Joerg Esleben, with Rolf Rohmer and David G. John. Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 384 Pages.

Summary

Since the 1960s, India has figured prominently in the theory and practice of “intercultural theater” because of the engagement with traditional Indian narratives and cultural forms on the part of several leading Euro-American directors. Jerzy Grotowski's two early productions of Kalidasa's Sanskrit play Shakuntala, Eugenio Barba's use of the classical dance form Odissi as a consistent point of reference in his Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, Richard Schechner's ethnography of the Ramlila of Ramnagar as religioussecular performance, the collective fascination with Kathakali, and, above all, Peter Brook's nine-hour stage version of the Mahabharata are notable examples of the process by which Indian cultural materials and aesthetics have shaped Western performance in both conceptual and artistic terms. Not surprisingly, in postcolonial assessments of cross-cultural exchanges, the same forms of engagement with India have come in for stringent critique, because they point to Western interculturalism as a Eurocentric, self-interested, neo-orientalist form of cultural appropriation that simply perpetuates the older colonialist asymmetries of power.

Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare, compiled and edited by Joerg Esleben with the assistance of Rolf Rohmer and David G. John, is a refreshing and instructive intervention in that now-familiar debate, because it presents a “seminal but neglected figure” whose intercultural experiments in India were substantially different from those of his Euro-American contemporaries. Bennewitz was an established East German theater professional and had been director-in-chief at the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar for a decade when he began his extended twenty-five-year relationship with India in 1970, under the auspices of an Indo-GDR cultural exchange program. As a committed socialist officially representing East Germany during the cold war years in a country “friendly” to the Soviet Union, he set two interrelated goals for himself as a teacher and director. Instead of taking on unfamiliar Indian narratives and forms, Bennewitz chose initially to direct plays by Bertolt Brecht (for which he had already acquired a reputation at Meiningen and Weimar in the 1960s), and later extended his repertoire to Shakespeare.