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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

Early Representation of Migration

This section is created to show that migratory performance is not just a 21st century phenomena: there are many examples of theatre practices by migrant communities starting as early as the 17th century.

This article discusses the musical “America” by playwright Guido Cataldo. It recreates the emotions and dramatic conditions of Italian migrants to the US in the early 20th century through an original expressive compound of drama, music, songs and prose.

This dissertation explores how the theme of migration in Peruvian theatre and performance from the 1950s until the beginning of the twenty-first century constitutes a response to Western discourses on development and modernity. Framing the arguments with decolonial and postcolonial theory, the author posits performance and theatre as powerful tools for contesting the colonial aspects of modernity, development, and globalization. By analyzing works by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Hernán Cortés, César Vega Herrera, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Gervasio Juan Vilca, Javier Maraví Aranda, and Julio Ortega, along with two festivals from the city of Cusco, this dissertation interrogates how Peru’s theatre protested racial discrimination and helped to craft regional and provincial identities as a response to the increasing encroachment of globalized ways of life. (taken from the dissertation)

  • Berghaus, G., ed. (1996). Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945 (1st ed.). Berghahn Books. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c0gm3z 

This text uses theoretical perspectives and concepts to approach the phenomenon of fascism, discussing its role and characteristics as a political system and analyzing the dynamic between theater and fascist or para-fascist regimes. The theatrical dimension to politics throughout history is explored in depth, as an instrument of propaganda, form of representation or political weapon across several cultures in the interwar period. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Contributors from a wide range of disciplines explore how the realia of particular places influence behavior, consciousness, beliefs, and creativity. They cover exile and erasures, writing the homeland, language in exile, multiple exiles: contingent homelands, and of other spaces: travel and trauma. Among specific topics are the end of exile: the Metz contest of 1787 revisited, performing homeland post-vernacular times: Dzigan and Schumacher’s Yiddish theater after the Holocaust, the world as exile and the word as homeland in the writing of Boris Khazanov, France as Wahlheimat for two German Jews: Heinrich Heine and Walter Benjamin, The Girl from the Golden Horn: Kurbin Said/Lev Nussinbaum’s vision of home and exile in interbellum Berlin, and paper existences: passports and literary imagination. (from the review – https://go-gale-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=otta77973&id=GALE%7CA616095767&v=2.1&it=r&aty=ip )

The Theatre of Luis Valdez focuses on the life and work of American playwright and director Luis Valdez, known for his play Zoot Suit – the first play by a Latinx playwright to appear on Broadway – and founder of El Teatro Campesino, the oldest surviving community theatre in the United States. Built around first-hand discussions of Valdez’s work, this collection gives an in-depth understanding of where ‘the godfather of Chicano theatre’ fits in the grand scheme of American drama and performance. This is a go-to resource for scholars, students and theatre practitioners looking for an introduction to this seminal figure in modern American performance. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This cultural activity is located in the direct prolongation of the intense cultural, educational and artistic effervescence that characterized the Second Republic. In the cultural activity of the refugees in France academic culture and popular culture are mixed, will of education and bonds of sociability, cultural practices and political militancy. The text studies the main stages and the components of those cultures, the vectors and the places of the safeguard of the cultural identity (press, ateneos, regional organisms, publishing houses and bookstores) and the cultural practices privileged by the Spanish Republicans (historical memory, short novels, poetry and theatre). (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book is a case study of the relationship between art and oppression. The author’s threefold experience with censorship, exile, and bilingualism has left a lasting imprint on his literary production. As he embarks on an artistic journey from censored playwright living in dictatorial Spain to bilingual exile writer residing in democratic France, his gradual employment of the French language comes to allegorize his quest for freedom of expression. (from the book jacket)

The author focuses on how the play articulates the narratives of migration that prompted many Caribbean people to uproot from their homes on the islands and move to England in the post-war era. For some of them, these dreams of a new life became a reality, but they were experienced differently across genders and generations. Also the book discusses Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, the yard play which depicts the lives of a black community living in poverty in a shared tenement yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the mid-1940s, showing how each of the characters carries dreams of escaping to create better lives for themselves and their families. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Horowitz’s case studies explore a tension in the art of 20th-century performers who emigrated from Europe or Russia: they “both stayed foreign and became American.” The author extends his domain beyond music into other performing arts, examining key exemplars in each discipline such as Igor Stravinsky in music composition, George Balanchine in ballet, and Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg in Hollywood. His understanding of the political nuances of immigrants’ artistic work, influenced by the circumstances in which they fled their native countries, is fascinating. Yet Horowitz emphasizes the Americanization of the artworks at the expense of their European roots. What Horowitz lacks in balance he more than makes up for in emotion, and in expounding on the political resonance of the immigrants’ art, he composes an enlightening, informative read. (from the review – https://go-gale-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=otta77973&id=GALE|A171442951&v=2.1&it=r )

Over 20 years after the war in Yugoslavia, this book looks back at its two most iconic cities and the phenomenon of exile emerging as a consequence of living in them in the 1990s. It uses examples ranging from street interventions to theatre performances to explore the making of urban counter-sites through theatricality and utopian performatives. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Here in This Island We Arrived takes readers on a vivid tour of Shakespearean performances in New York City in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as Elisabeth Kinsley closely scrutinizes “documented scenarios in which Anglo-identified people, perspectives, and experiences intersected with non-Anglo people, perspectives, and experiences via Shakespeare in Progressive Era New York, the entry city for most immigrant groups and the vanguard of American stage culture at this time”. By making fresh connections among intersecting categories of Shakespearean performance, publicity, and reception, Kinsley’s study reassesses what it meant to produce, perform, and enjoy Shakespeare in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and the implications of this material for how we understand key questions of nationality, ethnicity, and race during this period. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/845755 )

This dissertation investigates “The Seven Deadly Sins” by Bertolt Brecht. “The Seven Deadly Sins” embodies a gray area between opera and ballet, which has shaped its varied performance history. This work can be seen as a unique and innovative contribution to the field of German Studies, by bridging the gap between our literary field and the arts, and by strengthening growing ties between disciplines in the humanities who write on Theater and Performance Studies, Musicology, and Exile Studies. (provided by the author – at the link above)

In this book the authors examine the life of Spanish refugees fleeing the Civil War, and the disgraceful treatment they suffered in detention camps. However, as they note, these circumstances didn’t prevent an intense artistic and cultural activity. The emphasis is placed on artists in the sphere of theater which, having been popularized in Republican Spain, served as a means of liaison between the Spanish and the French population. (from the review – https://journals.openedition.org/ccec/14691 )

This study presents their story as a dynamic model of coping with the challenges of migration, whereby the actors made their transnational identity a central focus of their comedy. Grounded in a thorough mastery of scholarly literature on eighteenth-century French theatre, McMahan’s study ingeniously interprets Luigi Riccoboni and his troupe as theatrical migrants who used comedy as a means of cultural diplomacy. The author not only offers a vibrant, lucid history of a fascinating eighteenth-century institution, he also draws new insights from the Théâtre Italien’s re-entry into France that illuminate the phenomenon of cross-cultural theatre, a defining feature of performance in the modern era.” —Pannill Camp. (from the short review – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350507960_Border-Crossing_and_Comedy_at_the_Theatre_Italien_1716-1723 ) 

This analysis reveals that, regardless of age, language or nationality, the Theresienstadt authors universally drew upon two potentially adaptive types of humour (self-enhancing and affiliative humour) rather than two potentially maladaptive types (aggressive and self-defeating humour). Perhaps instinctively, they chose the very types of humour that have a demonstrated association with psychological health and that may have helped them preserve their psychological equilibrium in the potentially traumatising environment of the ghetto. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

As collaborators on the project Performing the Jewish Archive we worked with students in the US and in the UK to devise two separate peformances based on a script from the Terezín Ghetto (in German, Theresienstadt) titled Comedy about a Trap. By developing with them what we call ‘co-textual’ scenes, we engaged in a type of performance pedagogy that we hope will achieve lasting transformation: the students created and performed a relationship between the script, their new knowledge of the past and their own views in the present, leading to transformative insights regarding the lives of the prisoners and the need for action today. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This article trains a theater/performance studies lens on the struggle to control public perception of Elvira Arellano and coins the term “migrant melodrama” to describe how key media coverage, cultural production and social performance in Arellano’s case recycled nineteenth-century melodramatic tropes. On the one hand, melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community that may extend across national borders. Yet on the other hand, they can also backfire by unintentionally setting the price of inclusion at an impossibly high level of virtue. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the Latinx performing arts in what is now the U.S. since the sixteenth century. Volume I provides a chronological overview of the evolution of the Latinx community within the U.S., spanning from the 1500s to today, with an emphasis on the Chicano artistic renaissance initiated by Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino in the 1960s. This book offers an accessible and comprehensive understanding of the field and is ideal for students, researchers, and instructors of theatre studies with an interest in the diverse and complex history of Latinx theatre and performance. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This article discusses the role of women in the Austrian exile theatre Laterndl. For the 30,000 traumatised refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria living in the UK at the start of the Second World War, Laterndl was a beacon of light and hope during the dark days of the Third Reich. Refugees were living with the loss of their homes, the uncertain fate of families left behind, and the poverty and isolation of exile life. At the theatre they could laugh, weep and mourn together over stories, music and poetry presented by performers who shared the same experiences. For the artists themselves, the theatre allowed them to escape the daily grind of refugee life, provide a home for Austrian culture and contribute to the fight against Nazism. (from the article)

This chapter interrogates what we understand by the concept of ‘émigré theatre’ in the context of the French Revolution. Focusing on two studies in the German lands, Mannheim and Hamburg, it investigates the clash of two national theatrical cultures and considers the impact that the émigré population had on the local theatrical scene. It proposes that we can certainly understand ‘émigré theatre’ in the traditional sense of a company of exiles performing plays in their own language, but that we can also extend this concept to the local troupes adapting their performances for émigré audiences and to the theatrical public sphere that develops around the émigré theatre in the adopted country. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The article, based on Czech, Ukrainian and Serbian archives and the Ukrainian emigrant press, highlights the theatrical art of Ukrainian political emigration in Yugoslavia in the period between the First and Second World Wars. It is highlighted that the organizers of the performances were Ukrainian theater societies, public organizations and their subdivisions (theatre groups, sections, amateur troupes). The author characterizes the repertoire and composition of theater troupes. Attention is focused on the participation of professional theater actors and well-known public figures in the activities of theater groups. (translated from the article)

Through a series of chapters that offer careful, informed, and thought-provoking close readings of works of American-Jewish culture from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1960-s Weber seeks to trace the dynamics of “the genealogy of Jewish affect among immigrants from Eastern Europe arriving here a century ago and their children.” Through his analyses of works of literature, film, theater broadcasting, and sound recordings, Weber tracks what Raymond Williams termed a “structure of feeling” that dominates much of American-Jewish culture in the immigrant and early post-immigrant period. (from the review – https://www.jstor.org/stable/23887318 )

  • Ybarra, P.A. (2017). Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. (1st ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/55917 

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latin politics in the United States—cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism—and their many discontents. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)