Foreign bodies of knowledge: Crossing cultural borders through the actor's work

In this dissertation I discuss issues of cultural border crossing and appropriation privileging the actor's perspective. I argue that discussions of cultural appropriation on the stage should include the actor's contribution, as her embodiment of foreign performative techniques is markedly different from a superficial incorporation of such elements.; I introduce my argument by providing an overview of the history of intercultural theatre in connection to the large waves of immigration that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. The geographical displacement of so many performing artists heavily informed the Western avant-garde theatre of this period and is the basis of intercultural performance.; I examine current critiques of intercultural theatre, in particular of the theatres of Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba. These critiques place excessive focus on the director's input and ostensibly disregard the actor as a creative agent in performance. Thus, these critiques are blind to the actor's experience of cultural hybridity, and I argue that as such they are incomplete and often carry an anti-foreign bias.; In the second part of this dissertation I examine the trajectories of actors Ang Gey Pin and Roberta Carreri, including an original interview with each actor. Although these actors draw mostly from either intra or intercultural sources, each has experimented with both ends of the cultural border crossing spectrum. Ang's work is intra cultural in that she presents songs in her family's Chinese dialect, Hokkien. Differently, Carreri's embodiment of Japanese Butoh techniques shapes her acting as intercultural. In these interviews I pay particular attention to these actors' training and rehearsal processes, as these commonly take place away from the public eye.; My conclusion suggests that further studies into the reception of intercultural theatre should also include the examination of the spectator's position, as the reading of any given performance takes place in the spectator's eye as much as in the actor's actions.