It is very complicated to convey in a few lines the different concepts that resonate behind words such as ‘beauty’ in an aesthetic cosmos far removed from our own. What to do? Prelude the way to another beauty? Adorn it, as often happens, with the fascination of distant lands, the exoticism of improbable journeys? Or force it to submit to the anatomy of the boring science of trying to understand an unknown civilisation? And yet of one thing we are sure: that we do not refuse to access, even as theatre spectators, an experience that fascinates us. How then to overcome the embarrassment of a natural disorientation? Paradoxically, in every age of crisis in European culture, it has been precisely a mythical vision of the Orient that has disoriented us, that has shown us different possible ways in which to see our own world. We need to wake up our lazy eyes, our slow imagination. What we need is not just reason but a whimsical rationality, a lucid imagination. And then the theatre of a distant culture will seem much less foreign and distant to us: it is a direct encounter, a leap of the soul with the other.
