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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Winter 2006 : Off the Beaten Path

Off the Beaten Path

by Mary Shafer

Talk to Margaret Werry for just two minutes, and you can't help but suspect she's an actor. Her arms snake through the air for emphasis, her eyes widen and narrow as she illustrates her points, her laugh resonates.

Your suspicion would be partially correct. Actually, laughs Werry, an assistant professor in the University's Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, "I really wouldn't be an actor if given the choice. The daily, debilitating abuse is just too hard."

She has certainly done her share of acting, some of it as a graduate student at Northwestern University, where she earned a Ph.D. in the hybrid field of performance studies. This is the field that fuels her passion, and she pursues it not just as a critic who might view and review a stage production, but as a scholar who sees performance, in the broadest sense, as culture-defining.

Werry's self-described "weird and long story" began in her native New Zealand, where she majored in English literature before leaving for England to spend five years working in various arts-related positions and finding her niche as a political activist whose art became an expression of her convictions.

When she began the search for a Ph.D. program, she says, "What I really wanted was to find a program where I could think about issues like how performance creates meaning in a community and the role of gender in that performance."

Attracted to the Northwestern program's "interdisciplinary field growing out of theater, anthropology, and rhetoric," she pursued her questions by turning to her native New Zealand. What she found there was more than the landscape that had attracted the filmmakers of "Lord of the Rings" and "The Whale Rider"—although both films capitalized on the country's rich and varied locale. She found a case study in how performance creates culture.

Viewed historically, New Zealand is a European outpost. When white British colonists landed there, they disrupted the culture of the indigenous Maori natives who had lived on the land for centuries. By the early 20th century, though, the colonizers and the Maori had managed to craft a homogenous, bicultural nation state. How had that happened? The answer, Werry found, was tourism—and tourism as a performance practice.

In Werry's view, New Zealand created a culture for display—a performance for tourists who came to gawk, as it were.

"Tourism became key to New Zealand's national identity," Werry says. "It's the thing that allowed New Zealand settlers to negotiate their tenuous relationship with indigenous people. It was a way for the white culture to identify itself as different from Maori and it was also advantageous to the Maori, who became cultural ambassadors.

"New Zealand used tourism to raise its national profile and draw investors and migrants. And the Maori have been very on-message about presenting themselves as sophisticated, modern, sometimes superior."

Performance has been crucial, Werry says, giving legitimacy to New Zealand's story as it "changed from a colonial liberal state to a neo-liberal global state," she says. It was also, as it turns out, a vehicle for Maori women to define a role for themselves in this emerging state.

Not only did Maori women take an active role in their native country, but they also were influential participants when the New Zealand story was taken on the road. For example, says Werry, to attract visitors and to showcase their country, the British used "living village" displays at various World Fairs, including the 1911 World Fair in England, where Maori women lived and worked in a fabricated "native villages." As celebrities during these world tours, Werry says, the women were able to use their time in the spotlight to help shift public opinion in New Zealand to questions of race and rights.

As Werry sees it, performance helps us "rethink what culture actually is. Culture is not necessarily something that binds people together. It's what people produce and what they attract. It's how a country represents itself, as distinct from political discourse. It's something we become aware of when we see and experience differences between ourselves and others.

"Interactions, whether through theater or tourism or other means, make us aware of culture by revealing those differences."

Studying those interactions from a U.S. vantage point has allowed Werry the scholar to "re-think a different culture," she says. "I could never have done this living in New Zealand, because my identity is too tied to the place. Being in different places gave me the freedom to craft myself in a way I couldn't have if I'd stayed there. It allowed me to be a tourist."