Julie Stone Peters

In the first decades of the century, after Sadanji Ichikawa II's 1909 production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, Japanese theatre practitioners like Hōgetsu Shimamura and Shōyō Tsubouchi celebrate the importation of the Italian proscenium stage and of English, French, and Scandinavian naturalist drama (in the Shingeki movement) as a revolutionary liberation from the stifling Japanese traditional theatre.

In the 1920s, after having seen two American vaudeville and ragtime performers who were touring West Africa, the Ghanaian actors Ishmael “Bob” Johnson, C.B. Hutton, and J.B. Ansah, form a comedy group and develop a new theatrical genre-the “concert party”-which combines vaudeville, Ghanaian Anansesem narrative performance, and Liberian sea-shanties.

In 1984, a Hungarian scholar named Robert Sarlós begins the reconstruction of the 1583 Catholic Easter play, the Luzerner Osterspiel, attempting to train actors, dancers, and musicians in sixteenth-century style, and to dress the Swiss audience in sixteenth-century costume.

In 1985 in Zambia, a group of Ndembu led by a midwife named Seriya engage in a reconstruction of the Kankanga dances (the girl's initiation ceremony), using the script in Victor Turner's The Drums of Affliction (1968), and combining Kaonde performance forms with invented segments as a substitution for the naked “breast dance” the Turners had seen in the 1950s. ¹

In 1985 (following the lead of a spate of Indian theatrical, film, and television versions), Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière collaborate with an international cast of actors on a grandiose theatrical adaptation of the

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