Rearticulating Cultural Hybridity

The Golden Bough Performance Society and The Lady Knight-Errant of Taiwan—Peh-sio-lan

The hybridization of cultures resulting from colonial contacts is frequently associated with notions of cultural illegitimacy and contamination, a sign of how victims of a colonial conquest fail to completely imitate, or "mimic," in Homi Bhabha’s terms, the cultural character of their supposedly "superior" conqueror. However, this kind of "failed" mimicry also provides the means for decolonizing the contemporary stage of Taiwan.

The radical and subversive potential of colonial mimicry is explored in this article in relation to the theatre practice of Golden Bough Performance Society.

I argue that Golden Bough’s rearticulation of cultural hybridity opens up a transformative and transgressive space, one in which critiques of colonialism are foremost. In that space, cultural hybridity is distilled and rearticulated into an aesthetics of flamboyance that inscribes agency.