Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor's Work : Foreign Bodies of Knowledge

A sophisticated analysis of how the intersection of technique, memory, and imagination inform performance, this book redirects the intercultural debate by focusing exclusively on the actor at work. Alongside the perspectives of other prominent intercultural actors, this study draws from original interviews with Ang Gey Pin (formerly with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) and Roberta Carreri (Odin Teatret). By illuminating the hidden creative processes usually unavailable to outsiders--the actor’s apprenticeship, training, character development, and rehearsals--Nascimento both reveals how assumptions based on race or ethnicity are misguiding, trouble definitions of intra- and intercultural practices, and details how performance analyses and claims of appropriation fail to consider the permanent transformation of the actor’s identity that cultural transmission and embodiment represent.

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento is an artist-scholar from Rio de Janeiro, with a particular interest in experimental performance. Her articles appear internationally in journals such as A[l]berto and Folhetim (Brazil), Biblioteca Teatrale (Italy), Didaskalia (Poland), Studia Dramatica (Romania), and TDR and Theatre Research International (United States). A professor and chair of the Theater and Dance Department at Macalester College, she is also the author of After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation (Routledge, 2019).