What Is the Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation in Theatre?

Cultural exchange and cultural appropriation are often confused in theatre because both involve one culture using forms, stories, languages or techniques associated with another. The practical difference is not the mere fact of crossing a cultural boundary. It lies in the relationship between the people involved: whether the use is reciprocal and negotiated, how power and history shape the encounter, whether consent and credit are meaningful, who benefits, and whether harm or erasure is addressed. Cultural exchange is generally understood as a two-way, negotiated process with mutual benefit and ongoing relationship. Cultural appropriation is generally understood as a unilateral taking, especially when a dominant culture uses elements of a culture experiencing oppression, without adequate context, permission, credit, compensation or accountability. In theatre, those questions become visible in scripts, acting forms, masks, music, design, rehearsal methods, translation and marketing.

Definitions: broad scholarship, narrower public usage

Scholarship and public debate do not always use the same definition. Richard A. Rogers defines cultural appropriation broadly as the use of a culture’s symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals or technologies by members of another culture, and places it into four categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation and transculturation (Rogers, 2006). In that scholarly framing, exchange is a form of appropriation, not its opposite. This can surprise theatre-makers who use appropriation in the everyday negative sense.

In public and activist usage, the term is usually narrower. ReachOut, for example, defines cultural appropriation as happening when a dominant culture takes things from another culture that is experiencing oppression (ReachOut, 2023). The emphasis falls on unequal power. The Conversation makes a related point through a hypothetical: a white atheist man wearing a hijab as a fashion statement and claiming it as a new trend would provoke outrage not because clothing cannot cross cultures, but because the wrong person is wearing it, in the wrong context, with the wrong claim of ownership (The Conversation, 2017). The hijab is not merely cloth; it carries religious and social meanings, including meanings shaped by hostility towards the community associated with it.

For theatre practice, the useful approach is to hold both insights together. Culture is not a set of sealed boxes, and borrowing is normal. But power is real, and not every borrowing is reciprocal. The difference between exchange and appropriation is therefore a matter of degree and relationship, not a simple label that can be applied by checking whether a production includes foreign elements.

Exchange: reciprocity, context, consent and benefit

Cultural exchange in theatre is best understood as a process rather than a transaction. It involves practitioners from different cultural contexts negotiating what is shared, why, by whom, for whom and on what terms. A useful hypothetical: a company invites artists from a specific community to co-devise a production using that community’s songs, movement vocabulary or stories. The artists are paid, named as authors or collaborators, consulted on how sacred or restricted material is handled, and involved in decisions about touring and documentation. The relationship continues after the production. The audience is given enough context to understand the material without turning the community into an exotic display. That is exchange in the normative sense: reciprocal, contextualised, credited and accountable.

Exchange does not require perfect equality of resources or power. International theatre often involves unequal access to funding, visas, languages and markets. But exchange requires that inequality be acknowledged and worked with, not hidden. A well-resourced festival inviting a less-resourced company is not automatically practising exchange; it depends on who set the terms, who controls the dramaturgy, who owns the recording, who is paid, and whether the visiting artists can say no without losing the opportunity. These are practical questions, not abstract ethics.

Rogers notes a tension between criticising essentialism and using concepts such as ownership and degradation to challenge the exploitation of colonised cultures (Rogers, 2006). In theatre, that tension appears when artists want to respect a tradition without treating it as frozen or homogeneous. Communities are internally diverse; one elder, playwright or cultural officer does not automatically represent everyone. Exchange therefore needs specificity: which community, which language, which performance form, which period, which practitioners, and which authority to speak or consent.

Appropriation: extraction, decontextualisation and unequal power

Cultural appropriation in the negative sense typically involves extraction without adequate relationship. The material is taken out of context, flattened into aesthetic surface, presented as the taker’s innovation, and often marketed to audiences who are not told where it came from. The harm can include misrepresentation, stereotype, loss of control, economic dispossession and the erasure of the source community’s authorship. ReachOut’s emphasis on a dominant culture taking from a culture experiencing oppression is a reminder that the same act can have different consequences depending on who has institutional power, legal protection and public voice (ReachOut, 2023).

In theatre, appropriation can occur through text, form, motif and subject matter. Wei Feng proposes categorising intercultural theatre practices as text appropriation, form appropriation, motif appropriation and subject appropriation, arguing that this clarifies the meanings and forms of intercultural theatre and the object of ethical, political and aesthetic discussion (Feng). The categories are useful because they ask what exactly is being taken. A production might use a translated play (text), borrow a masked performance style (form), adapt a recurring story pattern (motif), or represent another community’s historical experience (subject). Each raises different questions about consent, credit, competence and benefit.

Consider a hypothetical: a director uses a sacred mask from a specific community as a design element in a secular production, without asking permission, naming the source or explaining its restricted use. The mask may be legally purchased or visually reproduced. But legality does not settle the cultural-ethical question. The production may turn a living practice into atmosphere, while the community that holds the practice receives no credit, payment or control. That is the kind of unilateral extraction that the language of appropriation is trying to name.

The Conversation’s hijab example shows why context matters. The problem is not that cultural elements never travel. The problem is the claim to ownership by a more powerful person, in a context where the source community is already subject to scrutiny and hostility (The Conversation, 2017). In theatre, similar problems arise when a company markets a form as exotic, ancient or tribal while erasing its specific practitioners, languages and contemporary politics.

Transculturation and the limits of a binary

Rogers’s fourth category, transculturation, complicates any simple opposition between exchange and appropriation. He describes transculturation as questioning the bounded and proprietary view of culture embedded in other types of appropriation; it posits culture as a relational phenomenon constituted by acts of appropriation, not an entity that merely participates in appropriation (Rogers, 2006). In plain terms, cultures have always formed through contact, borrowing, adaptation and mixture. A theatre tradition is not a pure substance. It is a history of exchanges, impositions, translations and reinventions.

This does not mean that anything goes. Transculturation is an analytical corrective to essentialism, not a permission slip for extraction. The fact that cultures are relational does not make power disappear. It does mean that theatre-makers should be cautious about language such as authentic or pure, which can freeze a living practice and ignore its internal debates. The more precise question is not whether a form is culturally authentic, but who is doing this, with what authority, in what context, for whose benefit, and with what consequences.

That question is especially important in intercultural theatre, a term that has been debated since its emergence and has covered expanding forms of practice (Feng). Intercultural theatre can be a genuine collaboration, a critically aware translation, or a shallow collage of signifiers. The label does not guarantee ethics. The process does.

Practical questions for directors, dramaturgs and producers

No checklist can replace judgement, but the following questions help distinguish exchange from appropriation in practice.

• Locate power and history. Is the source community minoritised, colonised or subject to ongoing discrimination? Does the production reproduce a familiar stereotype or exoticise the material? ReachOut’s definition makes power central (ReachOut, 2023).
• Establish provenance and meaning. What exactly is being used, whether text, form, motif or subject, and is it sacred, restricted, or specific to particular lineages? Wei Feng’s categories help name the object of the ethical question (Feng).
• Negotiate consent and authorship. Were community practitioners involved from the beginning, or brought in to validate a decision already made? Who holds decision-making power over cuts, design, marketing and documentation?
• Credit and compensate. Are names, languages and communities credited accurately? Are fees, royalties and contracts agreed? Is compensation proportionate to the value created?
• Contextualise without using context as a substitute for consent. Programme notes, pre-show talks and education work can help audiences, but they do not replace permission, credit or benefit-sharing.
• Assess impact and relationship. Could the project harm the source community or expose restricted knowledge? Is there an ongoing relationship, or only a one-off extraction? Who can say no, and what happens if they do?

These questions are deliberately practical because theatre is material. A script may be copyrighted, but a movement style, ritual gesture, vocal technique or design motif may not be. A licence may permit adaptation, but it does not settle whether the adaptation is respectful or whether the source community was consulted. Legal permission and cultural permission are related but not identical.

Why the distinction matters in theatre

Theatre makes cultural appropriation and exchange especially visible because it works through bodies, voices, objects and live presence. A costume, accent, mask, song, gesture or rehearsal exercise can carry histories that are not visible in a programme note. Audiences may read a performance as representation whether or not the makers intended it. That is why context, casting, design, translation and marketing are not peripheral; they are part of the ethical texture of the work.

The distinction also matters for international collaboration. Cross-border theatre often involves visas, funding, translation and touring arrangements that already place artists in unequal positions. If the stronger partner controls the narrative, the weaker partner may be cast as a cultural resource rather than a co-author. Good documentation, clear contracts, shared credit and transparent decision-making can help, but they do not automatically create reciprocity. Exchange requires ongoing attention to who speaks, who is heard and who benefits.

A working answer, then, is this: cultural exchange is a reciprocal, negotiated and accountable relationship across cultural contexts; cultural appropriation is a unilateral or extractive use of another culture’s material, especially under conditions of unequal power. The two are not hermetically sealed categories. They sit on a continuum, and the same project can move along it. The task for theatre-makers is not to avoid all cultural contact, which would be impossible and impoverished, but to make the terms of contact visible, fair and open to refusal.