The Global Ibsen: Peer Gynt Journeys to the Indian Subcontinent from Europe

About the project

The project attempts a scrutiny into three Peer Gynt performances in different cultures with a view to exploring how the productions contribute to a dialogic cultural transfer in this age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Peer has received worldwide attention because it talks about personal, cultural, and national identities, which are the most talked about issues in contemporary globalized cultural arena. I have chosen three productions¨C one from Europe (PG directed by Robert Wilson, an American, in 2005), and the other two from the Indian Subcontinent (Gundegowdana Charitre by Rustom Bharucha, India, 1995 and Peer Chan by Kamaluddin Nilu, Bangladesh, 2000).

The study seeks to understand how culture is exploited as a tool for negotiating ideological differences across geo-political divides, and how cultural productions can ¡°presuppose and constitute specific aesthetic forms of understanding¡±. My hypothesis is that the realm of art, social life and politics are not isolated in these Peer Gynt productions in which the deliberate fashioning/twisting by the creative directors in their respective cultural landscapes generates multiple ¡®aesthetics of the performative¡¯ (Fishcher-Lichte 2008: 51) through the production process. To be more specific, I presuppose that Ibsen¡¯s Peer Gynt by Wilson is more than a directorial extravaganza to celebrate a Norwegian national occasion; it, in my perception, is related with the idea of ¡®national imaginary¡¯ as understood in Norway at present. Nevertheless, the productions of Bharucha and Nilu evoke serious political issues marking a visible cultural transfer of the same western text, which is further modified to zoom in on the post-colonial national imaginary in their respective cultures.

My focus is on the Gynt persona of the original that gets certain shifts in the other cultures. Accordingly, I will ask: How has Peer Gynt produced the powerful varieties of national imaginary in different cultures? And what new aesthetics has been produced at the juncture of cultural crossroads?

Supervisors

Frode Helland, professor at the Centre for Ibsen Studies.

Erika Fischer-Lichte, professor, Institut f¨¹r Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universit?t Berlin.