1 Performance and Spectation in Orwell’s Burmese Days Douglas Kerr Douglas Kerr Douglas Kerr Douglas Kerr It is productive to think of empire, and Orientalism, as a series of performative encounters. Orwell anticipated this theatrical vision in a narrative such as ‘Shooting an Elephant’. This paper centres on an episode in Burmese Days in which Flory, the central character, takes the newly-arrived Elizabeth Lackersteen to see a Burmese pwe dance, performed in a street in the town of Kyauktada. The English visitors are both spectators of the performance and the crowd and the objects of curious spectation by the local audience. The episode offers a complex analysis of the dynamics of performance, spectation and interpretation, with Flory and Elizabeth bringing to bear quite different anthropological attitudes (to the Burmese) and aesthetic expectations (of the show, which their own intrusion also modifies). The pwe itself bears an interesting relation to both highbrow and popular Western ideas of performance – and of the Orient – in the period of modernism, from The Rite of Spring to Chu Chin Chow. Chu Chin Chow: Orient and Utopia