Intercultural theory, postcolonial theory,

and semiotics: The road not (yet) taken

MARVIN CARLSON

Abstract

Elams observation that during the past decade or so the semiotic approach
to theatre studies has lost its cultural and academic prominence seems un-
questionable, even though it should be qualied with the observation made
by Sue-Ellen Case and many other prominent theatre theorists that almost
all modern theatre theory is based on the semiotic project. Perhaps nowhere
was the attempt to move beyond semiotics more strongly marked than in
the various forms of poststructuralism, which, by their very assumption of
that name, attempted to develop a discourse both beyond and often in direct
opposition to semiotics.
In fact, the poststructuralist project did not produce a large body of sig-
nicant theatrical theory. Much more important have been the various types
of cultural studies, including various gender and ethnic studies, which never
attempted to similarly distance themselves from semiotics. Among the most
prominent of the various approaches to cultural studies that emerged in
the late twentieth century was postcolonial studies, an approach to theatre
studies that, like the various types of ethnic and gender studies that immedi-
ately preceded it, not only draws signicantly upon a semiotic background,
but is engaged in projects in which semiotic analysis provides perhaps
the most useful potential tools. Thus, after the anti-semiotic reaction in-
volved in at least certain aspects of poststructuralism, the reemergence of
questions of representation, of historical placement, and of authorial voice
in postcolonial studies provides a potentially rich new eld for semiotic
investigation.

Keywords: intercultural theory; postcolonial theory; theatre semiotics.

There can be little arguing with the fact that, as Keir Elam and others
have noted, the semiotic approach to theatre studies, so widespread in the

Semiotica 1681/4 (2008), 129142 00371998/08/01680129

DOI 10.1515/SEM.2008.007 6 Walter de Gruyter
130 M. Carlson

1980s, came to lose its cultural and academic prominence (Elam 2002:
194) during the following decade. More than twice as many books specif-
ically devoted to theatre semiotics appeared in the earlier decade, and se-
miotic studies of particular plays, playwrights, or performances, common
enough in the standard journals in the eld during the 1980s, rarely if ever
can be found in more recent issues.
This by no means indicates that semiotics in general has disappeared
from the cultural and academic scene. Somewhat surprisingly, given its
diminished visibility in theatre studies, I found on a quick search of the
MLA listings that there were actually more books and articles listed with
semiotics in the title during the 1990s (more than 1100) than in the 1980s
(about 100 less). Rather more important, specically in the area of theatre
studies, is the fact that semiotics, while not always directly acknowledged,
nevertheless continues to serve as the grounding approach for a great deal
of current theatrical investigation and, as I hope to demonstrate, oers a
great deal of still not fully utilized potential for the pursuit of some of the
most interesting and challenging directions of contemporary theatre and
performance research.
In her Feminism and Theatre (1988), the rst book-length study devoted
to the theoretical foundations of a feminist theatre, Sue-Ellen Case, a pi-
oneer in this movement, called for a new poetics that would draw upon
a wide range of theoretical strategies to develop alternatives to the tradi-
tional patriarchal systems of analysis of dramatic form, practice, and
audience formation. For the reader who is unfamiliar with these new
theories, Case suggested, an eective starting-point for the intersection
of new theory with performance and feminist poetics may be found in
the eld of semiotics (1988: 115). Particularly important for Case as well
as for the generation of feminist scholars that followed her was the polit-
ical implications of semiotic analysis. Case called cultural encoding, the
process fundamental to semiotic analysis, the imprint of ideology upon
the sign the set of values, beliefs and ways of seeing that control the
connotations of the sign in the culture at large (1988: 116). Thus, Case
noted, the semiotic concept of encoding shifts the political implications
of a theatrical performance from the interpretative sphere of the critic to
the signication process of the performance, thereby assigning political
alliance to the aesthetic realm (1988: 115117).
Although semiotics provided an important inspiration for certain of the
cultural feminists, such as Linda Walsh Jenkins, who sought an authenti-
cally female drama based on female signs (1984: 6), the most important
use of semiotic theory by feminist theorists was within that tendency in
feminism represented by Case, Jill Dolan, and Elin Diamond, which em-
phasized the cultural construction of gender and was strongly inuenced
 The road not (yet) taken 131

by modern, especially neo-Marxist political and cultural theory. In the

writings of such theorists, semiotics, untied with cultural and gender anal-
ysis, remained a major critical tool until the very end of the century, when
its utilization in other areas of theatrical theory had much diminished.
Thus, at the very end of the decade, in 1999, Mary Brewer began her
study Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Womens Theatre by an-
nouncing as a basic principle that representation is a process of semiosis
or meaning-making (1999: 12), and then proceed with a carefully
nuanced semiotic materialist analysis of a wide variety of performances
in England and America involving the issues of its title.
The signicant shift toward materialist analysis in the later years of the
twentieth century was by no means restricted to feminist performance
theory, but could also be found across a broad international spectrum of
drama and performance analysis. Within the eld of semiotic studies
itself, this shift could be seen in a number of key writings of the early
1980s. In 1983, Marco de Marinis, one of the most astute theorists in as-
sessing the state of semiotic analysis in the theatre and in predicting the
various stages in its development, published an important review essay ar-
guing that theatre semiotics, having established itself internationally as a
major critical approach, was now at a crossroads. It must either continue
its developed interest in the structural analysis of literary or performance
texts, De Marinis suggested, or it must move beyond such case by case
analysis to develop what he characterized as a pragmatics of theatrical
communication, engaging the historical and sociological contexts of
both stage realization and reception (1983: 125128). A similar observa-
tion, looking beyond theatre semiotics to the eld of semiotics in general,
was published the following year by Teresa de Lauretis, a pioneer in the
use of semiotic theory in both feminist and lm studies. De Lauretis ar-
gued that a major new direction was developing in current semiotic
theory, a direction that was taking semiotic analysis away from the clas-
sication of sign systems, their basic units, their levels of structural orga-
nization, and towards the exploration of the modes of production of signs
and meanings, the ways in which systems and codes are used, trans-
formed or transgressed in social practice (1984: 167).
This shift in the orientation of modern semiotics from the study of sign
systems to the social context of signication resulted in a rich variety of
new approaches to theatre analysis, a number of which utilized semiotic
strategies even when they did not specically characterize their work as
such. The social and cultural contextualization of dramatic texts, espe-
cially those of Shakespeare, became the major concern of the American
New Historians, headed by Stephen Greenblatt, and of the British cul-
tural materialists, such as Alan Sineld and Richard Dollimore, whose
132 M. Carlson

work in turn inuenced British gender and racial performance studies

such as that of Brewer, who foregrounded the semiotic nature of her
work.
The widespread recognition in the late twentieth century that signica-
tion must always consider cultural context reected a growing interest in
what came to be called cultural studies, a theatrical eld whose coming to
major international importance was signaled by the launching of the jour-
nal Cultural Studies, under an international editorial board, in January
1987, and the 1990 international conference Cultural Studies Now and
in the Future held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In both the theory and practice of theatre, this rising new interest was
manifested in a wide variety of ways. Performance studies and cultural
studies united to stimulate interest in performance work outside the Euro-
centric tradition. The productions of major theatre directors like Peter
Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Robert Wilson, and the rise of interna-
tional festivals and touring created an unprecedented occurrence of and
study of intercultural performance and reception. Finally, an interest in
the process of domination and subordination of cultures, particularly in
relation to the European colonial project, gave rise during the 1990s to
the major new eld of postcolonial cultural studies.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, as theoretical interest in intercultural
performance and subsequently in post-colonial performance grew, most
theorists in working in these areas did not, like Case or Brewer within
feminist studies, continue to acknowledge the debt their work owed to
the semiotic enterprise, nor, even more seriously, was much attention
given to how semiotics might be revisited to provide an important critical
approach to these new areas of investigation. This is all the more surpris-
ing in that during the early 1990s, as a strong interest in theorizing inter-
cultural theatre developed, serving as a kind of bridge between earlier
cultural studies and subsequent postcolonial work, some of the central
gures in this new orientation were scholars who, during the 1980s, had
become established as leaders in the eld of theatre semiotics. Among
most prominent of these were Patrice Pavis in France and Erika Fischer-
Lichte in Germany, both pioneers in modern theatre semiotics who turned
their attention during the following decade to the analysis of intercultural
performance. This new orientation was rst clearly expressed in a major
international symposium held in Bad Homburg, Germany, in May of
1988 under the title Das eigene und das fremde Theater. Both Fischer-
Lichte, who organized the symposium, and Pavis participated, along with
leading theatre theorists and practitioners from Europe, North America,
Asia, and Africa. Papers from the conference were subsequently pub-
lished (in 1990) as The Dramatic Touch of Dierence: Theatre, Own and
 The road not (yet) taken 133

Foreign. In the conclusion to this volume, entitled Towards a theory of

intercultural performance, Fischer-Lichte argued the process of contem-
porary intercultural performance was altering the modern theatre in a
manner signicantly unlike any previous process of theatrical change
(1990: 285) in that it simultaneously involved signicant alterations to es-
tablished theatre forms and the appearance of new theatrical forms aris-
ing from the utilization of foreign elements in new contexts by artists like
Suzuki, Brook, and Wilson (Fischer-Lichte 1990: 285).
The absence of semiotic terminology from almost all of the published
papers of this key conference is striking, especially since not only Fischer-
Lichte and Pavis (as well as several other participants in the conference)
had previously been leaders in this theoretical methodology, but it is de-
monstrably true that as theoretical interest in intercultural performance
developed during the early 1990s, it did so largely without the specic
aid of a semiotic discourse. Part of the reason for this seems to have
been that, in matters of the transfer of material from one culture to
another, semiotics seems to have been felt, rightly or wrongly, to be par-
ticularly useful in developing a translation model in which signs from a
source culture are replaced by signs from a target culture.
However, Fischer-Lichte specically rejected the translation model as a
means of understanding modern intercultural theatre, suggesting instead
the process of productive reception, taken from the writings of the Ger-
man reception theorist Gunter Grimm. In her conclusion to The Dra-
matic Touch of Dierence Fischer-Lichte specically cites this passage
from Grimm:

The eld of productive reception embraces all the production processes of a work
which are either occasioned by or strongly inuenced by reception. Through the
emphasis and activity of the subject dealt with, the aesthetic aspect of reception
predominates in contrast to the productive aspect, since the reception clearly
serves the production . . . The research of productive reception or receptive pro-
duction is dierent from former inuential research in its reversal of the perspec-
tive. (Grimm, quoted in Fischer-Lichte 1990: 284)

The former inuential research was clearly that of the early days of
modern semiotics, which in fact did reverse this perspective, concentrat-
ing on the theatrical production of signs for an essentially passive audi-
ence which interpreted but did not actively participate in the creation of
these signs. Indeed, as late as 1984 Marco De Marinis complained that
semiotic theory involving theatre had to date suered from a theoretical
void concerning the role of the spectator (1984: 128). The reversal of em-
phasis from production to reception had an enormous impact on modern
134 M. Carlson

theatre semiotics, and from the standpoint of this eld, a not particularly
positive one. As theatre theorists turned from the models of Saussure and
the tradition of European structural linguistics to the German reception
theorists like Jauss, Iser, and Grimm, they turned as well from matters
of sign production and communication to the cultural environment with-
in which the sign was interpreted, and thus away from what had been the
central concern of semiotics to the developing eld of cultural studies.
Hermeneutic concerns took precedence over semiotic ones.
This shift need not have led to a general abandonment of a semiotic
perspective, or even to a diminishment of its analytic usefulness. In partic-
ular, Americas leading pioneer in semiotic studies, Charles Peirce, of-
fered a model that would have been potentially extremely useful in this
shift of emphasis from production to reception. His often-quoted deni-
tion of a sign as something which stands for something to somebody in
some respect or capacity, by emphasizing the receiving somebody and
the context of reception, obviously looks in this direction. Peirce was
careful to distinguish, as did few of the pioneers of modern theatre semi-
otics, between the sign itself and what the sign stimulates in the mind of
the receiver. This result of the sign Peirce calls the interpretant, and as
usual he considers it in three aspects, which he calls the immediate, the
dynamic, and the nal. In brief, the immediate is the innate interpretabil-
ity of the sign before it reaches the interpreter and the nal is the ultimate
interpretation, a kind of Aristotelian complete form reached only when
all possible considerations have been assimilated. The immediate was al-
most universally the concern of traditional theatre semiotics, reinforced
by the assumption that this meaning should be given prominence since it
was what the author or artist intended. The second aspect, the dynamic,
comparatively neglected, had the potential to bring Peircian semiotics
into a close working relationship with reception concepts like Grimms
productive reception. In his most extended description of the dynamic,
Peirce calls it that which is experienced in each act of interpretation and
is dierent in each from that of any other, and a single actual event
(Peirce 1997: 111), leading to precisely the sort of analysis involved in cul-
tural reception studies.
Unfortunately, although Peirces division of signs into icons, indexes,
and symbols circulated widely among theatre semioticians, little of the
rest of his extensive theory had much impact especially, as one might ex-
pect, among European theorists like De Marinis, Pavis, and Fischer-
Lichte. It is hardly surprising that Fischer-Lichte, in particular, in at-
tempting to come to theoretical terms with the new intercultural theatre
of the 1980s would turn to the recent reception theorists of her own coun-
try than to a much less known and less accessible American semioticians
 The road not (yet) taken 135

who could have provided a semiotically oriented approach to the analysis

she wanted to undertake.
Of the major theorists, primarily European, who began to produce
studies of intercultural theatre in the early 1990s, only Patrice Pavis
seemed to remain strongly committed to an approach still openly
grounded in semiotics. In his Theatre au croisement des cultures, pub-
lished in 1990, the same year as Dramatic Touch of Dierence, he argued
that although we are still far from a general theory of interculturalism, it
is nevertheless within the semiotic model of exchange, like rewriting or
intertextuality (Pavis 1994: 209) that such a theoretical model would
best be developed.
This was by no means equally clear to other theorists, and even Pavis
seemed tempted at this point to move in a direction that sounded much
closer to the productive reception model proposed by Fischer-Lichte
than a more specically semiotic one. Even in the introduction to Theatre
au croisement des cultures, he suggested that The model of intertextuality,
derived from structuralism and semiotics needed to give way to that of
interculturalism, since it was no longer enough to describe the relation-
ships between texts (or even between performances) to grasp their internal
functioning; it is also necessary to understand their inscription within
contexts and cultures and to appreciate the cultural production that
stems from these unexpected transfers (Pavis 1994: 2). Again, the empha-
sis of traditional semiotics on sign production, without something
like Peirces recognition of the dynamic interpretant, oered no clear
model for deals with these inscriptions and operations of cultural
production.
Pavis seemed much more aware of the threat to semiotic analysis
than of some such method of adjusting it to the new concerns oered by
intercultural study. In his subsequent collection, The Intercultural Perfor-
mance Reader, published in 1996, he specically took issue with Fisher-
Lichtes emphasis on the productive reception model. By rejecting all
theorizing which suggests a communication or translation model, he ar-
gued, Fischer-Lichte cuts herself o from any productive model for ex-
change and renounces a semiotic (even a simply theoretical) explanation
(Pavis 1996: 11). So far as it went, this analysis and warning was both
correct and quite perceptive. The direction Fisher-Lichte was taking did
indeed lead away from the old communication model of traditional semi-
otic study, and such analysis was already well on the way to disappearing
from studies of intercultural theory. It is surely an exaggeration, however,
to charge that the abandonment of semiotics cut o the researcher from
any productive model of exchange or indeed from any theoretical ground-
ing whatever. Certainly other theoretical models were possible, but even
136 M. Carlson

within semiotics, if it were allowed its full potential, the concerns occupy-
ing Fischer-Lichte could in fact have been more fully explored.
Unhappily, this was not to be. Even the essays in Pavis Intercultural
Reader are singularly lacking in any reference whatsoever to semiotic
theory. Actually, the title of one section of Erika Fischer-Lichtes book
The Show and Gaze of Theatre, which appeared the following year in
1997, might seem to suggest that she was in some measure responding fa-
vorably to Pavis critique: Changing theatrical codes: Towards a semiot-
ics of intercultural performance. In fact, however, a central part of this
chapter includes the same championing of the new approach of produc-
tive reception, along with the same supporting quotation from Grimm,
as appeared in the earlier Das eigene und das fremde Theater. Indeed, in
the new book Fischer-Lichte is even more explicit in denying semiotics,
as was normally understood, as oering any potential insight into inter-
cultural performance. In such work, actors bodies, objects, and scraps
of language, sound, and music are no longer oered as signs that should
represent something, mean anything, but rather as objects that refer only
to themselves and which delight in their very objectness . . . There is no
longer a sign process, meaning, or orientation. In fact there is meaning,
but it is the meaning generated within reception: Since the audience is
presented solely with objects that are not culturally bound to a specic
meaning, any spectator from any culture can receive the objects presented
in the context of his or her own culturally specied experience and deduce
meaning (Fischer-Lichte 1997: 139140).
This then was the position almost universally held among those theatre
theorists who considered the intercultural operations of theatre in the late
twentieth century. When artists like Peter Brook or Robert Wilson uti-
lized gestures, sounds, images, or objects from cultures outside their own,
these became objects which refer only to themselves rather than signs
that represent something, mean anything. Thus there is no longer a sign
process, and no longer any role for semiotic analysis. In my opinion, this
position, though widely held, represented a serious reduction of both in-
tercultural theatre and semiotics. The concept that in a Wilson or Brook
production intercultural images become objects that refer only to them-
selves is merely a more sophisticated version of Michael Kirbys (in my
view) illusory vision of a non-semiotic theatre in the 1970s. As I argued
in my response to Kirby (1982), nding and presenting objects that refer
only to themselves (Carlson 1985: 107) is an almost inconceivable task,
and even were this possible, one would escape the operations of semiosis
only if one excluded reception from semiotics, which as I have already
noted, has been all too often the practice of the theorists of intercultural
theatre.
 The road not (yet) taken 137

In recent years, the study of intercultural theatre has been overtaken

and overshadowed by the development of a related but distinctly
dierently-oriented eld, that of post-colonial theatre studies. Building
upon the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1960s and Edward Said in the
1970s, theorists like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak during the 1990s
helped to consolidate post-colonial studies as a distinct eld, dedicated to
the complex interplay of cultural materials that resulted from the nine-
teenth century European colonial project and its continuing aftermath in
the countries around the globe aected by it.
Three major books in the late 1990s opened the eld of theatre and
drama to post-colonial study. These were Brian Crow and Chris Ban-
elds An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theatre and Helen Gilbert and
Joanne Tompkins Post-Colonial Drama Theory, Practice, Politics, both
of which appeared in 1996, and Christopher Balmes Decolonizing the
Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama, published in
1999. Crow and Banelds (1996) work provides little theoretical back-
ground, but is rather an introduction to the work of a number of leading
post-colonial dramatists such as Derek Walcott, Jack Davis, and Wole
Soyinka. Gilbert and Tompkins are somewhat more theoretical, although
their emphasis is upon the political and cultural dynamics of post-colonial
drama and their critical tools derived essentially from cultural and perfor-
mance studies. I do not believe they ever refer to semiotic work, although
in their discussion of colonial languages and dialects there is some use of
general linguistic theory.
For our purposes, Balmes work opens the most interesting perspec-
tives, not only because it is the most theoretical of the three, but because
it is the only one that directly, if briey, engages again with the question
of the operations and usefulness of semiotic analysis. Balmes introduc-
tion of the subject begins, in my opinion somewhat unpromisingly, by
accepting unquestioningly the irrelevance of semiotics to the study of
the sort of performance Pavis and Fischer-Lichte called intercultural
and which Balme characterizes as theatrical exoticism, which involves
processes of mixing and adaptation of foreign performance elements
into Western theatre. Since such elements are invariably stripped of
their original textuality, Balme asserts, they are no longer texts in the
semiotic sense, but merely signs, oating signiers of otherness (1999:
5).
When dealing with post-colonial theatre, however, Balme feels that the
use of foreign material operates in a totally opposite way, which opens an
opportunity for semiotic theory, but semiotic theory of a substantially dif-
ferent sort from that traditionally employed in the theatre. Balme comes
to this reorientation through his interest in syncretism, which, as his subtitle
138 M. Carlson

suggests, is the central organizing principle of his study. Syncretism is a

term with a long history in religious studies, almost invariably with
pejorative connotations, referring to the absorption of impure external
elements into orthodox religious practice. In the late twentieth century
however, with the declining faith in totalizing systems and exclusionary
master narratives, syncretism began to be looked upon as an inevitable,
and even positive operation, by religious scholars, such as Carsten Colpe
(1997) but also by such inuential pioneers in modern cultural studies
as James Cliord. In a key passage in Cliords The Predicament of Cul-
ture, one of the founding texts of modern cultural studies, Cliord notes
that:

With expanded communication and intercultural inuence, people interpret

others, and themselves, in a bewildering diversity of idioms a global condition
of what Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia. This ambiguous, multivocal world
makes it increasingly hard to conceive of human diversity as inscribed in bounded
independent cultures. Dierence is an eect of inventive syncretism. (Cliord
1988: 22)

Balme cites the work of two scholars of South Africa performance, ethno-
musicologist David Coplan and theatre scholar Temple Haupteisch as
the most comprehensive attempts to apply the concept of syncretism
to the performing arts, and approvingly quotes Coplans denition of
this phenomenon: the acculturative blending of performance materials
and practices from two or more cultural traditions, producing qualita-
tively new forms (Coplan, quoted in Balme 1999: 1314).
In fact, this denition, as stated, does not seem to me to exclude the
European intercultural experiments of the late twentieth century that
Balme feels took precisely the opposite approach from syncretic theatre.
In Balmes own discussion of this term, the distinction is made much
more clear, as is the reason that Balme feels that semiotic theory, even if
in substantially revised form, could bring useful insights to the study of
syncretic theatre even though he feels it was of no use to the exoticized
intercultural theatre. In the latter, non-Western elements, Balme argues
were neither used nor perceived as texts in their own right, while in syn-
cretic theatre, cultural texts retain their integrity as bearers of precisely
dened cultural meaning (1999: 5). This provides Balme with the means
to reestablish semiotics as an analytical tool by reestablishing the theatre
as involved with the communication of these precisely dened cultural
meanings. The substantial revision Balme requires is that future semi-
otic theorists must recognize the syncretic or hybrid nature of post-
colonial theatre and replace the monocultural communication model of
 The road not (yet) taken 139

traditional semiotics with one that recognizes this cultural complexity

(1999: 5).
Specic references to semiotics are essentially conned to the Introduc-
tion to Balmes work, but a number of later sections, including chapters
on language, the body, and uses of physical space, show a strong semiotic
inuence. Balmes book thus provides an important fresh look at the use-
fulness of semiotic theory after its relative eclipse in writings on intercul-
tural theatre, especially those produced in the high tide of poststructural-
ist theory.
Useful and important as Balmes book is, however, I hope that further
studies of post-colonial, and indeed of intercultural theatre will not un-
thinkingly accept his restrictive guidelines, which would restrict semiotic
study only to the communication of precisely dened cultural meanings.
In my opinion, this totalizing view would prevent many potentially pro-
ductive applications of semiotic analysis, since cultural meanings are
rarely if ever precisely dened. Reception always involves slippage, as
Bakhtin and others have pointed out, even in highly homogenized com-
munication situations, and in the complex creolized world of intercultural
and post-colonial theatre, this is even more the case.
I will take a single, but striking example of a process often found
in post-colonial theatre which illustrates not only the absence of a single
precisely dened cultural meaning communicated from stage to audi-
ence, but how the ambiguity that replaces this absence is perhaps best un-
derstood semiotically.
Very frequently, as Balme himself notes, post-colonial drama written
primarily in the colonialist language contains passages in the local lan-
guage directed primarily at that section of a mixed audience. In an article
on South African Township Theatre, Balme provides several examples of
plays in which multilingualism creates an area of freedom in which re-
venge can be exacted and satirical attacks leveled at white society. Thus
in Percy Mtwas Bopha!, for example, intertribal jokes are made in Zulu
which are clearly not intended for white consumption, and there is much
sexually explicit language and humor spoken in the African language
and thus reserved for the African audience (Balme 1996: 79).
Balmes multicultural semiotic model applied to these examples would
have to consider the semiotics of the Zulu audience experience, which
would involve the entire play, and the semiotics of the white audience ex-
perience, which would have to exclude totally these undened Zulu pas-
sages. The situation in hybrid or syncretic post-colonial performance is
usually much more complex and semiotically challenging than this, how-
ever, as we may see from the more nuanced analysis by Bob Hodge and
Vijay Mishra of the work of the Australian Aboriginal dramatist Jack
140 M. Carlson

Davis. Davis rst drama to achieve major recognition was his 1983 The
Dreamers, basically written in English, but containing characters who
sometimes speak in the Aboriginal language Nyungar. A central symbolic
gure, the Aboriginal Dancer, who can be seen by the audience but not
by the characters in the play, speaks only Nyungar.
The climax of Davis play is a Nyungar chant by the Dancer, in a pool
of light. For a non-Nyugar speaking audience member this gure is reas-
suringly recognizable, even if its language cannot be understood. It signi-
es both Aboriginality and the universal grief appropriate to a mo-
ment of death. For Nyungar-speaking audiences, however, the message
communicated is much dierent: The white man is evil, evil! My people
are dead. Dead, dead, dead. The White man kill my people. Kill, kill, kill,
kill (Hodge and Mishra 1991: 206). In this closing chant, the writers sug-
gest, Nyungar speakers are separated from the non-Nyungars alongside
them in the theatre and incorporated into a community with the Dancer.
But simultaneously, and equally importantly, a counterstrategy of mis-
direction is being utilized: Meanwhile the White audience will have the
illusion of having been welcomed without reservation into an inner circle
of universal human feelings (Hodge and Mishra 1991: 208).
It is to this meanwhile that I wish to draw particular attention. One of
the things that makes semiotic analysis so potentially important for the
study of modern intercultural analysis is that if it considers the entire pro-
cess of sign usage, both its production and its interpretation, it can deal
precisely and clearly with this sort of multiple, even contradictory signify-
ing operation. What the Nyungar speaking dancer is doing is not merely
presenting a culturally specic message to a monolithic audience, but
consciously dierent messages to dierent elements of a diverse audience.
It would be false to say that there is no message being communicated to
the white audience. There is a very conscious message which, reviews
of the play conrm, was correctly received by that audience. Thus,
even if we reject the arguments of Peirce and restrict semiotics only to
the study of communication, it is surely essential to realize that in the
hybrid work of modern intercultural and post-colonial theatre, drama-
tists, performers, and audiences are so varied in their communicative rela-
tionships that only a very complex and dynamic analysis can begin to
articulate the varied, and sometimes contradictory nature of these
relationships.
In fact, semiotics is an analytic tool that is extremely well suited to un-
dertake this important critical task, and it is to the credit of post-colonial
theatre theorists like Balme that they have begun again to recognize its
potential after a decade or so of comparative neglect. The important
thing now is not to arbitrarily limit the usefulness of this tool, as Balmes
 The road not (yet) taken 141

approach threatens to do, but allow it the freedom to explore the highly
intricate and challenging patterns of signication oered by the modern
multicultural work, with its constantly shifting congurations of audi-
ence, artists, and cultural contexts.

References

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142 M. Carlson

Marvin Carlson (b. 1935) is the Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre and
Comparative Literature at the City University of New York 3mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu4. His
research interests include theatre and performance theory, Western European Theatre from
1700 to present, Arabic theatre, and experimental theatre. His major publications include
Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996); Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury (1998); The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory-Machine (2001); and The Play of Lan-
guage (forthcoming).