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Performance and Migration website is designed to support any researcher, student or specialist in completing literature reviews, essays, publications or more in the field of Theatre and Migration by providing an easily accessible archive of research which has been compiled and sorted into several comprehensive collections

Africa

Africa as a whole

In the list, among others, the reader can find works which feature: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Botswana, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Congo, Zimbabwe, Somali, Cape Verde. + includes general literature about Africa.

The narratives of eleven “movers and makers” map their geographies and journeys between Punjab, Nairobi, Uganda, and London. Their artforms—of which they are all able to engage in at an exceptionally high level of skill with professional and economic success—are similarly diverse, including theatre. While a seemingly disparate collection of skills, placed in relation to each other, Bhachu’s examination of the makers and their work represents variations on the “successful immigrant” narrative. The ability of migrants to navigate “dissonant terrains” reflects not only self-reliance. It’s an important counterargument to the hate-filled rhetoric caused by rising xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and far-right sentiment in destination countries—it’s not just that migrants contribute economically and socially through their skills, it’s that their creative and collaborative approaches generate an exemplary resiliency that navigates “liquid worlds of uncertainty, fragility and disequilibrium, the norm for twenty-first-century global landscapes”. (from the review – https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/doi/full/10.1080/17496772.2022.2048499)

This research has engaged Egyptian migrants through the creative processes of theatre improvisations, storytelling practices, participatory photography, collaborative filmmaking and animation. The thesis is divided into two parts: in the first part the author looks at the role imagination and the future play in migrant’s relationships to their origins. The second part describes and reflects upon the performative and audio-visual collaborative practices that involved the participants in producing their own narrations and theoretical reflections on their experiences, aspirations and memories. The thesis concludes by arguing for social research to engage participants in more collaborative and creative practices in the study of migration, as a necessary way of involving the protagonists in producing the questions and counter-narratives that reclaim their acts of struggle and their creative imaginative abilities to contrast objectifying political discourses and exclusionary legal and bureaucratic procedures. (provided by the author – at the link above)

This article addresses a performance project titled Uncomfortable Conversations, which consists of African diaspora migrants. Performers were migrants from Sudan and Somalia, which are particularly stigmatized in current immigration debates. Titled Uncomfortable Conversations, the play itself participates in recent attempts by FORWARD, a London NGO, to approach key social issues through the arts. Active in the UK and Africa, FORWARD focuses on gender violence against women (including female genital mutilation or FGM, and forced/child marriage), and participants had been previously mobilized about these issues in meetings. (paraphrased from the article)

Emphasizing the resilience of theatre arts in the midst of significant political change, this book spotlights the emergence of new performance styles in the wake of collapsed political systems. Centering on theatrical works from the late nineteenth century to the present, twelve original essays written by prominent theatre scholars showcase the development of new work after social revolutions, independence campaigns, the overthrow of monarchies, and world wars. Global in scope, this book features performances occurring across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays attend a range of live events—theatre, dance, and performance art—that stage subaltern experiences and reveal societies in the midst of cultural, political, and geographic transition. This collection is an engaging resource for students and scholars of theatre and performance; world history; and those interested in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The Teatro delle Albe (Theatre of the Dawns) from Ravenna is probably one of the most important companies in Italian contemponary theatre. Since its first plays, the Teatro delle Albe has placed at the center of its research the need to be connected to the reality of its time. This research has led four young actors to cross the question of migration and the new border spaces between Italy and Africa. Francesco D’Antonio’s paper analyses the importance of the representation and integration of the foreign as migrant in the Teatro delle Albe and the specific aspects of its theatrical poetry. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The dissertation aims to explore the intersection between the artistic performance of blackness in contemporary Italian theater and the country’s social stigmatization of black immigrants as a problem or national emergency. The author uses performance as a methodology and category to analyze the world and individuate viable alternatives to Italy’s (un)welcoming reaction to African immigrants. The author follows the work of the Afro-Romagnole ensemble Teatro delle Albe. The value of Teatro delle Albe stems from its ability to celebrate hybrid pluralism as a contribution to the notion of national identity, rather than its destruction, as long as it is grounded in local and historical understanding. (provided by the author – at the link above)

The research project discussed in this paper – ‘Identity, Performance and Social Action: Using Participatory Theatre Among Refugees’, has been part of the ESRC research programme on ‘Identities and Social Action’. Its aim is to deepen our understanding, with the use of participatory theatre techniques, of how identities are constructed, communicated to others, contested and authorised and how these are linked to particular forms of social action, in this case settlement in London and integration into British life. The research involved working with four refugee community organisations in East London – Kosovan (mainly youth group), Kurdish (mainly theatre group), Somali (women’s only) and an ethnically mixed group of students in advice work. Two Playback performances and five Forum Theatre workshops took place with each group. (from the introduction)

In Mali, the use of theater by expelled migrants organized in associations is not limited to formal artifice. It is in solidarity with the social and political demands that they wish to make: to appear and be recognized as full-fledged actors on the public stage, to acquire this autonomy that political authorities or traditional forms of humanitarian work deny them, alert public opinion to the expulsion and to the precarious situations experienced after the expulsion. This attempt by the expellees to produce their own words clashes with other uses of theater; a theater promoted by the government, which stigmatizes the dangers of emigration to discourage young people from leaving, a theater without the expellees, which offers a compassionate image of them, simple victims of a politically unjust order. (translated from the abstract)

  • Marman, D. T. (2017). Empowering Communities Through Theatre: an Applied Theatre Model for Botswana. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

The main aim of this research is to develop forms of political theatre, with focus on the intersections between documentary theatre and theatre for development (TID). It brings together local, national and international perspectives from the UK, Kenya, Botswana, and Africa. Through this research, the author evokes the sense of immediacy and relevance in relation to unfolding political and social events. The written component of thesis comprises an analysis of the devising and working methods used by relevant UK theatre companies who work within social and political contexts, with a particular focus on the work of Actors For Human Rights (AFHR) and Cardboard Citizens Theatre Company. These are theatre companies whose work engages with the marginalised, such as the homeless, migrants and the undocumented. AFHRs, whose work specialises in human rights issues, have been very significant in this research work. (by the author)

This book brings together essays on theatre by people of African descent in North America, Cuba, Italy, the UK, Israel and Tasmania. Several chapters present overviews of particular national contexts, others offer insights into play texts or specific performances. Offering a mix of academic and practitioner’s points of views, Volume 8 in the African Theatre series analyses and celebrates various aspects of African diasporic theatre worldwide. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. The collection offers case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)    

This book is an ambitious project that aims to reclaim the agency of performers to facilitate cultural dialogue even within the globalized and decontextualized framework of the international theatre festival. Adopting a comparative approach that is fitting with the imperatives of the “Studies in International Performance” series, this book focuses on a specific transnational community—that of the Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, group of nations—in order to bring a new, transnational dimension to the discussions of global flows and local epistemologies that dominate festival scholarship. The author trains a sharp ethnographic eye on African performances staged at the festivals, revealing how festival productions and their aftermath can generate new perspectives on race and gender, colonial trauma, and the economics of cultural globalization. Featuring in-depth analysis of performances and artist interviews from Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique – countries with vibrant theatre practices and vexed colonial pasts – the book reveals how international festivals can be valuable platforms for new intercultural dialogues and diplomatic possibilities. (both from the review (https://journals-scholarsportal-info.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/details/00405574/v56i0001/124_.xml ) and from OMNI)

The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration provides a wide survey of theatre and performance practices related to the experience of global movements, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Given the largest number of people ever suffering from forced displacement today, much of the book centres around the topic of refuge and exile and the role of theatre in addressing these issues. The book is structured in six sections, the first of which is dedicated to the major theoretical concepts related to the field of theatre and migration including exile, refuge, displacement, asylum seeking, colonialism, human rights, globalization, and nomadism. The subsequent sections are devoted to several dozen case studies across various geographies and time periods that highlight, describe and analyse different theatre practices related to migration. The volume serves as a prestigious reference work to help theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and educators navigate the complex field of theatre and migration. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Minvielle, R. (2015). L’Amérique du Sud ou l’émergence d’un nouveau théâtre des migrations africaines. Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, 40(1), 19–39. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/afrdevafrdev.40.1.19

The migration of Africans to Latin American countries has become a new trend in the migration pattern of Africans. From the 1990s, and especially since the 2000s, migrants, mainly from West Africa, have found a new migratory route in which Brazil and Argentina are the preferred destinations. These new routes are being explored not just as a response to the stern immigration policies of countries in the North but also because of the economic opportunities, favourable conditions and histories of groups and individuals. While the vast majority engage in street trading, driven in particular by the Senegalese Mourid community, others seek to make their mark in football and business. (from the abstract)

In this article, the authors critically revisit Passajar, an immersive participatory performance project in Lisbon (Portugal), collaboratively created by four theatre-makers and recent refugees from Congo, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Zimbabwe. Firstly, authors look at how this particular project relates to and addresses difference in actual creative practice, and more generally, how such refugee performances ‘bind “one” to another without collapsing the “I” or the “Other” into a totalizing “we””. Secondly, they examine what kind of aesthetics working with refugee participants generates, and what are the performative means and dramaturgical processes by which such aesthetics of refugeedom are being produced. Lastly, they question the ethical positions deployed in Passajar. (taken from the article)

The essays in this volume explore the lives and activities of people of African descent – both black and white – in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. They go beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic emphasis of Black Studies, examining the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. Their subjects include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. The volume is multidisciplinary, and the contributors include a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This chapter seeks a deeper understanding of the encounters and exchanges between Africa and Harlem by employing cinema, the arts, and literature to glean insights into larger trends. The Black Renaissance underway—with its ongoing conversation with Africa—is not happening predominantly in literature as it did during the original Harlem Renaissance movement. Instead, today’s ever-growing African presence and influence on the cultural scene in Harlem encompasses stage productions, film, music, photography, and other arts side-by-side with literature. (provided by the publisher)

  • Stefano degli Uberti. (2007). Migrazione ed Esperienza Teatrale. Dinamiche Transnazionali ed Integrazione nell’incontro tra un migrante senegalese e la società italiana. Ethnorêma (Castelnuovo Scrivia), 3/2007, 385–418. Available at: https://www.ethnorema.it/rivista/

This paper is drawn from the data collected during the research fieldwork that the author carried out between June and December 2003. The present article reconstructs and analyses the experience of a Senegalese migrant who arrived in Italy in 1987 and achieved his own social recognition as an actor in a contemporary drama company. A first theoretical part draws a critical review of anthropological literature concerning the phenomenon of “migration” and the concept of “performance”. The research is directed toward the comprehension of the theatrical experience (from a human and professional point of view), and the genesis of a form of métis theatre (intercultural) which develops from the common contribution of Italian and African migrant artists. The author focuses the attention on the particular meanings and value assumed by the traditional figure of the griot (the core figure in the oral tradition of many African populations). (provided by the author – at the link above)

South Africa

This book focuses on a body of performance work, the work of Magnet Theatre in particular but also work by other artists in Cape Town and other parts of the continent or the world, that engages with the Cape as a real or imagined node in a complex system of migration and mobility. The performance works studied in the book attempt to get to grips with what it feels like to be on the move and in the spaces in-between that characterises the lives, now and for centuries before, of multiple peoples who move around and pass through places like the Cape. The contributors are a broad range of mostly African authors from various parts of the continent and as such the book offers an insight into new thinking and new approaches from an emerging and important location. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book examines writing, performing, building, and urban spatial practices and their agents, whose cosmopolitan diversity and capacity for invention challenge the normativity of modernity in the global north. It begins with the Empire Exhibition of 1936, and moves on to explore artistic creative responses to the rise of apartheid particularly in Sophiatown around 1956; poetry and performance around the Soweto uprising of 1976, and fictional and visual responses to the crime and disorder of 1996. It considers urban spatial practices including class and racial conflict and the treatment of migrants and other foreigners, as well as the imagination and practice of hospitality. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book is premised on the belief in the revitalizing power of arts-informed approaches to social justice work; it affirms and invites creative responses to personal, community, and political struggles and aspirations. The projects described in the book address themes of colonization, displacement and forced migration, sexual violence, ableism, and vicarious trauma. Each chapter shows how art can facilitate transformation: by supporting processes of conscientization and enabling re- storying of selves and identities; by contributing to community and cultural healing, sustainability and resilience; by helping us understand and challenge oppressive social relations; and by deepening experiences, images, and practices of care. Social Work Artfully: Beyond Borders and Boundaries emerges from collaboration between researchers, educators, and practitioners in Canada and South Africa. It offers examples of arts-informed interventions that are attentive to diversity, attuned to various forms of personal and communal expression, and cognizant of contemporary economic and political conditions. (provided by OMNI)

China

The narratives of eleven “movers and makers” map their geographies and journeys between Punjab, Nairobi, Uganda, and London. Their artforms—of which they are all able to engage in at an exceptionally high level of skill with professional and economic success—are similarly diverse, including theatre. While a seemingly disparate collection of skills, placed in relation to each other, Bhachu’s examination of the makers and their work represents variations on the “successful immigrant” narrative. The ability of migrants to navigate “dissonant terrains” reflects not only self-reliance. It’s an important counterargument to the hate-filled rhetoric caused by rising xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and far-right sentiment in destination countries—it’s not just that migrants contribute economically and socially through their skills, it’s that their creative and collaborative approaches generate an exemplary resiliency that navigates “liquid worlds of uncertainty, fragility and disequilibrium, the norm for twenty-first-century global landscapes”. (from the review – https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/doi/full/10.1080/17496772.2022.2048499)

This dissertation addresses the lives and plays of Ugandan-born playwrights Deborah Asiimwe, Charles Mulekwa, and George Bwanika Seremba, and American-born Ugandan playwright Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine. Their relationships with one another and with their homeland suggest an emerging artistic movement or artworld circumscribed by place and its absence, and constituted in the constellation of the artists’ lives in various locales. The work is a hybrid of genres, including biography of living playwrights, literary analysis, historiography, and theory, whose goal is to trace the representations of identity, home, and migration the four Ugandan playwrights create through their ongoing work and lives outside Uganda. Drawing on theories of performance, migration and exile, art, and nation, the author synthesizes history and identity from the global and national to the individual. (abstract from the dissertation)