Conference Abstracts: Keynote Presentations
Performing the Frontiers of Citizenship: Asylum and Australia’s Impossible Subjects
Suvendrini Perera(Curtin University, Australia)
Theatre of Migration, a Lankan-Australian community production, premiered in Sydney on the eve of the 2001 federal election. On the morning of the performance, cast and audience awoke to news that two asylum seekers, Fatima Husseini, aged 20, and Nurjan Husseini, aged 55, had drowned as fire broke out after the navy boarded and attempted to turn away their damaged boat from Australian waters. The women were the first known casualties directly attributable to new ‘Border Protection’ legislation introduced as a response to the arrival of the Tampa in August 2001.
The play had been put together in a climate of heightened tension in preceding weeks as the cast engaged in charged debates on citizenship, refugees, terrorism, security and border protection. The process, in which I participated as dramaturg and as a contributor to the script, resulted in a play that expanded to reach backwards in time to include the period before the introduction of the White Australia policy (i.e., prior to the establishment of the Australian state) as well as forwards to the refugee boats arriving on an almost daily basis as the play was being written.
In this paper I discuss Theatre of Migration as an enactment of cultural citizenship and the multiple investments and understandings that cast members bring to the staging of community theatre as a staking of a claim for public space. As such Theatre of Migration instantiates the fraught processes by which the histories, fantasies and desires of diaspora groups enter the public domain in negotiation with both internal tensions and debates and the demands of neo-liberal multiculturalism in a time of war.
Suvendrini Perera is a senior research fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Australia. She completed her BA at the University of Sri Lanka and her PhD at Colombia University, New York. She has published widely on topics relating to race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and refugees and is currently working on a project, funded by the Australian Research Council, on borders and junctions in Australasia and the Pacific region. Her most recent book is the edited volume, Our Patch: Enactments of Australian Sovereignty Post-2001 (Network 2007). In 2007, Suvendrini also presented keynote addresses at the Asian Australian Identities conference in Melbourne, Australia, and the Interrogating Terror conference at the University of Brighton, UK.
Taking Liberties: Performing Foolish Witness
Julie Salverson (Queen’s University, Canada)
Theatre is a dangerous witness, challenged with multiple responsibilities of integrity, imagination, inspiration and craft. How do we negotiate ethics, aesthetics and the urge to transform when re-imagining risky stories?
For five years I have taught undergraduate seminars on witnessing and testimony in which students create performance memorials. They grapple with questions of memory, history, aesthetics and ethics, often in the context of the lives of people who are displaced, dispossessed, relocated. This paper will follow the discoveries and struggles of my students in the context of the notion of foolish witness, an approach based in neither tragedy nor paralysis, but in the impossible bravery and willingness of the clown. I will address what I consider problems in how witnessing is performed and theorized, and describe how my students navigate the terrain of bearing witness – engaging with class visitors, class readings, creating their own performances, and encountering the differences amongst themselves and their own histories.
I aim to explore the clown as an intervention in sentimental or voyeuristic approaches to state violence and to imagine an alternative to a tragic or paralyzed approach to testimony, by turning to the absurd, the ridiculous, the schlemiel. Clown provides the opportunity for a performance form where the relationship between suffering and survival might be negotiated. The clown begins with nothing, is in fact ridiculous, but is innocent of the impossibility of hope. My interest in the world of clown includes the inevitability of failure, the insistence on the quest to ‘fail better’ as Beckett would say. How can we fail and still witness this story? What could the notion of a courageous happiness in the face of loss, suffering and failure bring to the ethics of witnessing a tragic world? I explore clown and the foolish as an attitude, an approach to encounters with testimony not only on the stage but also in the many encounters where we are called to witness. Foolishness as a way of enacting hope: not the prophetic hope of assurance, but a relationship with the future, which escapes formal logic. My discussion will draw on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, on contemporary discussions about witnessing and violence, on the performance work of Jacques Lecoq and Phillipe Gaulier, and on the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas.
Julie Salverson is a playwright and scholar and has worked in community related theatre since 1981, when she founded the Toronto company Second Look Community Arts. Plays and librettos include Thumbelina, Over the Japanese Sea, Boom, with Patricia Fraser (youth groups in Canada, U.S. and Thailand) and The Haunting of Sophie Scholl. Her essays have been published in book anthologies and journals including Theatre, Theatre Research in Canada, Theatre Topics, and Canadian Theatre Review. Julie’s current projects include: the libretto for Shelter, a clown opera about the atomic bomb; the book The Highway of the Atom: Memory, the Witness and the Archive (with Peter van Wyck); and Witnessing A Tragic World: Theatre, Testimony and the Courage to Be Happy. She is Associate Professor of Drama at Queens University, Canada .
The Proteus Cabinet, or ‘We are Here but not Here’
Sophie Nield( Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London)
In the early nineteenth century, there were three stage illusions in which a magician could cause a person to disappear. One of these, the Proteus Cabinet, accomplished this without the participant moving at all. They would enter the box, and simply vanish. Obviously, they hadn’t gone anywhere. As the designers of the Proteus Cabinet said of them, they were ‘Here, but not Here’. The border is a place where you have to appear. To pass through, the border-crosser must be present in more than one way – must simultaneously be both present and represented. That representation has historically taken the form of papers: passports, permits to travel, proofs of nationality, photographs, or verbal accounts of reasons for travel. More recently, this representation has been drawn from the body itself: fingerprints, retinal scans – what Agamben has called the ‘biometric tattoo’. Drawing on the ideas of Agamben, Kantorowitz and Baudrillard, and addressing this new concern of the body part as passport, I will argue that the disaggregation of representation and the subject of representation makes it impossible for the border-crosser to appear – the border becomes a machine of disappearance, and makes a person vanish in plain sight. Here, but not Here.
Dr. Sophie Nield is Head of the Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She writes on questions of space, theatricality and representation in political life and the law, and in nineteenth-century magic shows. She is a Trustee of the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection and recently completed a major AHRC-funded project enhancing research access to the Collection. In summer 2008, she will be an International Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Conference Abstracts: Panel Papers
Asylum Art, Participation and Ethics
StellaBarnesand Zory (Farngis Shahrokhi) (Oval House Theatre)
We cross the border between two apparently different worlds, professional and participatory arts. As artist/facilitators responding to and exploring exile we face many ethical questions and contradictions. In professional theatre we see refugees depicted as victims, reduced to their stories of trauma, beaten and abused, raped and tortured, drowned and suffocated. UK artists sometimes collect testimony from refugees to lend authenticity to their art, but some are disappointed when the stories are not traumatic enough. A film company abandoned their research with a group of young refugees because they were too happy!
Participatory arts projects for refugees are called: Memories, Suitcases, Journeys, Safety, Home, My Story. There is an implicit expectation that participants will share personal stories as artistic material – once more, a fascination with the participants’ pasts and especially their trauma.
Do artists believe that it is ‘good’, perhaps even ‘necessary’, for refugees to share their stories and how do they manage the potential emotional fall-out this work may create? How can refugees become empowered to make their own choices about art and be better supported to rebuild their confidence, find hope in an uncertain future and shake off the victim mantle? Has ‘asylum art’ commodified the lives of refugees for entertainment or has it made a valuable artistic and politically contribution to the asylum debate? Are artists missing an opportunity by focusing on individual trauma rather than the politics of forced migration?
Stella Barnes is Head of Arts in Education at Oval House Theatre in Kennington, South London where she develops partnerships with non-arts sector agencies to deliver dynamic arts intervention projects with marginalized young people. Stella is Chair of Refugee Arts Initiative, a London-wide network for exiled artists. She is an experienced trainer and arts facilitator and delivers national training in using the arts with young refugees and asylum seekers for Artswork, the national youth arts development agency. Currently Stella is conducting research into ethics in participatory arts, focusing on work with marginalized communities.
Zory (Farngis Shahrokhi) was born in Iran. In her art work she is interested in showing the emotions, sensations and phenomena experienced by humans by who have been violated. Her practice developed through a concern to explore cultural/political agendas, employing performance in relation to installation and photography. Zory also works as an arts facilitator and is currently part of the Living Here Project at Oval House Theatre where she runs participatory arts projects for young refugees and asylum seekers and is supporting the development of an ethical framework for the project.
Utilizing a Global Vision to Safeguard the Local Village
Selina Busby( Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London)
The Bribri are one of six indigenous rainforest communities in Costa Rica. These communities constitute only one percent of the Costa Rican population; due to deforestation many are losing their community location as well as their indigenous knowledges and languages. In an attempt to maintain oral traditions in the face of globalisation and avoid deforestation, the community invited students from The Central School of Speech and Drama to work with them in a cultural exchange programme that raised variety ethical dilemmas for students and staff. The project initially involved four students working with a Bribri community in Yorkin on the documentation of their cultural myths and legends. This in part resulted in a evening of celebration in which the students and the Yorkin community shared and exchanged foods, songs and dance and culminated in a short performance of the Bribri creation myth which was acted by the younger children of the village and had been devised by the older children.
On returning for the second year of the project, the dilemmas thrown up in the first year were magnified by the communities’ decision to sell the result of the original exchange to a variety of tourist groups. This paper explores the possibly controversial idea that this has been a project that recognises a plural and diverse world – aiming for a pluriverse (rather than a universe) in which every culture can conserve its own identity and at the same time assimilate the ‘developments’ of globalising post-modernity, therefore rejecting the disciplining homogenising unity of the global village but harnessing it to remain individual without reproducing the problematic binaries of development.
Selina Busby is currently course leader for the MA in Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education) at Central School of Speech and Drama. Previously she has taught drama and performing arts in further education colleges, as well in schools and prisons. She has recently co-written a chapter with S. Farrier entitled ‘Queering Kane’ published in Alternatives Within the Mainstream II: British Postwar Queer Theatres. Recent conference papers include ‘Utilizing a Global Vision to Safeguard the Local Village’ delivered at the IDEA World Congress, Hong Kong, 2007, and ‘Living with the Enemy: Towards Not Reconciling the State with Queers, Trannies and Children’, delivered at PSi# 12, Queen Mary’s, University of London, June 2006.
The Intersubjective Witness:
Trauma Testimony in Towfiq Al-Qady’s Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee’s Story
Emma Cox ( Australian National University)
Testimony typically privileges singular subjectivity; as a means of representing psychological trauma, it is thought to bear witness to an individual’s unique experience. I interrogate the question of singular subjectivity, arguing that a community can be the nexus around which a witness ‘gathers’ the human and historiographical significance of their experience, focusing its constitutive relationship with those of and for whom they speak. I examine this idea with reference to Towfiq Al-Qady’s autobiographical solo performance, Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee’s Story, first presented in Brisbane in 2005. Al-Qady constructs a fluid, unstable (inter)subjectivity, performing as and speaking about his mother, lover, daughter and his child and adult selves, as well as speaking for other communities with which his experience connects. The decentralisation of the individual witness highlights possibilities for encounter and communication; the theatre crystallises such preoccupations. Of course, decentralisation is problematic in terms of witness agency and risks de-specifying individual experience, constituting asylum seekers and refugees as a homogenous category. This problem focuses the tensions and slippages between self and other(s), ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ that inhere in testimonial acts. I investigate the extent to which Nothing But Nothing enables effectualgeneralisation, whereby the witness’s testimony is situated and its significance expanded, and audience identification with the witness–figure allows for lines of community engagement to be drawn up across the divide between asylum seekers/refugees and Australians.
Emma Cox is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. She is researching recent works of performance and writing by and about asylum seekers and refugees in Australia. Emma has published articles on drama and contemporary fiction in Australia and the United States.
Tensions of Aesthetic Representation and Accountability in Refugee Performance
Rea Dennis( University of Glamorgan)
This paper explores the intercultural spaces between performer and audience bodies and performer and audience stories in refugee and asylum seeker contexts. It seeks to explore the potential for dialogue and misunderstanding in these spaces and the inherent risks when performing in such contexts associated with authority, accountability, authenticity, and intention. It argues that these concerns could be linked to the implied redemptive promise of empathy in the performing/telling of other people’s stories and the intractable ephemerality of the dialogic spaces invoked in the intercultural work. The paper considers the tension that emerges between the key imperatives of accountable and aesthetic representation in performing refugee and asylum seeker stories in playback theatre. It examines the complexities embedded within the dedication to authenticity surrounding the performance of refugee stories at the expense of the artistic rendering of the stories.
Dr Rea Dennis is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Glamorgan, South Wales. Previously from Australia, her research interests span the application of theatre and drama forms for peace/coexistence, memory and trace in contemporary devising practice, and psychophysical training for applied theatre artist/facilitators. Rea completed her PhD on playback theatre in 2004.
Theatrical Migrations and Digital Bodies: The Migrant Voices Project
Alan Filewod ( University of Guelph, Canada)
The question of interculturalism and migrancy in theatre studies has pressed critical questions that engage with the politics of theatrical practice and the ethics of representation. This paper outlines an argument that the recognition of migrancy as a condition of modern political and economic repression has profound significance in theatre practice.
With a focus on a single performance in the Canadian tour of Wild Geese, a video-ballad performed by Birmingham-based Banner Theatre on the subject of migrancy and labour, the paper explores the implosion of mise-en-scène as a refusal of cultural surrogation. Banner Theatre’s reduced theatricality fuses actor-musicians, digital video projection and audio recordings to create a montage of recorded actuality and performed commentary. The mix of live music, digital video, documentary collage and news-item voiceovers disrupts normative patterns of theatrical reception. Here we see the performance of hybridity, as forms migrate and reterritorialize across disciplinary, cultural and national borders. By manifesting phenomenally the passages of migration and the connections of global resistance, becoming not a theatre but instances of a theatre, Banner challenges fundamental precepts of theatre knowledge, mise-en- scène, and reception.
Alan Filewod is a Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada. His books include Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (1987), Performing ‘ Canada’: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (2002), and, with David Watt, Workers’ Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970 (2001). He is a past president of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research and of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures, and is a former editor of Canadian Theatre Review.
Life Is Like a Caravan: Refuge and the Performance of Care
Emine Fisek( University of California, Berkeley)
In 2003, the Paris-based theatre company Théâtre du Soleil launched Le Dernier Caravansérail: Odyssées (2003), a collaborative creation based on stories that company members had collected from refugees at the Sangatte refugee camp outside Calais. Scenes of moral reasoning dotted the six-hour spectacle, calling to mind the international media frenzy that followed the short lifetime (1999–2003) of the camp: if Sangatte was the ultimate embodiment of French compassion toward those in need, why did many resist confinement and hope to escape? By way of a closer look at the Sangatte scenes in Caravansérail, this paper asks several questions: How did the company engage the recent turn toward ‘humanitarian’ effort in French immigration policy in their depiction of the refugee experience? What were the structures of care and compassion with which the performance itself approached its subjects? And finally, how was performance practice, with its sensitivity to questions of affect and corporeality, taken to complicate the forms that human care can take?
Emine Fisek is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her interests include theories of ritual, bodily practice and embodiment and the history of twentieth-century francophone performance.
Too Distant Shores: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Space of Exception
Milija Gluhovic( University of Warwick)
Focusing on The Sheepand the Whale (Le mouton et la baleine, 2001) by Moroccan playwright Ahmed Ghazali, my paper will examine political and ethical issues concerning human migration from Africa to Europe. While the last decade has seen North Africa turned into transit countries for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, the prevailing European perspective on Mediterranean migration lies almost exclusively in the security paradigm. Detailed legal provisions known as re-admission treaties are being forced on countries bordering the EU, frontiers have been reinforced, and increasing emphasis is laid upon detection and deportation of illegal immigrants and even refoulement of asylum seekers. The play’s representation of human rights abuses in the Strait of Gibraltar and the dilemmas facing illegal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers will be situated in relation to current debates about the state of exception and the new forms of neo-liberal governmentality employed under the conditions of globalization (Agamben). In one way, Ghazali’s drama pays homage to those trying to enter Fortress Europe – and specifically to the nameless young African bodies and boats washed up on the shores of southern Spain. It attempts, in part, to exorcise the unspoken violence of these people’s deaths in what has become a vast African cemetery, while prompting us to ask what could be done in order to reduce the death toll in the Gibraltar Strait. To address this question, I canvass recent work on cosmopolitanism as a potential model for cross-cultural engagement and a new sense of global justice (Benhabib; Balibar).
Milija Gluhovic is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. His major research interests include the intersections of memory studies and contemporary European theatre and performance; migrations and human rights; contemporary and avant-garde performance in Europe and North America; critical theory, historiography, and radical democratic theory. He is currently working on two book projects: European Memories: Spectacles of Loss, Mourning and Intervention and Performing a ‘New’ Europe.
The Terror of Having Words Put in My Mouth:
Finding an Ethical Way to Speak for Asylum Seekers in Verbatim Theatre
Sarah Goldingay ( Exeter University)
On Thursday 21 June 2007, twelve performances took place across the UK of Asylum Monologues: Personal Testimonies of Asylum Seekers in the UK. I was one of three actors who performed in the Exeter event. This paper explores some of the ethical issues I wrestled with when participating in this intervention. As a performer was I simply speaking the words given to me in the script? Was I taking on the role of actor, or becoming a character? What kind of accents, gestures and intonations were appropriate? How could I ever fully embody the words of these people; how could I help the audience understand what was taking place? How could I honour these peoples’ stories?
And whilst my liberal sensibilities were running rampant, the sceptic in me was screaming. As an academic how could I simply accept the information given to me in the script as being accurate when no sources for the statements made were given? How could this performance make any difference when it was attended by people who were already sympathetic to the experiences of individuals and families within the UK’s asylum system?
Sarah Goldingay is an AHRC funded PhD researcher at the University of Exeter studying current Church of England ritual practice and how it both constructs and reconstructs itself through performance. Following a year of psychophysical performance training with Phillip Zarrilli, she performs primarily for The Varadi Foundation. She also works as a freelance strategic development consultant with various arts organisations including Howard Barker and the Wrestling School.
Audience and Asylum
Amber Onat Gregory
The war in Kosovo in 2000 led to an ‘overnight dumping’ of Kosovans in Margate. The cultural gap between the refugees and the host community was not addressed. Hannah and Hanna was created by Company of Angels to acknowledge the racial tension that occurred. It was first performed in June 2001 during Refugee Week to an audience in Margate who had experienced the ‘dumping’ first hand. The play then continued to tour nationally and internationally for six years – demonstrating to numerous audiences the tensions that arose between two communities and how human rights were violated. This paper explores which audiences Company of Angels, Ice and Fire and Banner Theatre target for performances about asylum seekers to address the effects of human rights abuses. Looking at approaches that a variety of theatre companies take when showing their work to different audiences enables us to gauge which seem the most effective.
Amber Onat Gregory has recently set up Tell me a Tale, a community interest theatre company that is dedicated to creating issue-based drama with groups who are disenfranchised from the community, struggling to be heard in society. The first project was a series of drama workshops at HMP Canterbury, a male foreign national prison; this project was a part of her fourth year at the University of Kent. Having recently graduated she is now focusing on facilitating workshops at the three immigration removal centres in London.
Perspective Reversed – Christoph Schlingensief’s Ausländer raus! and
Roberto Sifuentes and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s Temple of Confessions
Simon Hagemann( University of La Sorbonne nouvelle Paris 3)
Refugee organisations like the German based group ‘the voice’ remind us that one of the major issues in the discussion on asylum and human rights questions is the intercultural fear, the racism and xenophobia of both the authorities and the public. While performances by and about refugees and asylum seekers are often more focused on the immigrants and explore questions of identity, belonging, refuge, corporeality or surveillance, the two performances I will discuss in my paper, Christoph Schlingensief’s Ausländer raus! (2000) and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s Temple of Confessions (1994), have a reverse perspective. Their focus lays not at all on the identity and situation of asylum seekers in Austria and Mexican immigrants in the U.S., respectively, but on how the Austrian and the U.S. societies think and feel about them. The interactive character of the two performances reveals xenophobia and other prejudices, which might not have been revealed in other ways. My paper discusses this strategy of a reverse perspective and the interactive character of the performances, its strenghts and weaknesses, and its meaning in the context of asylum, migration and human rights.
Simon Hagemann is a PhD student at the University of La Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. He recieved an MA from the University of Lyon 2 with a thesis on intertextuality in the plays of Elfriede Jelinek. Currently he is working on his doctoral thesis on the role and vision of the media in 20 th century theatre. His research interests include post-dramatic theatre, theatre and technology, intermediality and political theatre.
Refugitive and the Theatre of Dys-appearance
Rand Hazou (La Trobe University)
This paper focuses on issues of embodiment specific to the experiences of an asylum seeker represented in the play Refugitive (2003). The play was written and performed by Shahin Shafaei, an Iranian asylum seeker who spent a period of twenty-two months in an Australian detention centre. The play exposes details about the isolation compounds and examines the hunger strikes that detainees engaged in. The narrative of the play emerges through a conversation between the hunger striking protagonist and his hungry belly. The unfolding narrative suggests an asylum seeker experiencing a disconnection from his body, or a rupture between his experience of body and self. What does this rupture tell us about the bodily effects of the detention environment? And in what ways does this play help to explain the hunger strikes that detainees engaged in? Drawing on the phenomenology of mental illness explored by Thomas Fuchs (2005) and the phenomenology of pain outlined by Drew Leader (1990), the discussion attempts to illustrate how the traumatising environment of the detention centre can cause a rupture between the experience of the self and body of the detainee. I argue that the hunger strike depicted in Refugitive can be read as an effort to resist the ‘corporealisation’ and ‘disembodiment’ that can emerge in detention. By re-presenting the suffering of the hunger strikes in the theatrical frame, Refugitive speaks when the hunger strikers have been silenced. Adapting Leder’s term, I argue that this is a theatre of dys-appearance; it is theatre that makes the invisibility of asylum seekers apparent.
Rand Hazou completed a Bachelor of Arts in Geography, Media Studies and Drama at the University of Queensland in 1998. In 2003, he was awarded First Class Honours in Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University. In 2004, he was commissioned by the UNDP to travel to the Occupied Territories in Palestine to work as a theatre consultant running workshops for Palestinian youths. Rand is currently a PhD candidate at La Trobe University, Melbourne, investigating the latest wave of political theatre in Australia dealing with Asylum Seekers and Refugees.
‘A New Ethos for Europe’:
Representing Refugees and Asylum Seekers in European Literature
Sissy Helff(University of Leeds/Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt)
This paper examines the representation of African refugees and asylum seekers in European literature in general and in recent life writings and literature for young adults in particular. Examples will be drawn from writers as diverse as Benjamin Zephaniah and Senait G. Mehari. I suggest that the selected refugee stories invest in narrating an imagined community of ‘new Europeans’ and thus invite readers to a plural reading of historical events. Following this train of thought, I am particularly interested in the interplay between images and motifs that evoke and shape various nation-states while illuminating an imagined European community. I therefore seek to excavate a transcultural imagery that characterizes refugee and asylum seekers as the ‘new Europeans’ by utilizing narrative strategies that reflect Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about a new ethos for Europe.
Sissy Helff teaches literature and cultural studies at the English Department of the Johann Goethe-University of Frankfurt, Germany. She is author of Die Erfahrung der Migration in der Black British Frauenliteratur (1999) and her more recent Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Literature (2008). She is co-editor of Transcultural English Studies (2008) and Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2008). She has widely published on postcolonial, transcultural and gender issues and narratology. Her recent research focus is refugee aesthetics and new tendencies in Travel Writing. Currently she is a visiting scholar at the New Colonial and Postcolonial Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bridge of One Hair:
A Somali Poet and a Toronto Community-engaged Theatre Project
Ruth Howard and Faduma Ahmed Alim(Jumblies Theatre)
Hawa Jibril was born in the nomadic regions of Somalia in the 1920s. Since 1994 she has lived in a subsidized high-rise in Toronto. She was a renowned oral poet and public figure in her own land. In Toronto, she has lived a reclusive life, communicating with her scattered family and community mainly by telephone.
In 2003 Ruth Howard, Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre, a company specialising in artist-community collaborations, met Hawa’s daughter, Faduma Ahmed Alim, a trained linguist and translator. This relationship lead to the creation of a new music and image-driven theatre work, Bridge of One Hair, which uses Hawa’s life story and poems as central form and content, and which premiered at Toronto’s New World Stage Festival in April 2007, involving several dozen professional artists and over 100 community performers, including many Somali women, youth and children.
Ruth Howard and Faduma Ahmed Alim will give an overview of this project, and discuss how it affected Hawa, the Somali and non-Somali participants, and the broader communities that the project touched. We will represent two interlinking perspectives: that of a non-Somali artist, learning while she creates, and grappling with the attendant aesthetic, ethical and social ramifications, and that of a Somali cultural guide, herself connected to the play’s subject matter: both observing and feeling the effects of the process and outcome. We will illustrate the process and performance through video segments.
Ruth Howard is the founder and artistic director of Jumblies Theatre, a company dedicated to artist/community collaborative projects and residencies. She has designed large-scale community plays across Canada and in the U.K, which combine visual arts, performance and story gathering/telling. She has led many workshops and given many presentations in diverse educational, academic and community settings in relation to her community-engaged projects. Ruth is a graduate of Eastbourne College of Art and Design, the National Theatre School of Canada and the University of Toronto. Ruth received a Vital People award in 2006 from the Toronto Community Foundation, and was nominated for a Dora Award for Outstanding Costume Design for Bridge of One Hair in 2007.
Faduma Ahmed Alim received her education in Somalia, Egypt and Italy. She graduated from the Arabic Section of the Oriental Institute of Naples in 1962, with a graduate linguistics thesis on Somali proverbs. She served in Somalia’s sectors of education and culture over 24 years as teacher, school inspector, administrator, and government officer. She is also a social activist promoting women’s rights and an advocate for humanitarian causes and social justice. In Canada she co-coordinated various projects serving refugees and new immigrants such as language instruction, mental health and other educational programs. She co-founded various Somali women’s associations, and over the years, served in the boards of several national and international organizations, including the UNICEF Executive Board and the Arab League Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Ethical and Theatrical Implications of Using Personal Narratives in Participatory Refugee Performance in the UK
Alison Jeffers( University of Manchester)
Storytelling in the form of personal narrative plays an important, if contested, role in participatory theatre practices in many locations. This paper will examine two participatory theatre projects in Manchester, UK. Both involved refugee participants in their creation and performance and raised questions about the caution utilised by the facilitators during these projects, both in eliciting and performing personal narratives. Such caution has been noted anecdotally among other British practitioners and it will be suggested that this is partly due to a stress on the pedagogic nature of refugee theatre for both participants and audiences in the UK and partly due to professional considerations. Feldman’s ethnographic work in South Africa and Northern Ireland suggests ways in which personal narrative in participatory refugee performance can be analysed and reflected upon when it does appear in performance.
Alison Jeffers is researching refugee and asylum seeker performance as part of the In Place of War project at the University of Manchester. A three year, AHRB-funded project, it examines the response of performers and artists to situations of contemporary conflict. Alison is engaged with mapping refugee theatre and performance across the UK for the project. Her PhD will use this map as a way to focus on issues of performativity. Alison works with groups of refugees on practical theatre projects and runs a drama group with clients from the Medical Foundation for the Support of Victims of Torture in Manchester.
Performing Like a Refugee: Paradoxes of Hyper-Authenticity
Silvija Jestrovic( Warwick University)
This paper will investigate performance events that feature actual refugees and asylum seekers, but in instances where presence and embodiment are mediated and made ambiguous, including a fashion show by Catalan designer Antonio Miro, who uses refugees from Senegal as models, Christoph Schlingensief’s public art project ‘Foreigners Out’, and ‘Sierra Leone Refugees All Stars’, a documentary about a band formed in a West African refugee camp on the road to world stardom. In different ways and to varying degrees, these case studies exemplify the phenomenon that I will call the hyper-authentic – where the authenticity of the subject is partly constructed through the gaze of the beholder. Although the projects in question use real refugees and asylum seekers as performers, exilic voices and bodies are often subordinated, to a greater or lesser degree, to the creative and/or entrepreneurial concepts of the established Western artists. Nevertheless, I would argue that the relationship between performance ethics and efficacy remains ambiguous, making these case studies difficult to dismiss as merely gratuitous.
Silvija Jestrovic is Assistant Professor at Warwick University. She studied dramaturgy and playwriting at the University of Belgrade and received her doctorate from the University of Toronto. Her book, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology, was published in 2006 by University of Toronto Press. She convened and co-organized the International Conference on Theatre and Exile ( University of Toronto, 2003) and co-edited a special issue of Modern Drama on the same topic. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Between Destruction and Monotony: Urban Performance as Resistance.
Space, Performativity and Performance with Four Refugee Groups in East London
Erene Kaptani and Nira Yuval-Davis
This paper stems from the research project Identity, Performance and Social Action: Community Theatre among Refugees, which is part of the ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme. We focus on the lives of refugees in London and their encounters with local voluntary and governmental agencies. We examine the processes of construction, communication, authorisation and contestation of refugee identities. Four refugee groups (Kosovan, Kurdish, Somali and mixed origins) took part in two Playback performances and five Forum Theatre sessions. The theatrical events are followed by interviews with a sample of members of the groups.
For the purpose of this paper, we examine the manner in which the theatre space informs/is being informed by the interactions and perceptions of the refugees in the intersectional spaces in which they live. The paper focuses on the ways refugee performativity , which is reiterated by agents of power, state interventions and public discourses, is being reproduced and/or disrupted in the theatre space by the narration and performance of the refugee participants. For this purpose we use narratives of both the theatrical events and recorded performances. We investigate how all these processes intersect with each other within the particular spatial and cultural contexts of the refugees’ families, their communities and the London locale, mediated and translated into the theatre medium and space.
Erene Kaptani is a Research Fellow in Identity, Performance and Social Action: Playback and Forum Theatre Among Refugees (www.uel.ac.uk/ipsa), and also a theatre practitioner and performer. She has conducted research on three generations of Greek Cypriot women in London, on experiential learning methods working with migrants. She has published a paper, ‘Playback, Forum and Social Change’, for a German studies publication. For the last ten years she has been working with the homeless, children, elderly, women and refugees as a theatre facilitator. She is currently involved with Playback South Theatre Company.
Can the Creative Contextualisation of the Abuse of Human Rights
Change Perspectives and Create Action?
Sara Masters (Co-Artistic Director, iceandfire)
The measurable effect that the arts, specifically theatre, have in creatively contextualising the abuse of human rights and counteracting ‘compassion fatigue’ is under-explored. Using qualiquantitative research I investigate how effective fictional theatre is at changing people’s perceptions. Audiences were interviewed before and after attending a new play, Crocodile Seeking Refuge, which examines the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. In focussing on a work that concentrates on a vulnerable group, the research examines theatre’s catalytic role in creating active engagement with abuses that have taken place. Results indicate that in this specific context theatre is effective in changing perspectives and creating a limited degree of action. An outline is given of the further studies that will be required in order to ascertain whether theatre can be a more powerful catalyst for change, to gauge its long-term efficacy, and to determine how it can support audience members in moving from being spectators to participants.
Sara Masters is Co-Artistic Director of iceandfire, a new-writing theatre company dedicated to exploring stories of displacement and conflict. Recent projects include the ‘Protect the Human’ playwriting competition in conjunction with Amnesty International UK and Separated, a new play for young people exploring the experiences of unaccompanied minors in the UK. She trained as an actress at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and has an MA in Human Rights from University College London.
Making the body:
Applied Theatre at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture
Riti Herman Mostert ( Wageningen University )
This paper shows how drama and participatory theatre research can contribute to the restoration of the damaged and fragmented self and identity of victims of torture. The paper is an outcome of an MA study and is based on work of the drama group of the Medical Foundation in Manchester. The study tested the theoretical assumption that surviving torture and healing from torture, or ‘making the body’, can be realised through the reverse process of destruction: imagination. In applied theatre imagination becomes embodied and the men in the drama group used their bodies in a creative and constructive manner. Moreover, the project contributed to the restoration of a political will and identity, both by doing drama and by participating in the research. Doing applied theatre and participatory theatre research fuelled this process of creation, ‘making the body’ and constructing the world, hence entailed a crucial part of the healing process. Theatre, research, performance and being political are assets of the healing process for victims of torture and can be encompassed in applied theatre.
Riti Herman Mostert was born in 1980 and raised in two cultures ( Romania and the Netherlands). Her family fled in 1983 from Ceaucescu’s dictatorship. She is interested in social change, theatre and development, and studies at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She has an MA in Applied Theatre and aims to develop Theatre Action Research in development studies.
Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement
Misha Myers( Dartington College of the Arts)
This paper enquires how certain performative mechanisms deployed in the practice-as-research project Homing Place might be conceived as homing devices, mechanisms that create relational and dialogic interspaces of orientation, dwelling, and emplacement and methods of bodily attunement to places? How might they be homing place or homing places – describing both a place of inhabitation that exists in and through movement and a method of action, a way of finding, making and inhabiting that place? In Homing Place a set of contextually-based and participant-led experiments involved the participation and contribution of particular audiences and social groups, inhabitants of Plymouth, UK, who are asylum seekers and refugees, in spatial, relational and dialogic art processes of wayfinding, mapping and walking. This essay considers the underlying conceptual concerns of this project – how do those performative mechanisms employed create place or are place-making, and how is emplacement performed? Key conceptual tools for this discussion are Tim Ingold’s concept of wayfaring and inhabitantknowledge and Edward Casey’s conception of dwelling and inhabitation.
Misha Myers is a Live Artist and Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, UK. Originally, from Mississippi, she first trained as an anthropologist and dancer. Her contextually-based and socially engaged performances, installations and processes invite an active, self-determined and collaborative participation of particular individuals or social groups. She has presented her work world-wide including in Japan, Denmark, Romania, Spain, Guatemala and USA. Her recent work featured in the ‘Art in the Age of Terrorism’ exhibition at Millais Gallery, Spacex Gallery’s public art project ‘Homeland’, and in Newlyn Art Gallery’s programme of site-specific and live art.
From Nation to Home:
A Transited Cultural Identity on Taiwanese Stage in the 1980s
Chao Ning-Yu (Queen Mary University of London)
Mainlanders are identified as one of Taiwan’s ethnic groups who migrated to there with the KMT (Kuomingtang) government in the late 1940s after it was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in China. It is estimated that around one-and-a-half million Mainlanders withdrew to Taiwan and around nine hundred temporary shelters (namely, the residential military community) were built to settle those homeless Mainlanders. At that time, no one was able to foresee that those simple temporary houses would become the Mainlanders’ permanent homes.
These Mainlanders arrived in Taiwan as political refugees as well as settlers as they had dominated the political power for over forty years. However, t he socio-political position of the Mainlander has been shifted from an ‘imagined’ dominant majority to a margin ali zed minority under the effects of both globalization and localization. Mainlanders have been regarded as comprising Chinese diasporas in Taiwan and encounter more and more difficulties as Taiwan is undergoing a process of nation-building with a supreme Taiwanese consciousness.
This paper will examine Taiwanese theatre works in the late 1980s that focus on representing Mainlanders’ lives in military communities. I will argue that by staging the life in the community, theatre becomes a site for Mainlanders to negotiate and integrate the traumatic memory of war, the nostalgia of homeland and the local living experience. As a result, the performances help to diminish the exotic imagination of China and reshape the meaning of ‘home’.
Chao Ning-Yu has participated in Taiwan’s theatre activities since late 1980s, a time when Little Theatre was in its booming stage. She performed in various productions such as The Shakespeare’s Night (1992) and Darling, Eating and Fishing (1996). From 1998 to 2002, Chao taught radio production and communication theories at Ming Chuan University in Taiwan and directed the MCBS105.3 station . Currently, she is a PhD candidate in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on Taiwanese contemporary performance and national identity.
‘They Are Here Because We Were There’:
Performance and the Cultural Geographies of Collision/Connection
Kerrie Schaefer( University of Exeter)
This paper will examine the ways in which recent radical performance and installation art in the UK has responded to extreme local events and global contexts, such as the grisly discoveries of dead bodies fallen from the wheel bays of commercial airliners (a number of the 7182 documented refugee deaths attributed to the policies of Fortress Europe) or the drowning deaths of 23 Chinese cockle pickers at Morecambe Bay on February 5, 2004. Cardboard Citizen’s Visible, Banner Theatre’s Wild Geese and Strangers in Paradise Circus/They Get Free Mobiles Don’t They?, and Graeme Miller’s Held are all recent (2005-2007) performances or installations which engage with human rights issues concerning refugees and asylum seekers. These strategic performance/art ventures employ a diverse range of methods and techniques including absurdist satire/farce, audio-visual memorialisation and documentary actuality to re-present the lives and deaths (living and dead bodies) of refugees and asylum seekers. In this paper I argue that these performances operate without the security of either the pseudo-ethos of a Brechtian critique or the pseudo-pathos of aesthetic suffering. Their radicalism consists in the attempt to connect a public audience with the cultural geographies of forced (economic) migration, surveillance, detainment, and even death. As Graeme Miller states in reference to Held: ‘Geographies, personal and political, collide or connect; the migrant meets the settled, the living meet the dead’.
Kerrie Schaefer has just taken up a position in the Department of Drama at Exeter University after having lectured in the Drama Department at the University of Newcastle (NSW). She completed her PhD in Performance Studies at the University of Sydney and has published in The Drama Review, Australasian Drama Studies, and About Performance as well as in a number of edited collections. Her current research interests in place, history, memory and performance are being explored through the field of Applied Drama at Exeter.
Mike Parr’s Recent Performance Art
Ed Scheer ( University of Warwick)
The latest phase of Mike Parr’s 35-year opus deals directly with the rise of neo-Conservative politics in Australia and in particular its obsessive and unscrupulous management of national identity and the policy of ‘indefinite detention’ of asylum seekers. His art is informed by the notion that art must do more than make images: it must address the manner in which images are received, engage with how we sensorially perceive the world, and acknowledge that our perception is also structured by media, technology and particular events. For Parr this involves a consideration of the interactions between subjectivity and the world in which it is formed, both the sensorial world and the world of politics, government policy and public discourse.
While the depiction of bodily pain is of central importance to the meaning of the work, it is also engaging with larger questions of how this pain is administered, by whom and for what reasons. In this paper I will focus on how this work stages the unrepresentability of the pain of others, specifically those in indefinite detention whose own pain was also sometimes enacted on the body (cutting wrists, sewing lips etc). The background to the ways in which the humanity of this suffering was actively negated by government and the possibility for empathy limited by constant government reiteration of the discourse of illegality and queue jumping will also be discussed.
Edward Scheer is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick. He is a founding editor of the journal Performance Paradigm and has completed a monograph on Mike Parr’s performance art (forthcoming Schwartz Press 2008). He has edited a number of books including Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader for Routledge (2004) and Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny, with John Potts (2006). Between 2004–2007 he was chairman of the board of directors of the Performance Space in Sydney. His current Australia Research Council funded project is a study of time and performance in nineteenth-century experiments in art and science. He is President-elect of Psi Performance Studies International (2007–2010).
Who’s European Here?
Roma Campers, the ‘ Third World’ and European Identity
Ioana Szeman( Roehampton University)
This paper analyzes a recent case brought to media attention, in which Roma from Romania, who had camped close to one of the main Irish highways, were threatened with being sent back to Romania. An article in the Guardian describes Third World slum conditions near a European metropolis and cites locals who present the Roma as dirty, begging Gypsies who need to be removed from the very visible space they have temporarily inhabited. Yet, the photographs show these individuals from a different angle. They are embodying and claiming European identity. One of the photographs is a close-up of a man’s Romanian passport, proof of his European-ness and freedom to travel.
This example brings into question issues of citizenship, rights and borders in the European Union. A few years ago many of these individuals would have been able to legally seek asylum from Western European countries. Today, as citizens of Romania, a member of the European Union, they no longer can do that, but are free to travel anywhere in the European Union. However, the realities of their lives may not have changed since Romania joined the European Union. I analyze the limits of categories such as ‘asylum seekers,’ for migrants from the newly joining European countries and the ways in which this example shows the cracks in the European enlargement process.
Ioana Szeman is a Lecturer in Performance Studies at Roehampton University and is currently working on a book project provisionally titled ‘Gypsies on Changing European Stages: Romanian Roma Performance, Memory and the Politics of Visibility.’ This book addresses the new wave of Gypsy chic and the success of Gypsy music and performance in the West, which coexists with persistent Roma marginalization. She has published in Theatre Research International and New Theatre Quarterly and has recently completed ethnographic fieldwork in Romania. She has also conducted workshops and participated in theatre projects addressing the maginalization of homeless and orphaned youth in Romania.
Finding the Freedom Through the Wire to Welcome the Asylum Seeker
Devorah Wainer( University of Technology Sydney)
Amad and I have come to watch the first complete ‘reading’ of Through the Wire. The production is due to open the following week for the Sydney Festival. Ours is a privileged invitation to attend, together with Suzi, Moshen and Gaby. Already we’ve agreed that writer and producer Ros Horin has faithfully and accurately scripted our interviews for this verbatim theatre production. We are now about to be the audience to ‘ourselves’. The women are performed by three of Australia’s best-known actresses. Poignantly, Ros has cast unknown actors to play the incarcerated asylum seekers.
Amad is quivering before we even enter the theatre, unsure if he can see ‘someone else suffer his suffering’. In his determination to be there, Moshen has doubled his daily dose of medication to cope with the psychosis induced by conditions in detention. Gaby hugs us all and then leaves. She can’t watch. A former nurse in the infamous Woomera detention centre, she and Shahin are now engaged. They met after his release from solitary confinement. At that time all ‘illegals’ were placed into solitary confinement immediately upon arrival to isolate them from the knowledge systems, policies, procedures and timelines of application for refugee status. Shahin is playing himself. Significantly, not only did this production reach an audience alternate to and wider spread than those normally engaged in the discourse on human rights and asylum seekers, but it also became a mirror, reflecting the deeper personal journeys of those engaged in the discourse.
What unfolded during that ‘reading’ led me to a specific phenomenology of freedom, as described by Emmanuel Levinas, that I will present in this paper. Additional to the paper, I’ll present a five-minute award winning film, scripted and produced by an asylum seeker who was incarcerated for five years.
Devorah Wainer is a researcher in social ethics, an advocate for detained asylum seekers and a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. A former Director of the Multicultural Community Relations Commission, Devorah won a gold award conferred by the Premier of NSW for a multicultural project. Currently writing her PhD, she draws upon a broad background that includes growing up in South Africa under apartheid and 20 years research and development around relationships in organisations.
Witnessing Degree Zero: Performance, Disappearance, and the SIEV X
Caroline Wake( University of New South Wales)
On October 19, 2001, 353 asylum seekers drowned when what is now known as the SIEV X (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel X) sank somewhere between Java and Christmas Island. Several attempts have been made at bearing witness for those whom Peggy Phelan might call ‘the dead, the disappeared, the lost’ however this paper focuses on Version 1.0’s documentary play CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident).
Documentary plays tend to rely on primary testimony, which is to say on the words of those who survive the traumatic event. Yet CMI attempts something else, preferring to operate in a mode of metawitnessing since the majority of the play is spent witnessing secondary witnesses. In the fourth and final act, however, the play attempts something more radical again, moving into a mode that might be called witnessing degree zero. Witnessing degree zero, or the attempt to ‘bear witness for the witness,’ contra Celan, is a risky activity and yet performance studies scholars such as Phelan insist that while risky it is also necessary. Thus, witnessing degree zero inaugurates two possibilities—false witnessing and audacious witnessing – both of which are evident in CMI’s final act. This prompts me to contemplate the possibility that the acts of false and audacious witnessing are almost one and the same, that they complete each other, and that perhaps CMI, and documentary plays more generally, performs and produces a mode of ‘faux-dacious’ witnessing.
Caroline Wake is doing her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New South Wales. Her research considers theories of witnessing in the context of performance.
The Ethics of Representation and the Role(s) of the Artist in Dialogical Arts Practices
Natalie Waldbaum ( University of Warwick)
This presentation introduces an aspect of my research into approaches to asylum and migration discourse in dialogical and process-based contemporary art practices. I will explore questions of ethical practice and the adoption of social and political roles by socially engaged arts practitioners, arising from practice-led research engaging with asylum seekers in Plymouth ( Plymouth Walls/Plymouth Interviews 2004-5). These include issues of duration, trust-building, confidentiality and risk; the roles of the artist as advocate, ethnographer and investigator; ethical issues concerning the artistic appropriation of methodologies developed under other research traditions; and questions of authorship, expectation and exploitation in participatory arts. These issues are further explored through the works of European artists engaging with migration, illegality and integration, examining methods of engagement by dialogical representation and by self-representation of the artist as migrant.
Natalie Waldbaum is an artist and researcher in contemporary visual, live art and performance practices, and a PhD student at Warwick. She recently obtained an MA in Performance and Cultural Location in Contemporary Europe from Dartington College of Arts. Her work examines discourses of contemporary migration, mobility and asylum addressed through and reflected within socially engaged arts practices, and the ethical concerns facing arts practitioners working in the crossover between the arts and socio-political sciences. She has performed and worked throughout Central Eastern Europe, including Poland, Estonia, Czech Republic and Serbia.
Performing Refugee Policy: ‘Emotional Illiteracy’, Professionalism, and ‘These People’ in the Testimony of Rear Admiral Smith
David Williams(UNSW/version 1.0)
This paper examines the deliberate strategies of dehumanisation that were applied to asylum seekers in Australia in 2001, and the manner in which these strategies were performed through refugee policy by Australian government ministers, public servants, and military personnel using the rhetoric of ‘professionalism’. In particular, I focus on rhetoric produced around the so-called ‘children overboard’ scandal of 2001, in which refugees were rhetorically represented by political actors as being ‘evil people engaged in child abuse’. This incident was the subject of the Senate Committee on A Certain Maritime Incident in 2002. This paper examines the performance of this dehumanising rhetoric of ‘professionalism’ in the Senate Select Committee in terms of what Robert Dixon describes as ‘emotional illiteracy’, focusing primarily on the testimony of Rear Admiral Smith. Further to this, the paper examines the ways in which this emotionally illiterate ‘professional’ language of refugee policy was re-presented in Sydney-based performance group version 1.0’s CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) (2004), a performance that took as its primary source material transcripts of the Senate Select Committee.
David Williams is a performer, writer, technician and director. He is a founding member of the Sydney-based performance group version 1.0 (www.versiononepointzero.com), acclaimed in Australia for their blend of documentary-style political theatre, live art aesthetics, and media spectacle. In August version 1.0 premiered their most recent work, Deeply offensive and utterly untrue, investigating the Australian Wheat Board’s ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal. David submitted his PhD at UNSW in June 2007. His current research focuses on close readings of rhetorical performances by politicians and other political actors.
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