and attitudes toward women’s participation in public life, many historical forms of theatre banned female presenting individuals from performing, including Greek tragedy, Japanese Nōh drama, Indian Kathakali dance, as well as the Elizabethan theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In other forms, such as Roman mime, Japanese Kabuki, and English Restoration comedy, female contributions were marginalized, suppressed, or tightly controlled. These gendered restrictions offer an example of how culture shaped not only who could appear onstage but also the aesthetic conventions that developed within each tradition. A Nōh performer’s slow, deliberate gesture may convey meaning for an audience of connoisseurs, while a Kathakali dancer’s precisely controlled eye movements communicate a character’s bhava or inner emotional state.[ii] In many traditions, the performer’s virtuosity lies not in reproducing everyday behavior but in mastery of form, rhythm, repetition, and symbolic detail.

Understanding these differences helps us appreciate performance on its own terms rather than through the lens of contemporary Western acting norms. Those norms, of course, have their own history. Responding to the industrial revolution and the rise of modernism, Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), along with director Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko and playwright Anton Chekhov, rejected the presentational style of acting that had dominated Western theatre for centuries. Stanislavski sought a more psychologically rooted style that drew on the actor’s emotional memory, working from the “inside out.” His system continued to evolve throughout his life and after his death as students such as Lee Strasburg, Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, Sanford Meisner, Michael Chekhov interpreted and adapted his teachings in different ways. What audiences once hailed as the height of the craft of acting in the 1950s might now seem exaggerated and mannered when compared to the subtlety favored on many Western stages today. Acclaimed British actor Laurence Olivier’s Richard III as immortalized in the eponymous 1955 film was parodied by comedian Peter Sellers a decade later. Appearing in a similar costume and affecting Olivier’s famous cadence, Sellers recited the lyrics to “A Hard Day’s Night” by the Beatles to loud guffaws of recognition. Both Olivier’s performance and Sellers’ parody appear dated in the face of Zimbabwean-American actor and playwright Danai Gurira’s fresh and chaotic delivery of the same speech during her run as Richard in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production mounted by New York City’s Public Theatre. Performers everywhere are shaped by the worlds they inhabit, by systems of religion, politics, class, gender, sexuality, and history that inform their work and their audiences’ expectations.

Although performance traditions differ widely in practice and purpose, they share certain fundamental qualities. The anonymous priests who enacted the Egyptian ritual drama The Triumph of Horus, Thespis, the legendary first actor of Ancient Greece, Roscius, the Roman comedian, and Zeami Motokiyo, the master of Nōh, all have something in common with Shakespeare’s leading man Richard Burbage, tragedians Sarah Siddons, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry, Italian icon Eleanora Duse, and French superstar Sarah Bernhardt. They are also linked to twentieth- and twenty-first-century performers such as xìqǔ master Mei Lanfang, dancer Michio Ito, Kabuki onnagata Bandō Tamasaburō V, Butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno, Kathakali virtuoso Kalamandalam Gopi, griot and actor Sotigui Kouyaté, South African actor John Kani, and Broadway legends Lena Horne and Pearl Bailey, as well as countless other performers. Across eras and cultures, all these artists share the essential act of transforming themselves in front of others and inviting audiences into imagined worlds.

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[i] The Yoruba Egúngún masquerade of West Africa is a performance tradition honoring ancestral spirits. Masked performers represent ancestors who return to advise and bless the community. These ceremonies combine ritual, dance, costume, and storytelling, illustrating how performance functions within religious and social life.

[ii] In classical Indian performance theory, bhavas are the emotional states portrayed by performers, while rasas are the emotional “flavors” experienced by spectators. Traditional theory identifies nine primary rasas, including love, humor, anger, fear, and wonder.