The essence of an artistic performance becomes available to a person only through his or her physical and mental involvement in the event and his or her acquisition of experiential knowledge; it cannot be expressed in words or represented satisfactorily in any other medium than the human body. However, physical and mental involvement in the event transgresses the framework of Western academic practice, which is borne witness by the stigma attached to a researcher's 'going native'. Involvement remains taboo, in spite of the propagation of research methods, such as that of participant-observation and learning by performing, which appear to be based on exposure rather than on involvement (e.g. Van Zanten 1991:53-61). It threatens the foundations of a science directed at objectification, externalization, and universality.
Furthermore, theatre's ambiguous reality status, that is its ambiguous relationship with the world, provides a double paradox to those subscribing to the objectives of Western science. Being by nature real and a representation of reality - a status which is exploited and magnified through performers' praxis - rational science does not know how to deal with the event. In order to bypass this problem, academic practice has chosen to base its analyses of artistic performance, not on the real event itself, but on representations of the event in the form of audio or audiovisual recordings, written transcriptions of a performance, and the textual traces which have come down to us and which we call 'literature' (Greenblatt 1988:3). These 'artefacts', representations of representations, of which the temporal dimension and usually many other dimensions and details have been removed, became substitutes for the real events - a reduction and a transformation which will have to be acknowledged by and accounted for within a methodology of practice (Kersenboom 1995:5).
I do not have ready-made answers to the complex theoretical and methodological problems which surface in the development of a methodology of practice which can be applied to the performing arts of Asia. However, I believe that a focus on practice offers a vast potential by which to describe theatrical events and their exponents from 'within' and on the basis of their own terms, without falling in the trap of reinventing the 'authentic', or a nostalgic (and therefore perfect) past (Clifford 1986:114). Contemporary Western social science refutes deep involvement in a non-Western culture, because it lacks the means to translate, interpret, and accommodate experiental data derived from such an involvement within its own culturally defined, theoretical models and to represent them adequately in its most important medium of expression: the printed word. If, for these practical reasons, at present we cannot become deeply involved in a culture and its artistic expressions at an experiental level, we could as well stop pretending that we are representing and analysing the 'real thing'. Perhaps this would help us to accept more easily the many local representations about the theatrical event as important sources of information in addition to representations of the theatrical event. These local representations are embodied in human participants in the event. They are expressed in the form of critical accounts of recent performances and expectations with regard to future performance events, both of which are placed against the horizon of the participants' memories of earlier events.
Accepting that the first-hand, subjective and unique experience of performance events will remain forever untranslatable because they belong to a unique individual, we could still ask ourselves why such events are meaningful in a given culture and how they become invested with the power to 'affect' people, to confer pleasure, excite interest, or generate anxiety: people produce and consume theatrical events because these 'do' something to them and to the social world of which they form part. This requires the translation of experience from one culture to the other so as to make sense of other's behaviour in terms of our own.