| Summary: | This study examines the phenomenon of intercultural theater, exemplifying it through a specific case: the productions of the Bacchae by Tadashi Suzuki. The reason why we are talking about productions (instead of production) is because the Japanese director submitted the euripidean prototype to a continuous process of transformation that lasted over twenty years. More precisely: The Bacchae of Toga (1978), the bilingual performance of Milwaukee (1981), and finally Dionysus in the staging of Mito (1991). The three versions, or evolutions of the classical myth, aside their peculiarities, present themselves as an interrelated program of dichotomies: ancient and modern, rural and metropolitan, but above all East and West. The latter is flashed out not only in ideological terms (Penteo and Dionysus) but also at a performative level, as an encounter/clash between profoundly different techniques and styles. On the one hand the expressionist, codified and sophisticated, Japanese tradition of No and Kabuki, on the other hand the realistic, logocentric and testocentric modern drama of European origin. Using apparently irreconcilable categories and parameters, Suzuki has succeeded in creating an almost perfect dramaturgical balance, on which allowed him to explore the nature of violence, by identifying (hypothesizing) the causes that generate it.
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