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

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 scéne of musicians framed, literally, by illuminated red square boxes ‘theatricalises’ Rajasthan’s folk culture of orality and renders such a tradition the quality of strangeness that borders on theatre and music, contemporary and traditional. The ‘dazzling’ union of the Manganiyar’s music and scenography of Amsterdam’s red light district engendered an exotic seduction that garnered raving reviews on its global tour. This paper then examines the production’s performative interstices: the in betweenness of sound and sight where aural tradition is ‘spectacularised’, and the shifting convergences of tradition and cultural consumption. It further interrogates the role of reception in the construction of such ‘exotic’ spectacles.

Muldoon's Betweenness

Muldoon’s poetry frequently explores states of being ‘in-between’ and this can plausibly be related to his Catholic Northern Irish identity. He seems to be aware of the effects comprised in Derrida’s concept of différance, one version of which is the entre (‘between’). Nevertheless, Muldoon is more interested in exploring the experience of postmodernity than in offering a theory, or relating it to one culture. But this exploration has as many similarities with the concerns of existentialism and phenomenology as with deconstruction. Poems from Why Brownlee Left to Moy Sand and Gravel are discussed, and topics addressed include the South American exotic (new sources are suggested) and the troping on yarrow (compare Derrida’s pharmakon) in The Annals of Chile. Formal effects of repetition and difference reflect the themes. The redemption of repetition is studied with the help both of Kierkegaard and of Muldoon’s thoughts on the ‘magic mist’ of Irish romance.