Performance and Asylum: Ethics, Embodiment, Community
Performance and Asylum: Research Issues
Asylum, Performance and Human Rights in Australia

Performance and Asylum: Ethics, Embodiment, Community

International Conference supported by the AHRC, Diaspora, Migration and Identities Programme

3–5 November 2007, Royal Holloway, University of London

Within the current context of globalisation and its attendant anxieties about immigration and national security, performance by and about refugees and asylum seekers presents an exemplary medium through which to explore questions of identity, belonging, refuge, corporeality, surveillance and ethics. This international conference examines the ways in which performance projects in various parts of the world engage with refugee communities and, more broadly, the complex and multifaceted topic of asylum.

Abstracts
Programme

Organised by Helen Gilbert and Tina Muir.

Performance and Asylum: Research Issues

One-day Symposium Supported by the AHRC

Friday 9 February, Royal Holloway, Blue Room, Kingswood Building

This one-day event examined issues arising in research centred on performances by and about asylum seekers and refugees. The aim was to share insights and ask questions about representation, identity, belonging, refuge, corporeality, surveillance and ethics, while considering asylum seeker and refugee performances within their social, political and theatrical contexts/communities.

Participants gave 15-minute presentations on aspects of their current or planned research or practice in reference to the broad field of performance and asylum and the following questions:
• What are the burning issues involved in or raised by your research?
• What critical, theoretical and/or methodological approaches are you taking to such issues?
• How do the issues you’ve identified mesh with other kinds of scholarship or practice-based research relating to refugees and asylum seekers?

Sophie Nield’s paper, presented by Dan Rebelato, opened the discussion by suggesting that a ‘theatrical’ perception of the world could imbue our understanding with new insights. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘Law of Exception’, she observed how the stateless person is also a rightless person and considered the extent to which our notions of humanness and citizenship are correlated.

Charlotte Hennessey’s talk provided an insightful approach to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and the peace-building work of two mobile theatre groups. Her research showed that the theatre groups observed consider the children to be the future ambassadors of peace. Overall, it was suggested that theatre and performance can provide valuable images of peace to people and children that have mainly experienced war.

Misha Myers presented two radical projects (Way form home and VocaLatitude) that create a dialogic process of wayfinding, mapping and walking. The projects deal with the notions of displacement and emplacement in refugee and asylum seeker communities and can inform audiences about the particularities of the place-making process with which refugees have to deal.

Alison Jeffers, presented a simulating overview of the mapping process, where she observed that the process conceals undertones of inconsistency and truth distortion. The map, she avers, is an exercise of power, with no guarantee for objectivity. In this light, the researcher, the one who maps, needs to be responsible towards the Others, and ensure that their voices and their visions can be heard.

Erene Kaptani, examined the value of performance as a research tool and discussed the ways in which a research project on refugee communities was informed by the use of Playback and Forum theatre. She maintains that through character building the participants stated what could not have been stated otherwise: illustrative narrations, feelings and personal experiences. However, there are still concerns about how such results will be analysed, used and published.

The talk provided by Maggie O’Neill analysed the sociological usefulness of art as a medium that reveals another side of an argument. Although there is always the fear of romanticising pain, it is evident that the artistic approach to the issue of concern can disrupt stereotypical views. Through creative representations of their experiences, the refugees that participated in the project were granted a space where their voice can actually be heard.

Susan Haedickle also provided a very stimulating talk on the representation of ‘refugeeness’, this time in terms of street theatre work. Street performances were, in her view, a rather effective method of experientially suggesting exile, as this might be experienced by the estranged other. However, the efficacy of such performances is ambiguous and documentation that could facilitate research in the field is rather scarce.

The discussions culminated in a series of questions that challenged not only the contribution of performance practices in social discourse, but also the extent to which the refugee experience is aestheticised and thus decontextualised. Participants also considered the sense of shame and responsibility invoked by such performances, together with the utility of the information retrieved through theatre research.

PROGRAMME

9.30 am Coffee and Opening Remarks
10.00 am Sophie Nield Citizens of the State of Exception
10.30 am Charlotte Hennessy Theatre and Peace-building in Sri Lanka
11.00 am Morning Tea
11.30 am Misha Myers Homing Place: Methods of Participation and Place-making through Performance
12.00 noon Alison Jeffers Mapping, Terminology and Refugee Roles in Scholarship and Practice-based Research on Asylum Issues
12.30 pm Erene Kaptani Playback and Forum Theatre: A Space for Telling and Acting Formative Moments in Refugee Lives.
1.00 pm Lunch
2.00 pm Maggie O’Neill Global Refugees: Participatory Action Research as Performative Praxis
2.30 pm Susan Haedicke Efficacy and Metaphoric Memory in European Street Theatre Companies’ Engagement with the Discourses of Exile
3.00 pm Helen Gilbert Aesthetics and Ethics in Refugee and Asylum Seeker Representations
3.30 pm Afternoon Tea
4.00–4.30 pm Open Forum

Panel Presentation, International Federation of Theatre Research Conference, Helsinki, Finland, 2006

Asylum, Performance and Human Rights in Australia  

Australia ’s current regime for managing asylum seekers is one of the Western world’s most draconian. It has entailed mandatory detention, sometimes for years, of so-called ‘unauthorised arrivals’; forced transportation of asylum seekers to offshore processing centres; temporary protection visas that limit refugees’ opportunities to be reunited with their families; the deliberate and systematic demonising of those seeking asylum; and various instances of physical and psychological abuse. The consistent rationale offered by the current federal government and its supporters to justify this regime, which has been criticised not just by local human rights activists but also by the United Nations, is that harsh measures are necessary to contain refugee numbers and combat threats to national security. In this pervasive ‘border protection’ discourse, the manufactured imperative to deter asylum seekers apparently overrides humanitarian considerations.

Not surprisingly, the shameful treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in this context has generated a number of performative responses, ranging from protests, hunger strikes and acts of self-injury among detainees, to silent public vigils in support of refugee rights, to more artistic but often no less political events in forms as diverse as verbatim theatre, stand-up comedy, circus, autobiographical monologue, fictional drama and performance art. This panel will approach the topic of performance in relation to asylum and human rights from different critical and methodological angles in order to consider a cluster of related questions: What ethical issues arise in/through projects with and about refugees and asylum seekers? To what extent is the request for asylum – and its denial – inscribed in corporeal terms? How might discourse perform or circumscribe the limits of hospitality and compassion towards asylum seekers? How do audiences respond in affective and interactive terms when witnessing narratives of bodily trauma? In what ways do site-specific projects shape representations of asylum and of particular environments?

While the panel discussion focuses on Australian examples, the ambition is to help build scaffolding for work with an international scope. This is a particularly urgent task given that various other nations, including Britain, have considered adopting elements of Australia’s asylum policy.

Speakers

Tom Burvill suggests ethical and political frameworks within which we might discuss dramaturgically various forms of intervention concerning refugee/asylum-seeker issues. Forms canvassed included performance art/installation, verbatim or research-based work and more or less fictionalised character-based ‘theatre’. Beginning with the premise that these forms are as much ethically as politically inspired, the presentation develops the implications of some influential schools of thought around issues of hospitality (Derrida), recognition (Honneth) and injunctions about the duty to the other (Levinas et al.). The aim is to investigate how far we can see these articulating with various performance forms and strategies and how might we, not only as analysts but also as dramaturgical activists, inform work from these sources.

Tom Burvill is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. He has worked as dramaturg for Sidetrack and published widely on Australian theatre and culture, especially around issues of ethnicity and multiculturalism.

David Williams discusses recent work by Sydney performance group version 1.0 in relation to Robert Dixon's notion of ‘emotional illiteracy’ and the testimony given in the 2002 senate inquiry into the ‘Children Overboard Affair’, an orchestrated event entailing deliberate and erroneous claims by the Australian government that asylum seekers had thrown their children into the water in order to manipulate an ocean rescue by the navy. This presentation’s focus is on the dehumanising strategies used by key witness Rear Admiral Smith in his testimony to the senate, and its performative re-presentation in version 1.0’s verbatim piece, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident).

Scholar–practitioner David Williams is a founding member and artistic director of the performance group version 1.0. and has devised and performed in The Second Last Supper, CMI and The Wages of Spin, now touring, He is also a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales.

Gay McAuley uses the concept of ‘islands of vanishment’ to examine how the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre can exist in suburban Sydney and the extent to which it is becoming a memory site (Pierre Nora). The term ‘islands of vanishment’ is borrowed from museologists who have used it to discuss the heritage implications of colonial penal settlements. The figure of ‘the vanished’ (which might apply historically to Australia’s early convict settlers and, in turn, to Aboriginal people) has now come to the fore again as a result of the Howard government’s punitive treatment of asylum seekers. The paper explores how performative acts are being used to exorcise as well as to reinforce the vanishment at the heart of the government’s detention centre policy.

Internationally known for her extensive scholarship in performance studies, Gay McAuley is Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. She is currently working on a study of cultural memory and site-specific performance.

Helen Gilbert raises the issue of animal rights in order to suggest ways of thinking about the animalisation of asylum seekers in media and governmental reports and other public discourses in Australia. The presentation interrogates the performative functions of the human–animal species boundary and investigates some of the strategies by which theatre workers have explicitly attempted to ‘rehumanise’ asylum seekers for their publics. This research also investigates ethical issues in positing links between human and animal rights.

Helen Gilbert is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely on Australian theatre and postcolonial studies and is currently developing a collaborative transnational project on performance and asylum.

Paul Dwyer is chair, respondent, interlocuter and provocateur

Paul Dwyer teaches Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. He has worked professionally as an actor, animateur, director and/or dramaturg in youth/community theatre and is currently embarking on research into the performative aspects of 'restorative justice' and various kinds of reconciliation ceremony.