Alvina Ruprecht investigates the Nature of Multiculturalism in France

SSHRC Grant 2006 – Research Profile
Alvina Ruprecht, Department of French

Alvina Ruprecht will be investigating the nature of multiculturalism in France, as defined not by music or film or media or dance, but by the many forms of theatre that are produced by France’s overseas departments and by the way new hybrid forms of theatre are emerging in European France through the interaction of stage artists of African, European and other origins.

French society, although very much entrenched in Jacobean principes of poltical, administsrative and cultural centralization, has become a post colonial space where people from the Caribbean, from Polynesia, from the Indian Ocean and the whole African continent, are emerging as important artists of the stage: playwrights, actors, directors and critics. The theatre establishment in France, traditionally very closed, is just beginning to recognize the existence of these artists but no in-depth study exists of their creative process and the way these creations feed off multiple influences to produce new forms of performance. What is the nature of this new theatre that has become a site of artistic multiculturalism, a space of fusion where traditions of afro-caribbean, classical Greek, polynesian, Indian, West and Subsaharan African, Latin American and North African converge?

Her research will take her not only to France but to all the French overseas departments where she will document performances and interview over 300 artists.