|
Article Excerpt
The most disputed frontier of all is the one which separates the field of cultural production and the field of power. (Bourdieu, Field 43)
In the account of The Theatre of Neptune in New France with which I introduced this book, I argued that all of Canadian theatre, and the nation it stages, can be seen as a replaying of Lescarbot's masque: a constant historical citation and recitation of the postcolonial crises of authenticity and displacement. The case studies that have developed that argument have each in turn examined a moment in which theatre culture, and the imagined theatres it projects, enacted an historical crisis of authenticity. I want to conclude this argument by returning to the personal space in which I began and by questioning the longing for authenticity that theatre and nation both answer with profound emotion.
As a father, I have watched in fascination as my young son grows into the world and begins to embody nationhood as a set of reflexive and pleasurable emotional responses. On Canada Day (which will always be Dominion Day to me) we gathered with ten thousand other people at a riverside park in Guelph to watch the fireworks display. This annual display (manufactured, in fact, by the same company for which John Henderson wrote his scripts a century ago) is sponsored by the Rotary Club in Guelph but is presented as a civic event. We watched the display with pleasure and, at times, wonder. Immense speakers pumped out recordings of The Tragically Hip, kids waved Canadian flags and yelled "Bonne Fete Canada!" and my six-year-old son looked up at the pyrotechnics and whispered, "This is awesome."
"Awesome" is a major word in the vocabulary of a six year old, but in this case I was struck by the realization that he was absolutely correct: it was awesome. This was the state (the city, the Rotarians, the nation assembled) dazzling its citizens in a performance of surpassing wonder. We were as dumbfounded by marvel as Vasari's compatriots were in Florence five hundred years ago and by a technology that hasn't changed very much in the interim. The evocation of awe is one of the principal means by which states command the emotional allegiance of their constituents. A fete at Versailles, a masque at a colonial outpost, a pyrotechnic spectacle, a military parade, a floodlit rally: these are the familiar spectacles of emotive manipulation that remind us of the performative mechanisms of nationhood.
The sense of elation and wonder that nationhood can evoke, in localized, secular, spectacles (hockey games, Santa Claus parades, Gay Pride, and Caribana all come to mind), as well as in explicitly patriotic performances, reifies a sense of authenticity through catharsis and for this reason has long been suspect. But if it reifies a sense of community grounded in nationality as one of the formative sites of social identity, is it possible that the nation need not just be imagined (in Benedict Anderson's sense) but may be, in fact, invented? If theatre culture enacts nationhood, can it summon emotional allegiance to fictive, invented nations? And are they any less authentic than the nation that commands awe on Canada Day?
That question began pressing in on me after I took my son to see The Lion King at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. By coincidence, we saw the show on its first birthday. Following the performance, the producers, Ed and David Mirvish, brought a giant birthday cake onto the stage and introduced the flamboyant Mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman. After his ceremonial speech, the cast sang "Happy Birthday," and ribbons cascaded from the ceiling. This, building on the rapturous staging of the play, had my son staring in wide-eyed wonder: "This is awesome!"
He wasn't alone in that response. As Mel Lastman proudly told us, the Toronto production of The Lion King has sold 850,000 tickets in the year since it opened, and it plays to a market that covers the entire Great Lakes heartland of North America. It is, needless to say, a major anchor of cultural tourism in Toronto. The Toronto production of The Lion King is one of seven currently playing in the world (the others are in New York, Los Angeles, London, Hamburg, Tokyo, and Fukuoka). Each carries the imprimatur of the celebrated avant-garde director Julie Taymor and Disney Theatricals, and each serves its market as the "authentic" production--and in fact may mark spheres of authenticity.
The Lion King can be understood as an imperial spectacle which in Julie Taymor's playful and, in the most literal sense of the word, marvelous staging inscribes Disney's fable of manhood and natural law in a mysticized circle of life as seen from the top of the food chain. Taymor's mise en scene deploys puppet techniques from a variety of "indigenous" cultures in a spectacle of interculturalism grounded in a dehistoricized, dislocated myth of primal Africa. The interculturalism of the show builds on a fantasy of an invented Africa, legitimized by South African musical forms and the (mostly) black bodies of the performers. This choice of a fantasized as opposed to a pedagogical interculturalism seems to have been a deliberate strategy to gesture to the shifting politics of race without engaging in local specifics, and the fantasy of an invented Africa, sustained by intertextual signs of South African cultural experience, allows the show to adapt to the cultural particularities of its various sites. In Toronto, the polysemic performing bodies of The Lion King play back a multiplicity of readings, as cross-cultural puppeteers, as signifiers of blackness, as celebrants of contemporary diversity. The Toronto production takes place in The Princess of Wales Theatre, a new house decked in comfortable citations of theatrical traditionalism with its plaster scrollwork on boxes and gently curved galleries where audiences sit in signs of theatrical tradition to watch signs of cultural tradition. An imagined theatre watches an imagined Africa. But the audience and the performance are real, realizing each other in a moment of reclaimed authenticity that time and...
|
