The transcultural body: Kolkata re-membered

This article explores the tensions that surround the effort to make intercultural performance. In particular it draws on the author’s experience of making a cross-cultural devised theatre project for the British Council in India, working with Indian performers and largely western devising techniques. This is contextualized by a discussion of the work of some key practitioners in this area, such as Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski and Tatsumi Hijikata. Barba’s notion of ‘travellers of speed’ is discussed, as is the critique of such ideas by Phiip Zarilli, among others. The attempt to make a performance space that transcends culture is contrasted with the experience of making performance in a context where cultural specificity is written through every aspect of the work and expresses itself within the bodies of the performers themselves.