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You know walls, can't contain me : approaches and reflections on directing Charles Mee's the Bacchae 2.1 as a hybrid theatre and the interfacing of Asian performance rituals to the Western spoken drama

University of British Columbia

My MFA Theatre Directing Thesis Production inquires on intercultural theatre through hybrid pollination of Asian ritual performances to the Western spoken theatre using Charles Mee's The Bacchae 2.1. What attracted me about this text is Mee's rendering of different cultural influences and layering of various artistic traditions into one dramatic expression. In one of the lines of Dionysus, he ascertained, "You know walls, can’t contain me…", the premise that signifies in this line is the process and approaches I employed in crafting this performance. Global issues influence my experiences as a contemporary artist, and my central interest in this project is to seek how cultures blend without a compromise. Mee's The Bacchae 2.1 captured this artistic rendition by sourcing various texts and materials while keeping the moral ethos and political premise of the original text. When cultures are mixed and blended to form a new style of artistic language, dialogues can then be opened between people of various cultural backgrounds. From this, new artistic forms are fused to transcend cultural differences in search of an understanding of the global human condition.

Text

2015-04-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/52694

Theatre

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/