Theatre on the Brink of 2000: Shifting Paradigms

Abstract

When I accepted the invitation to address this World Congress and first devised my title, I was drawing on a strong conviction that as we approach the century's end, we are living through a period of profound local and global changes which touch every level of our intellectual and emotional lives. The location of this present moment of our inquiries, poised between the markers of termination and origin, the end and the beginning, the twentieth and the twenty first centuries, seemed to me a powerful and widely understandable trope for our shared contemporary situation, at this conference and in our respective countries. But of course, this is a World Congress, and not for all the cultures of the world is this trope of brinkmanship immediately compelling. Assuming the Roman calendar without initial reflection, I have performed in my title one of the very acts which I planned to criticize: I have assumed in language, imagination, and sociality a centredness and primacy for Western discourse which I no longer believe or support. Indeed, the major important revision of the theoretical, historical, and critical apparatus of our time has been to de centre such governing assumptions. The title, then, marks the limits and difficulties of moving beyond historically inherited and inscribed paradigms, even as I struggle to do so, and I offer this revision of the assumptions of this piece: while for many of us, this talk of the millennium may provide a meaningful context for inquiry, for others it may be perceived as a foreign and local concept, in need of translation.