Decolonizing Experimental Theatre: Experiments in Living in the Work of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti
摘要
The notion of experimental theatre is tied up with experiments in form and expression (e.g. Caryl Churchill’s works for theatre). Much of this work is by white playwrights and responds to western traditions of playwriting, performance, style such as the ‘well made play’ and realist drama. In its narrowest definition the term experimental theatre therefore references particular potentially Eurocentric but radical traditions of theatre making that are entangled with other more conservative forms of theatre, neither of which, within the British context, have created much room for theatre by practitioners of Black or Asian origin. This is partly a function of the use of classification as such (Foucault) which has the task of creating difference, or specificity, and at the same time a certain unity of assumption as to what theatre is. In theatre classification operates to delimit the scope of a given entity, foreclosing its horizon by assigning it to a particular order. Thus we talk of Black theatre but not, for instance, of white theatre. Classifications pigeonhole, privileging a particular dimension of a play while downplaying or ignoring others, with attendant implied asymmetric meanings. Against this, and in the contemporary spirit of decolonization, this chapter examines the plays of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, not as an experiment in form, staging or expression which would simply mean the reproduction of an existing Eurocentric order of theatre making, but as the portrayal of an experiment in living, interrogating contemporary forms of post-multicultural co-habitation. The chapter argues that Kaur Bhatti’s work seeks to decolonize conventional theatre classifications through its exploration of a post-multicultural Britain that struggles to come to terms with its heritage and which produces experiments in living whose sustainability is in question.