Performing Culture and Cultural Performance in Japan: A Critical (Auto)Ethnographic Travelogue

Bryant Keith Alexander

When one becomes conscious of one's own cultural performances, biases are more easily recognized as well as adjusted when cultural alternatives emerge.

So writes James W. Chesebro as he builds an argument for performing across cultures as a pedagogical strategy for ???sensitizing oneself to alternative cultural systems.???^1.The idea of performing across culture(s) suggests a border crossing. Whether as a pedagogical strategy, social commentary, entertainment, or performative scholarship--examining the links between performance and culture offers insights to self and the other (or the self as other). This link invokes what Dwight Conquergood calls a dialogical understanding in which ???the act of performance fosters identification between [similar] and dissimilar ways of being without reducing the other to bland sameness, a projection of the performing self.???^2.

My purpose in this essay is to tease at and exemplify the intricacies of ???cultural performance??? and its semantic correlate, ???the performance of culture.??? I specifically use the construction of ???teasing at??? as an act of arousing response and not ???teasing out???--because the entanglements between cultural performance and the performance of culture are meaningful and cannot be easily separated. The link between culture and performance has often been engaged through ethnographic methods--instances in which the researcher has crossed literally or imaginatively into unfamiliar territories. Hence ???ethnographies are documents that pose questions at the margins between two cultures. They necessarily decode one culture while recoding it for another.???^3.I center this exploration in my experience as a Black male performance studies scholar, traveling to Japan to serve as the guest performer/lecturer/adjudicator at the All Japan Student Performance Festival.^4.

Drawing from the work of Erving Goffman, my frame analysis for this essay is what I am calling ???a critical (auto)ethnographic travelogue???--in which I do a close reading and critique of ethnographic travel notes.^5.Within the essay I blend and bleed two primary methods of inquiry and articulation of experience, autobiography, and ethnography leading toward the practice of autoethnography. Yet signified by the use of the parenthetical, my

^1. James W. Chesebro, ???Performance Studies as Paradox, Culture, andManifesto: A Future Orientation,??? in The Future of PerformanceStudies: Visions and Revisions, ed. Sheron J. Dailey (Annandale. NCA,1998), 317.

^2. Dwight Conquergood, ???Performance and Dialogical Understanding: In...