Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T05:01:36.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Between Sound and Sight: Framing the Exotic in Roysten Abel's The Manganiyar Seduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2013

MARCUS CHENG CHYE TAN
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Roysten Abel's The Manganiyar Seduction is perhaps the most popular performance of Indian folk music on the global festival market today. This performance of Rajasthani folk music is an apt exemplification of an auto-exoticism framed as cultural commodity. Its mise en scène of musicians framed, literally, by illuminated red square boxes ‘theatricalizes’ Rajasthan's folk culture of orality and gives the performance a quality of strangeness that borders on theatre and music, contemporary and traditional. The ‘dazzling’ union of the Manganiyars' music and the scenography of Amsterdam's red-light district engendered an exotic seduction that garnered rave reviews on its global tour. This paper examines the production's performative interstices: the in-betweenness of sound and sight where aural tradition is ‘spectacularized’. It will also analyse the shifting convergences of tradition and cultural consumption and further interrogates the role of reception in the construction of such ‘exotic’ spectacles.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 47 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 The Manganiyar Seduction, programme notes, Singapore programme.

2 See ‘Manganiyar Seduction 1,’ YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJFriUUnDnA, accessed 2 April 2012.

3 Interview with Roysten Abel, ‘2010 Festival Insights – The Manganiyar Seduction – Roysten Abel’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpJv7s3xZs4. See also See ‘FESTIVAL TV: Roysten Abel on The Manganiyar Seduction’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwl2AqWDU_0, accessed 6 June 2012.

4 Ibid.

5 The Manganiyar Seduction, programme notes, Singapore programme.

6 Ibid.

7 Seegalan, Victor, Essai sur l'exotisme: Une esthétique du divers (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1978)Google Scholar.

8 Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Kothari, Komal, in Rustom Bharucha, Rajasthan: An Oral History. Conversations with Komal Kothari (India: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 225.Google Scholar

10 Neuman, Daniel, Chaudhuri, Shubha and Kothari, Komal, Bards, Ballads and Boundaries: An Ethnographic Atlas of Music Traditions in West Rajasthan (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2006), p. 38.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 38.

12 Ibid., p. 230.

13 Smith, Steve, ‘Muslim Troupe Arrives with Splash and Age-Old Ecumenical Traditions’, New York Times, 23 November 2010Google Scholar, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/arts/music/24seduction.html, accessed 8 June 2012.

14 Carol Middleton, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction’, Australian Stage, 7 October 2011, www.australianstage.com.au/201110074850/reviews/melbourne/the-manganiyar-seduction.html, accessed 8 June 2012.

15 Irfan Kasban, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction’, Singapore Arts Festival 2011: An Independent Perspective, 10 June 2010, http://singartsfestival.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/912/#more-912, accessed 8 June 2012.

16 Jenny Ringland, ‘Review: The Manganiyar Seduction at the Sydney Festival in 2010’, Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2010, www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/indepth/review-the-manganiyar-seduction-at-the-sydney-festival-in-2010/story-fn4guuui-1225818501590. See also Graham Reid, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction: From Religion and Red Light’, Elsewhere, 7 March 2011, www.elsewhere.co.nz/culturalelsewhere/3975/the-manganiyar-seduction-from-religion-and-red-light

17 See ‘2010 Festival Insights – The Manganiyar Seduction – Rosyten Abel’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpJv7s3xZs4, accessed 2 April 2012.

18 The Manganiyar Seduction, programme notes, Singapore programme.

19 Ibid.

20 Bharucha, Rajasthan, p. 332.

21 Neuman, Chaudhuri and Kothari, Bards, Ballads and Boundaries, p. 145.

22 Arendt, Hannah, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; first published 1954), p. 204.Google Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 In all fairness, Abel's production is not the first to use the Manganiyars in a hybrid global spectacle. Among the most notable cross-cultural (and cross-generic) performance was Zingaro's hybrid equestrian performance entitled Chimère (1994). In this performance, Zingaro had horses move to the rhythms of a coterie of ten Rajasthani folk singers. While one could certainly accuse Zingaro of the same cultural orientalism and exploitation as Abel, the framing of these musicians differs greatly, thereby shifting the argumentative tangents significantly: Zingaro's purpose was a visual–musical hybridity where rhythms of the Manganiyars motivated the ritualistic movements of horses; Abel's transposition of the Manganiyars, as they are, keeps focus on their cultural ‘authenticity’ while framing them with signifiers of cultural harlotry. To read more of the collaboration between Zingaro and the Rajasthani folk musicians as recounted by Komal Kothari, see Rustom Bharucha, Rajasthan, pp. 249–52. There is also Tony Gatlif's documentary Latcho Drom (1993), which features the Manganiyars as ancestors of the Romany gypsies.

25 See ‘Manganiyar Seduction 1’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJFriUUnDnA, accessed 2 April 2012.

26 Neuman, Chaudhuri and Kothari, Bards, Ballads and Boundaries, p. 145.

27 Harvey O'Brien, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction’. The Irish Theatre Magazine, 27 September 2010. www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Dublin-Theatre/The-Manganiyar-Seduction.aspx, accessed 8 June 2012.

28 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p. 13.

29 Foster, Stephen, ‘Exoticism as a Symbolic System’, Dialectical Anthropology, 7 (1982), pp. 21–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 21.

30 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p. 14.

31 Ibid.

32 hooks, bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 21–39.Google Scholar

33 Stephen Tumino, ‘Materiality in Contemporary Cultural Theory’, Red Critique, www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/materialityincontemporaryculturaltheory.htm, accessed 30 May 2012, p. 1.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 42.Google Scholar

37 Victoria Laurie, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction’, ABC Perth, 14 February 2011, www.abc.net.au/local/reviews/2011/02/14/3138497.htm, accessed 8 June 2012.

38 See O'Brien, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction’, para 2.

39 Laurie, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction’.

40 Ibid.

41 Todorov, Tzetan, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 265.Google Scholar

42 Huggan, p. 17.

43 This is a personal observation of the performance I attended at the Singapore Arts Festival 2010.

44 JonT2000, ‘The Manganiyar Seduction by Jon Townend’, YouTube, 23 December 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI2FsLf-RUM&feature=related, accessed 14 June 2012.

45 Darren Koay, ‘Manganiyar Seduction’, YouTube, 20 April 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDLofWt568U&feature=share, accessed 14 June 2012.

46 Appadurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 David Sarno, ‘Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey Illuminates The Site's Founding Document. Part I’, Los Angeles Times, 18 February 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html, accessed 16 June 2012. My own italics.

48 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 207.

49 Ibid., p. 202.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., p. 204.

53 Bharucha, Rajasthan, p. 283.

54 Ibid., p. 286.

55 Rustom Bharucha, ‘Personal Interview’, 25 July 2012.

56 Bharucha, Rajasthan, p. 288.