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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

Europe

Europe as a whole

Here are the works about Slovenia, Russia, Yugoslavia, Sweden etc., which I couldn’t group, or Europe/EU overall.

In Russia, documentary theatre can be seen as a challenge to bureaucratic logic. Teatr.doc, the first documentary theatre to open in Moscow, has recorded a “human document” for undocumented immigrants by staging plays about the lives of ethnic minorities in Moscow. Recently threatened with the loss of its 12-year-old basement space, Teatr.doc must be studied as an institution that created space for public discussion despite increasing state supervision of culture. This paper describes Teatr.doc’s efforts to document the everyday lives of undocumented labourers living amidst ethnic stensions in Moscow. (from the introduction to the article)

This article examines Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith’s theatrical adaptation of A Seventh Man, the 1975 book by John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr studying the experience of migrant workers in Europe. Pinchbeck and Smith’s 2020 adaptation uses immersive performance strategies in dialogue with a multi-voiced, cross-disciplinary publication that itself aims to produce an immersive or ‘animated’ reader engagement. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • 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.

This book aims to offer an extensive examination of the independent European 110 reviews theatre scene, mainly after the 1990s. The topics range from examinations of cultural policies for the independent theatre in different European countries to the relation between migration and theatre practice at the European level (Azadeh Sharifi). Sharifi, writing about post-migration theatre practices, gives an overview of the state of affairs in eight European countries and analyses three minority theatres (Theatre of the Roma, German-Sorbian Folk Theatre Bautzen, Bimah – Jewish Theatre Berlin). Overall, in addition to the fact that some of the chapters deal with under-researched themes, the book lacks a clear editorial strategy and would have benefited from sharper arguments. With its substantial contribution to the field it will nonetheless spark future debate. (from the review – https://journals-scholarsportal-info.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/pdf/03078833/v43i0001/109_.xml_en )

This article looks at tropes used to represent European-bound migration, notably the experience of “Lampedusa” migrants who drown or are rescued in the Mediterranean. It considers how the same evocative tropes can be instrumentalized for varying reasons and with very different consequences. Attention is focused on evocative tropes that remain easy to manipulate, notably the image of the orange life-jacketed African refugee as the “zombie refugee” or the “living dead”. The author examines how the trope of the Mediterranean as a cemetery is constructed and mobilized in the performing arts and the larger consequences of adopting such an image. Specifically, he interrogates how symbolizing this maritime space as a cemetery transforms the figure of the migrant in the public imagination and ask whether alternatives, either real, or potential exist that might possible reshape the public’s vision of the figure of the migrant. (the abstract from the article – at the link above)

A key aim of this essay’s discussion is to make sense of processional aesthetics—both as a way of seeing and as an embodied practice responsive to refugees—via an analysis of narrative and photographic representation, chiefly within news media, and of collective embodied responses, including community marches, walks, parades, religious ceremonies, and performance art. (from the article)

This book clears a space for such discourse by examining the ways in which ethnic and racialized minorities, citizens and migrants, trouble the very notion of cohesive European identities through activism and creative practices. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe offers an invaluable contribution to the growing study of ethnic minorities in Europe and their strategies of resistance, particularly through their engagement and use of the public sphere. At the same time, El-Tayeb’s “fusionist” approach adds a valuable dimension to other methodological lenses, such as intersectionality and African diaspora studies, to name but two. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/515071 )

The article reports an exploratory study of how theatre plays were used in upper-secondary schools to generate pedagogically relevant platforms for addressing the current Middle East conflicts and their impact on European societies in the context of religious education and civics. The study is ethnographic documenting theatre visits and classroom activities in relation to two plays about the Middle East situation. The results show that plays may open up new opportunities for addressing these issues, but that they may also be perceived as normative and generate opposition. An interesting observation is that a play may generate space for students to tell their refugee story in class, which personalized the experience of what it means to be a refugee. (abstract from the article)

In this essay the author retraces some of the migration movements and representations of Europe in order to present the development of these subjects in the work of the Germanophone novelist and playwright Margareth “Maxi” Obexer. Despite the differences in the forms used, the author persists in her questioning of three key concepts or topics: identity, migration and the staging of Europe. (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)

This chapter delves into the potential for social entrepreneurship to empower asylum seekers in Slovenia through participatory methodologies, aiming to yield emancipatory outcomes. This initiative drew inspiration from the educational tenets promulgated by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed. During the workshops, two tutors on the pedagogy of oppressed and the theatre of the oppressed used several techniques, such as image theatre, forum theatre, newspaper theatre, legislative theatre, analytical theatre and breaking repression. This mixture of techniques was very well suited to work with asylum seekers and refugees, since we were also trying to bring attention to “how some people are racialized, governed and labelled as ‘migrants’ both individually and as part of a multiplicity”. (taken from the chapter)

This book interrogates current textual, visual, written and performative modes of (re)presentation of migrants and migration from Asia and Africa to Europe between 2000 and 2020, but with a special focus on the period between 2015 and 2020. The contributors to this research volume interrogate migrants’ struggles to reach the land that no one promised them: Europe. This book develops general and specific hypotheses, theoretical frameworks and methodologies related to the social sciences in order to research the multimodal representation of twenty-first-century Asian and African migrants striving to enter Europe, being retained in border detention centres or starting their lives in Europe, be they asylum seekers, refugees or undocumented migrants. Topics and research areas covered include textual, iconic, performative and cinematic representation of Asian and African migrants’ historical past, as well as present socio-economic and political factors and actors related to their forced mobility and border crossing, among which we find transnational organized crime and human rights. (from the introduction)

The author’s stated goal is to enhance and intensify the discourse on theater and nationalism in different countries, distinct historical periods, and diverse cultures, and in the book she offers broad views of the celebration of culture and history in the US, Mexico, Canada, and various European and Asian countries. The book focuses not only on the theater’s power to convey national nostalgia for a country’s greatest moments, but also on the relationship between the construction and/or subversion of cultural identity and the force of politics both inside and outside the culture. A broad perspective emerges, thanks to the range of essays. (from the review – https://login.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/staging-nationalism-essays-on-theatre-national/docview/225759368/se-2?accountid=14701 )

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cleveland, Ohio became an increasingly important destination for European immigrants and African American migrants from the rural South. In this dissertation, the author examines Cleveland’s diasporic music theater traditions — namely German, Yiddish, African American, and Slovenian — and their connection to issues of ethnicity and immigration. Despite having different languages, stagings, and meanings, all of these groups were working toward shared underlying goals and their efforts were all carried out on the musical stage. (by the author – at the link above)

The book maps a previously underexamined territory of social, political, communal, cultural and personal performance that often defines the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Australia, Europe and the United States. Chapter 1 focuses on what Jeffers calls a ‘bureaucratic performance’, when the asylum seekers are forced to ‘perform’, as convincingly as possible, their stories of war, torture and flight in the courtrooms of their host countries (p. 16). Chapter 2 critically engages with the ways refugees are portrayed by the artists/representatives of these host cultures. It addresses the ‘complex question of the aesthetic representation of suffering’ (p. 72). Chapter 3 looks at the refugees’ own performative interventions, when they ‘stop outside the expectations of silence and invisibility that are often imposed upon them’ (p. 14) and thus act upon their own ‘wishful performatives’ (p. 93). In her last chapter, Jeffers studies the refugees’ ‘cultural expressions’. (from the review – https://www.proquest.com/docview/1504140544?accountid=14701&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals )

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)

The arts are a powerful means of fighting discrimination, marginalisation, neglect and even poverty. This book presents 23 successful arts-based efforts to respond to social problems experienced by disadvantaged communities. Social problems that are addressed in this book include migrants facing a strange and not always welcoming cultural context; Roma youth fighting negative stereotypes and many more. This book will be of interest to scholars working in the visual arts, art education, design education, drama and theatre education and museum pedagogy. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book provides a study of dramaturgical practices in contemporary multilingual theatre in Europe. Featuring interviews with international theatremakers, the book gives an insight into diverse approaches towards multilingual theatre and its dramaturgy that reflect cultural, political, and economic landscapes of contemporary Europe, its inhabitants, and its theatres. The book illuminates not only the potential for multilingual dramaturgies, but also the practical and creative difficulties involved in making them. By bringing the voices of artists together and providing a critical commentary, the book reveals multilingual dramaturgies as webbed practices of differences that also offer new ways of understanding and performing identity in a European context. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book enhances critical perspectives on human rights through the lens of performance studies and argues that contemporary artistic interventions can contribute to our understanding of human rights as a critical and embodied doing. This study is situated in the contemporary discourse of asylum and political art practices. It argues for the need to reimagine human rights as performative and embodied forms of recognition and practical honouring of our shared vulnerability and co-dependency. It contributes to the debate of theatre and migration, by understanding that contemporary asylum issues are complex and context specific, and that they do not only pertain to the refugee, migrant, asylum seeker or stateless person but also to privileged constituencies, institutional structures, forms of organisation and assembly. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This article examines the relationship among migration, performance and intercultural dialogue as social policy in the European Union since the late 2000s. Intercultural dialogue is currently enjoying a second wave of prominence with several recently published reports by the European Union explicitly highlighting the relationship between this strategy’s transformational possibilities and the role of the arts. Crucially, in both European social policy and performance theory today, interculturalism is increasingly used to mean an embodied practice and site of encounter that strategically multiplies – rather than binarizing or reifying – cultural differences between individuals and within groups. This article compares the work of three European theatre companies who describe their work as theatrical interculturalism and use it as a means of practising and furthering intercultural dialogue: Kloppend Hert (Belgium), Terra Nova Productions (Northern Ireland) and Outlandish Theatre Platform (Republic of Ireland). (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) 

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)

Theater of War and Exile offers a study of plays and production styles from select Eastern European and Israeli theater artists. Radelescu looks at theater that emerges from experiences of displacement, exile, and war, and examines its role as a catalyst for social change. Integrating artist interviews, and description and analysis of selected plays, supplemented by postmodernist theory and Brechtian aesthetics, Radelescu considers how connections between lived experience and theater-making may generate a transformational experience for performers and audiences alike. Playwrights variously employ black comedy, buffoonery, pastiche, surreal and hyper-real imagery, fragmented narratives, reversed chronologies, and spatial disruptions in order to theatricalize an essential experience of trauma. Radelescu does not fully succeed in defining an “aesthetic of war and exile,” as she sets out to do, but in the end, this is a valuable compilation of work that is often overlooked, work that emerges from and responds to the experience of displacement. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/701603 )

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 report from the Migration Policy Institute explores how European societies and cultural institutions can strengthen the participation of migrant-background and minority communities in art and culture, efforts to date to build this type of cultural inclusion, and how this can contribute to more inclusive and cohesive European cities. Interviews with cultural professionals from 11 European countries are drawn upon to examine the inclusion of migrants and minorities. The publication is divided into three sections, focusing on migrants’ and minorities’ inclusion in arts and culture, local practices to promote inclusive artistic and cultural scenes, and strategies to ensure cultural institutions mirror societal diversity. (provided by the institution)

In this article, the authors discuss the motivation to edit a special section on theatre and statelessness. According to them, it evolves from the urgency of the outrageous circumstances so many refugees are facing, even though some of them are now “safe” in Europe. Not only is Europe drifting further into nationalistic politics, where not just refugees but all minorities and racialized groups are targeted by right-wing parties in many countries, but also the refugee laws and politics in Europe are becoming worse than ever, creating an impossible system for people who are fleeing the humanitarian crisis all around the world to apply for asylum legally.

This book interrogates the theoretical difficulty of writing and talking about political theatre in a neoliberal, post-Brechtian, post-Marxist, post-poststructuralist European context. The author foregrounds the rise – under the influence of post-structuralism – of the presumed value of the ‘autonomous spectator-subject’ and the attendant scepticism that truly radical political theatre should not provide any clear point of closure or ‘ideological steer’. The book is structured in two sections, with Part One setting out the theoretical terrain: unpacking and interrogating Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator and Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist project of radical democracy, among others. Part Two applies theories to examples of performance practice in order to foreground the theoretical tension: the author introduces a range of different performance examples, and, among others, Queens of Syria (2016), a performance created by a group of Syrian refugees. (from the review – https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/doi/full/10.1080/10486801.2020.1815451 )

The digital publication Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees: The Role of Cultural Organizations provides knowledge and tools to meet the needs of culture professionals willing to play an active role in the social inclusion of migrants through specific programmes and other actions. It includes 10 interviews with cultural Project Managers and migrants or refugees across Europe and beyond; such as Association Renovar a Mouraria (Portugal), Roskilde Libraries (Denmark), Science Centre and Technology Museum of Thessaloniki (Greece), National Museums Liverpool (United Kingdom), Museum Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Migration Museum Project (United Kingdom) and Institute for Canadian Citizenship (Canada). (provided by the institution)

This collection of essays addresses the historic and contemporary roles of National Theatres in Europe (such as those in London, Paris, Helsinki and Moscow) and the changing artistic, social, political and economic circumstances that have created a crisis for their position as cultural flagships today. Leading international theatre scholars including Marvin Carlson, Laurence Senelick, Loren Kruger, Willmar Sauter, Bruce McConachie and Thomas Irmer examine the National Theatres throughout Europe, analyzing their structures and roles in society, and illuminating the problems that they are currently facing. Edgaras Klivis, Barbara Susec Michieli and Kalina Stefanova provide surprising perspectives on Baltic, Balkan and Eastern European countries, in the aftermath of recent political and cultural transitions. Dragan Klaic, from Serbia and the Netherlands, proposes a novel approach to National Theatre repertories, and Michael Coveney and Janelle Reinelt reflect on the practices of the National Theatre in London and on the implications of the newly created National Theatre of Scotland. (from the book jacket)

Performing Statelessness in Europe examines the sociocultural and aesthetic role of theatre practice in exploring the difficult nexus of migration and the nation-state. Over nine chapters, the author uses the examples including adaptations of Greek theatre and their thematic treatment of asylum-seeking, documentary dramas based on refugee stories and featuring the protagonists of these stories on stage, and discussions of both well-established and emerging theatre voices and companies. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/725903 )

Austria

In the last twenty years, several cultural and educational organizations developed amongst the Serbian migrants in Vienna, and they engage in presenting modern day Serbian culture and the lives of migrants in a different light and with a different approach than some other clubs of our former migrants. The goal the autors have set with this study is to present just one segment of these activities, and those are the amateur theater plays that our migrants take part in playing themselves and about themselves; specifically, the group “Non-Aligned Dilatants”. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This article examines the experiences of artists who were forced to leave their homes due to war, persecution, and violence that (re-)started their artistic careers in their arrival countries. Based on an ethnographic study of Syrian refugees’ artistic practices in Vienna, Austria, spanning diverse cultural fields (music, theatre, literature, visual art), the paper shows how these artists are not only confronted with what has been called ‘the burden of ethnic representation’, but also with expectations that emerge from being categorised as ‘refugees’. A four-mode typology of the artists’ self-presentations (adapting/masking/switching/refusing) uncovers how this ‘double burden of representation’ shapes their positioning in the field of art – by emphasising either ethnic or refugee labels (or both or neither). The findings contribute to the study of social categorisation of migrants and their artistic practices in the cultural field and how this affects pathways of social incorporation. (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)

Denmark

This article reflects on the ethics and process of writing and performing the play This Is Us with a group of rejected asylum seekers from Deportation Centre Sjælsmark in Denmark. Positioned within larger frameworks of political and media hostility, the group pushed for a more radical approach of ‘not just theatre’, but called instead for solidarity within and beyond moments of collective writing. From this process, ‘dramaturgical ethics’ arose as an aesthetic and ethical practice, which can support thinking through responsibilities and relationalities involved in research, theatre making and entering into the world together. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book explores the notion of home in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, and asks how home and belonging can be rethought through the act of creative practices and collective writing with refugees and asylum seekers. Where Giorgio Agamben calls the refugee ‘the figure of our time’, this study places the question of home among those who experience its ruptures. Veering away from treating the refugee as a conceptual figure, the lived experiences and creative expressions of seeking asylum in Denmark and the United Kingdom are explored instead. The study produces a theoretical framework around home by drawing from a cross-disciplinary field of existential and political philosophy, narratology, performance studies and anthropology. Moreover, it argues that theatre studies is uniquely positioned to understand the performative and storied aspects of seeking asylum and the compromises of belonging made through the asylum process. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This chapter is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork among twenty refugees  from Afghanistan living in or around Copenhagen, Denmark. In this chapter, the author talks about Aliah, a migrant woman from Afghanistan, who critically engages on stage with the idea that politicians depict refugees as welfare exploiters, with her enactment reflecting her insistence on being included as an equal. (from the chapter)

This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of “postmigration” and how it can be applied to arts and culture. The contributions resort to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. In the chapter “The cultural capital of postmigrants is enormous” the author draws our attention to the notion of “postmigrant theatre”: it is as an experimental artistic practice concerned with roles, bodies, and as an organisational process in itself, and it has a lot to offer the social sciences as a practice of knowledge construction. (abstract from the introduction to the book)

This book offers a compelling study of contemporary developments in European migration studies and the representation of migration in the arts and cultural institutions. It introduces scholars and students to the concept of “postmigration”, offering a review of the origin of the concept (in Berlin) and how it has taken on a variety of meanings and works in different ways within different national, cultural and disciplinary contexts. The authors explore postmigrant theory in relation to art as well as the representation of migration and cultural diversity in cultural institutions, offering case studies of postmigrant analyses of contemporary works of art from Europe (mainly Denmark, Germany and Great Britain). (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Finland
  • Kostiainen, A. (2014). Finns in the United States: A History of Settlement, Dissent, and Integration. (1st ed.). East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.  Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/28710

A fresh and up-to-date analysis of Finnish Americans, this volume lays the groundwork for exploring this unique culture through a historical context, followed by an overview of the overall composition and settlement patterns of these newcomers. The authors investigate the vivid ethnic organizations Finns created, as well as the cultural life they sought to preserve and enhance while fitting into their new homeland. Also explored are the complex dimensions of Finnish-American political and religious life, as well as the exodus of many radical leftists to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s. Through the lens of multiculturalism, transnationalism, and whiteness studies, the authors of this volume present a rich portrait of this distinctive group. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This is the first anthology focused on the relationship of various concepts of national identity formation to theatre, examining, as stated in the introduction, “the role of theatre in promoting a sense of national character”. The book is divided into three sections. The first is devoted to an explanation of ways in which theatre has shaped discourses of national identity in various times and places, the second raises questions pertaining to the impact of national ideologies on theatrical practice, and the third presents examples of how theatre can both critique traditional concepts of nationhood and serve as a means for constructing alternative national identities. An ultimate opinion of the text rests on two factors: first, whether one is interested in the application of national identity to the study of theatrical practices and second, whether one is interested enough in Finnish theatre to read seven articles that pertain in some way to it. While not a perfect text, it does provide a glimpse into the vast possibilities of looking at theatre through the gaze of the “nation,” and it honours one of the minds responsible for the growth thus far of theatre studies through this critical framework. (from the review – Clemons, L. (2002). Helka Makinen, S.E. Wilmer, and W.B. Worthen, eds. Theatre, History and National Identities. Modern Drama, 45(2), 326+. https://link-gale-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/apps/doc/A99600049/AONE?u=otta77973&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=69344b17 )

This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of “postmigration” and how it can be applied to arts and culture. The contributions resort to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. In the chapter “The cultural capital of postmigrants is enormous” the author draws our attention to the notion of “postmigrant theatre”: it is as an experimental artistic practice concerned with roles, bodies, and as an organisational process in itself, and it has a lot to offer the social sciences as a practice of knowledge construction. (abstract from the introduction to the book)

France

This article is about the play “The Two Refugees”, an engaging show that gives migrants a voice. This play tells the story of the suffering of two Syrians in exile. Between humor and nostalgia, Mohamad and Ahmad Malas take the viewer into the lives of refugees.

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)

In this article, the author offers theatrical collaborations as a site through which to consider the role of personal narrative in undocumented immigration activism in France. By taking a closer look at how the politics of representation are negotiated by undocumented immigrants, humanitarian aid workers and theatre makers, she shows how a focus on theatrical practice can elucidate a broader set of concerns regarding the relationship between personal narrative and immigration politics. Author’s claims are informed by a series of interviews conducted from 2008 to 2010, in particular the interviews with the three actors and director of Témoignage Théâtral de Mille de Cachan (The Theatrical Testimony of the Cachan Thousand), a performance based on narratives collected from and performed by the residents of the Cachan squat, an undocumented immigrant community that was brought to national attention when their suburban Parisian squat was forcefully evacuated in 2006. (taken from the introduction)

  • Fisek, E. (2017). Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris. (1 ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Available at: muse.jhu.edu/book/55264 

The author explores the complex relationship between theatre practice, immigration politics, and identity by interrogating both representation (theatre as bearing witness to marginalized voices and narratives) and the impact of embodied social practice (theatre as site of the construction of personal and legal identity). One of the many strengths of this volume is its bringing together of critical frameworks with ethnographic fieldwork (undertaken from 2009 to 2012) featuring Paris based organizations engaged with immigration rights and citizenship through theatre (from small NGOs to international companies). The careful use of in-depth interviews alongside detailed accounts of the experience of performances in context adds a welcome pragmatism and self-reflexivity to analysis. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/716729 )

Amid controversy and fanfare, the year 2003 was declared Djazaïr or Year of Algeria in France. Not surprisingly, Algerian and French organizers and artists alike faced the challenge of determining how to commemorate a long and contentious colonial and post-colonial history set in the more recent context of a brutal civil war. Algeria’s Berber population, with its long history of resistance to repressive governmental policies, organized protests and a boycott against the government’s sanctioned role as “official” purveyor of Algerian culture in the context of the 2003 program. This latest controversy is another reminder of the Algerian nation’s long and arduous struggle toward self-definition, as played out both within and outside of its borders. For Algerian playwrights and performers living in Paris, the past, both distant and recent, asserts itself as an omnipresent and seemingly inescapable backdrop against which the creative process takes place. This paper briefly outlines that backdrop before exploring the various ways that Algerian playwrights have articulated exile over the past thirty years. (from the article)

The article is focused on the recurrent use of the character of Ulysses (and more generally of Homer’s Odyssey) to represent the vulnerability, the uncertain and precarious fate of the migrants. The expression “complex” or “syndrome” of Ulysses is commonly used in attempts to analyse and understand the traumas associated with forced exile and migration. But why to use the Greek hero to represent or symbolize the migrant? Even though the character maybe related to migration and share some common features, it also entails the comfort of consensual heroic representation. The theatrical stage here is observed through two productions recently performed in France (Les Larmes d’Ulysse, directed by Géraldine Bénichou and le Théâtre du Grabuge, Ithaque – Notre Odyssée I, and Le Présent qui déborde – Notre Odyssée II, directed by Christiane Jatahy), and are used by the author to question these ambivalences. (translated from the description)

Kheireddine Lerdjam is an Algerian director, working between Algeria and France. This life of wandering between two countries and thus two cultures plays an important role in his productions. In Page en construction, he stages his own universe, based essentially on a cultural transfer from one shore to another in a spirit of tolerance, of cultural dialogue and acceptance of the Other. Lardjam’s play depicts a common history that links two countries, through the story of an exiled man.

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 ) 

The article focuses on the activities of the Nimis Groupe, the international theatre collective consisting of twelve actors, with six from Belgium and six from France. In 2015, Roxane Paire conducted an interview with the group while they were developing a play titled “Ceux que j’ai rencontrés ne m’ont peut-être pas vu” (Those That I’ve Met Probably Did Not See Me). The main point of this article is to view the ethical considerations of the European actors collaborating with migrants who had not yet attained legal recognition as citizens in Belgium and France.

This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of “postmigration” and how it can be applied to arts and culture. The contributions resort to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. In the chapter “The cultural capital of postmigrants is enormous” the author draws our attention to the notion of “postmigrant theatre”: it is as an experimental artistic practice concerned with roles, bodies, and as an organisational process in itself, and it has a lot to offer the social sciences as a practice of knowledge construction. (abstract from the introduction to the book)

This article explores the possibility of the body as a potential home or space of exile through the theatrical works of Wajdi Mouawad and Marie NDiaye. Distinctions between the “self” and “other” are heavily present in colonial and post-colonial, exilic narratives and serve to reinforce difference and division between people. Mouawad and NDiaye’s inclusion of teratomas, non-corporeal beings, and characters living within the body of other characters invites us to reconsider our autonomy and our perceptions of self-hood in relation to community. Both of these authors use their personal experiences as well as common exile metaphors and imagery to expose the possibility of shared experience and common suffering as a basis for building new, hybrid communities. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

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)

Germany

The article contributes to an understanding of the formation of political identities of asylum seekers within the context of theater in Germany. Thus, this article demonstrates the ways in which the identity of the refugee as a political activist is accomplished through performative exercise for the German audience. Data is drawn from the viewing of seven performances in Germany of refugee activists from the global South as well as from interviews with the theater team. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

What does migration-generated diversity mean for cultural policy and the performing arts scene in Germany and how is it promoted? Through bridging theory and practice, Özlem Canyürek introduces the concept of thinking and acting interculturally, and proposes a set of criteria as a stepping stone for a semantic shift in cultural policy towards achieving a fair and accessible performing arts scene for all. She delineates the framework conditions of a receptive cultural policy to envision cultural diversity in motion to enable the production and dissemination of multiplicity of thoughts, experiences, knowledge, worldviews, and aesthetics of an intercultural society. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book chapter analyses the work of Gorki theater in Germany. While this institution experiments with the form of the German state theatre, much of what is performed on the mainstage is still in the semi-documentary mode praised by some, condemned by others. Postmigrant theatre at the Gorki means engagement and reengagement over common and uncommon grounds. It means concrete social actions followed by disorder and discord, then a new play or a text by Heiner Müller, or a reimagined Brecht, then returning again to social action. It means hiring people, on permanent contracts, who would not otherwise find employment at state theatres – while also producing wild, playful events with freelance artists. (taken from the book chapter)

The book examines how internationalization affects the processes and aesthetics of theatre, highlighting the examples drawn from Australia and Germany from the 1930s to today. The book includes chapters by specialists in popular commercial theatre, disability theatre, Indigenous performance, theatre by and for refugees and other migrants, young people as performers, opera and operetta, and spoken art theatre. (provided by the publisher) Theatre and Internationalization prompts readers to reflect across a broad range of topics and presents them with useful tools to carry out further study. The studies found here will be particularly useful towards developing a language to articulate the complex realities of stage practice and performance, drawing from a considerable theoretical apparatus. The case-study grounds the contributions and ensures their concreteness, in an area of study that would otherwise risk falling into sterile abstraction.  (from the review – https://journals.ucc.ie/index.php/scenario/article/view/scenario-16-1-13 )

The aim of this study is to explore the participation of migrants in socio-cultural activities related to arts, theatre, concerts and sports events and its role in their subjective well-being. The empirical analysis relies on data derived from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey over the period 1984–2017 and the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study covering the period 2010–2013. The findings of the study suggest that socio-cultural integration can be an alternative policy of creating inclusive, secure and happier communities. (provided by the author)

With a premier performance of Giden Tez Geri Dönmez (Those who leave do not easily return) on June 15, 1980, the Turkish Ensemble became the first Turkish theatre to appear in a major West German theatre. This essay analyzes the early projects of the ensemble, including the Turkenprojekt (Turkish project), Giden Tez Geri Dönmez, and Keşanlı Ali Destanı (The ballad of Ali from Keshan), to show how the ensemble shifted from an attempt to develop a complex theatre dealing with the reality of migrants in West Germany to the performance of Turkish culture for German and Turkish audiences. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

In order to re-consider the relationship between migration and society, Marc Hill and Erol Yildiz turn established certainties over and include the experience of migration. Their focus is on shared stories that show the versatility of urban community life. By doing so, they make migration the starting point of other analyses of society. Postmigrant visions serve as categories of the analysis of social situations of mobility and diversity, make ambiguities and marginalized memories that articulate social conditions visible. Contrasting ideas are put in the focus without overlooking conditions of dominance and structural barriers. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book offers a series of essays that explore how playwrights, directors, theatre-makers, and performance artists have re-staged or re-worked a classic national play, performance, theatrical form, or theatre space in order to engage with conceptions of and questions around the nation, nationalism, and national identity in the contemporary moment, opening up new ways of thinking about or problematizing questions around the nation and national identity. For instance, in one of the chapters the play “Woza Albert!”, which recreates scenes of racial oppression under apartheid with vitality,  humor  and  insight, is studied. The author explores ways in which the play premises nationalism on ideals of continual revolution. Another chapter discusses the work of artistic directors, such as Shermin Langhoff at the small, independent Berlin Ballhaus and Karin Beier at the Cologne municipal theatre, for their attempts to bring Germany’s present post-migrational reality into the nations theatre institutions. (provided by the publisher – at the link above, + I have added material from particular chapters of interest)

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)

This article theorises how Akira Takayama with his theatre company Port B facilitates large-scale multi-sited performance works in cities across the globe, which expand the physical architecture of the theatre and utilise digital communications technology. To probe the relation between theatre and the contemporary city, the article interrogates what Takayama calls ‘theatre 2.0’. Drawing on interpersonal exchange with the artist and the notion of ‘quiet politics’ (Askin 2015), the article argues that Takayama’s theatre 2.0 forges urban interstices for quiet and tender migratory encounters within an otherwise violent geopolitical sphere of asylum, forced displacement and oppressive border regimes. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Muslims of the second and third generations, to call Germany their home. Benjamin Nickl examines through the social pragmatics of humour the dynamics that underpin these questions in the still-evolving popular culture space of German mainstream humour in the 21st century. The first book-length study on the topic to combine close readings of film, television, literary and online comedy, and transnational culture studies, Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment presents the argument that Turkish German humour has moved from margin to mainstream by intervening in cultural incompatibility and Islamophobia discourse. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

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 book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of “postmigration” and how it can be applied to arts and culture. The contributions resort to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. In the chapter “The cultural capital of postmigrants is enormous” the author draws our attention to the notion of “postmigrant theatre”: it is as an experimental artistic practice concerned with roles, bodies, and as an organisational process in itself, and it has a lot to offer the social sciences as a practice of knowledge construction. (abstract from the introduction to the book)

This article deals with the notion of post-migrant theatre. The study serves as a starting point for the attempt to position the activities of three theatres (Teatr Kreatur, Theater der Migranten, Ballhaus Naunynstraße) within the typology of intercultural theatre proposed by Wolfgang Sting. This is done to illustrate how migrant and post-migrant theatres can be described within the framework, and how practice and social context modify the understanding of this category. (translated from the article)

This book offers a compelling study of contemporary developments in European migration studies and the representation of migration in the arts and cultural institutions. It introduces scholars and students to the concept of “postmigration”, offering a review of the origin of the concept (in Berlin) and how it has taken on a variety of meanings and works in different ways within different national, cultural and disciplinary contexts. The authors explore postmigrant theory in relation to art as well as the representation of migration and cultural diversity in cultural institutions, offering case studies of postmigrant analyses of contemporary works of art from Europe (mainly Denmark, Germany and Great Britain). (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Sellman, J. (2022). 5 Writing against ‘Crisis’: Defamiliarising the Refugee Narrative in Arabic Literature and Theatre in Berlin. In Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Forced Migration and Speculative Fiction (pp. 147-190). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Available at: https://doi-org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/10.1515/9781399500142-008 

In this chapter, the author discusses the emergent Arabic literary, theatre and arts scene in Berlin and analyzes several literary and theatre texts and performances that are defamiliarising migration in ways that create openings for transformative reflection. This discussion anchors Berlin’s collaborative, translational and internationalising ethos within a range of different institutions, cultural actors and efforts to define it.  (provided by the publisher)

This chapter helps us to take a closer look at the notion of “post-migrant theatre”, and specifically its political attribution. At the same time, the author highlights that post-migrant theatre, apart from creating opportunities for young artists, also created a division. Because of the fact that the post-migrant art is still labelled as ‘community theatre’ or ‘sociocultural’ projects and underfunded, young artists do not want to use the term “post-migrant theatre” in order to avoid being boxed or labelled. However, in the end, despite these tensions, the shifts that post-migrant theatre has initiated are significant.

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 book discusses the applied theatre with Syrian refugees, while the author offers a personal account of his experiences using applied theater techniques (from Boal’s image theatre to monologue and movement work, among others) within different contexts: a refugee camp (Amman, Jordan), a refugee resettlement organization (Hamburg, Germany), and a religious nonprofit (Philadelphia). The book presents concise narrations of applied theatre techniques in practice, while also outlining the ethical and political considerations of conducting applied theatre workshops with refugee communities. The book will fit well in discussions of ethics and applied theatre practice, the politics of psycho/social support in humanitarian interventions, drama therapy, and theatre for social change. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/802114 )

This doctoral thesis examines contemporary theatre practice and theatrical representation in the Federal Republic of Germany as a country of immigration. It traces the fates of five plays by two Turkish-German playwrights: Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu, who writes for the stage with Günter Senkel. The thesis focuses on these plays in performance and examines the dramatic and performance texts’ negotiations of 1) mimesis – the artistic representation of ‘the real’ – and 2) mimeticism – a mechanism identified by cultural theorist Rey Chow as relying on Platonic concepts of idealised ‘originals’ to keep certain subjects ‘in their place’. (by the author)

Theatre is seldom considered a major social or theoretical mover today; however, since its inauguration in 2008, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre in Kreuzberg, Berlin, has been hugely instrumental in bringing the concept of postmigration into the public realm in Germany and beyond. Shermin Langhoff, the founding artistic director of the Ballhaus, explains that “postmigrant means that we critically question the production and reception of stories about migration and about migrants which have been available up to now and that we view and produce these stories anew, inviting a new reception”. In this article the author explores the narratives and gestures through which the theoretically aware postmigrant theatre as practised at the Ballhaus. The author suggestds that a broad view of the theatre’s repertoire over its first decade reveals a long-standing concern with and intervention into the intersection of discourses on sexuality, gender, and migration. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book sheds light on the Turkish-German theater, while drawing attention to the ways in which it has intervened in, or “rescripted,” the theatrical establishment. The work thus provides a critical expansion of the Turkish-German studies archive through close reading of play-texts within their multiple performance contexts and histories. The author provides new insights into Turkish-German theater history and its place within and interventions in the German theatrical landscape, as well as its significance for contemporary theater practice and the postmigrant movement in particular. Furthermore, the book is sure to seed future scholarship on additional periods of Turkish-German theater history, but also on the impact of recent migrations and the potential limits of postmigrant theater. (from the review – https://www.proquest.com/docview/2700012552?parentSessionId=R0lihjZY8eBdTM%2F9xwyvAzX2B758lPnuOQ8QYKcG32s%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=14701&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals )

While flight and exile are primarily associated with movement, this article aims to examine their static side, focusing on the element of waiting in the refugee and exile processes of theatre migrants. Examining the memoirs of the playwright, theatre manager and journalist, Heinrich Börnstein (1805–1892), and the documentary stage production What They Want to Hear (2018, Kammerspiele München) by the Argentinian director Lola Arias, it seeks to identify the subjective experiences of waiting of individual theatre makers and asks how they are configured in different settings and over time, in specific geographic and political locations. These subjective experiences of theatre migrants viewed through the analytical lens of waiting provide – as will be shown – crucial insights into social organising principles and power hierarchies. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book is a wide-ranging account of the unique German  public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic  institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts  analyses how  artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and  cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical  contemporary  cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous  history of German state patronage and self-cultivation through the arts. It presents Jonas Tinius’ fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extraordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. The entire chapter of a book is devoted to solely public migrant theatre. (abstracts from the book)

In this paper the author suggests comparing recent critical approaches and debates in the cultural field of transnational migration studies, with a focus on ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘post-migrant’ theatres. This focus will be narrowed down by looking particularly at the discourses of Turkish migration and diaspora surrounding the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin (Germany), the Arcola Ala-Turka company in Dalston-Hackney (UK), Theater RAST in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), the Turkish American Repertory Theater in Baldwin New York (U.S.), the ReOrient Festival in San Francisco (U.S.) and the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles (U.S.). The author questions the differences in the companies’ self-definitions in relation to their cultural climates and the retellings of the different pathways artists make within the scope of their works and careers. In addition, he explores how these founding ‘narratives of self’ in view of an increased social mobility could be explained through the wider discourses of transnational migration studies, as they are currently being developed in Europe and the U.S. (written by the author – access at the link above)

This article fills a very important gap in the field of research centered on the new wave of intellectual immigration from Turkey that took place in the 2010s. In particular, the fact that this research does not focus on the experiences of one or a few individuals, but rather attempts to capture a sense of the field that the immigrant artist from Turkey in particular is trying to integrate by analyzing and comparing in-depth interviews with policy reports, marks the research as a unique contribution to the field. (from the review – Basar D. Peer Review Report For: Exiled lives on the stage: Support networks and programs for artists at risk from Turkey in Germany. https://doi.org/10.21956/openreseurope.16990.r33608 )

Focusing on examples from theatre (“On the Move” festival, London International Festival of Theatre/Royal Court Theatre, London 2016), film (Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fuoccoamare,” 2016) and the visual arts (Ai Weiwei’s “Safe Passage,” Berlin 2016), this article proposes that in order to think through questions of efficacy and value of performance that seeks to engage with the pain of others, we must consider the interrelation of migration and excess. In an attempt at understanding excess as a sensibility that underpins the ethics and politics of performance in response to the ‘refugee crisis’, the article focuses on two interrelated areas: the aesthetics of the sincere and the obscene. In doing so, the author attempts to offer a way of thinking of the performance of ‘refugee crisis’ as excess in the logic of the neoliberal system, which perpetuates that system. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Greece

Focusing on aspects of language, identity, migration, and exile, the article examines three Greek theatre productions that facilitate encounters with “unfamiliar strangers.” All were created by migrant artists or include migrants as performers: Laertis Vasiliou’s One in Ten (2007), Thanasis Papathanasiou and Michalis Reppas’s Homelands (2012), and Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris’s Clean City (2016). Although recent Greek theatre lacks a multilingual body of texts, an interest has emerged in staging migrant narratives in the forms of documentary and testimonial theatre. These theatrical encounters tap into national narratives of hellenikotita and propose more heterogeneous and playful ways of imagining Greek identity. (taken from different parts of the article)

This essay engages with the concept of the autonomy of migration through an analysis of contemporary migrant performance practices in Greece. The author engages critically with the performative action, activism, and political presence of ELANADISTIKANOUME (Come and see what we do), a performance group Hypatia Vourloumis teaches at the International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies in Athens, Greece. Active since September 2009 and working in collaboration with indigenous and international theatre and dance practitioners, this fluctuating and makeshift collective of nonprofessional dancers and actors regularly engages in spontaneous performances held across the Athenian cityscape. The author traces the ways in which this collective, which mainly consists of undocumented laborers working within an informal economy, mobilizes performance strategies that simultaneously inhabit, critique, and transform the nation-state.(taken from the article)

The book gathers contributions from a range of international scholars and geopolitical contexts to explore why people organize themselves into performance communities in sites of crisis and how performance – social and aesthetic, sanctioned and underground – is employed as a mechanism for survival. The chapters examine a wide range of examples of what can be considered ‘survival’, ranging from sheer physical survival, to the survival of a social group with its own unique culture and values, to the survival of the very possibility of agency and dissent. Performance as a form of political resistance and protest plays a large part in many of the essays, but performance does more than that: it enables societies in crisis to continue to define themselves. This book not only highlights theatre’s performative potential – the fact of its material agency – but also demonstrates an urgent imperative for theatre and performance scholars to look at such situations of crisis and extremity from plural perspectives. (taken from the introduction)

Ireland

This book is a fairly in-depth analysis of the theater scene in Ireland, and of particular interest to researchers of migration and performance arts may be the practices of three migrant-led companies: Arambe Productions, Camino Productions and Polish Theatre Ireland described in the book. McIvor concentrates on the nearly systematic appearance of two prominent figures of the migrant on Irish stages: the migrant as an asylum seeker/refugee and the migrant as a woman. By exploring various examples of community theatre as well as the deployment of intercultural projects found in numerous festivals, the author dissects how intercultural community art projects offer participation through the arts as ‘a mode of active citizenship that at the very least introduces temporary experiences of cultural belonging’. (from the review – https://web-p-ebscohost-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=5d2f0464-bd85-4e24-a709-c951c2779a9c%40redis )

This article examines the relationship among migration, performance and intercultural dialogue as social policy in the European Union since the late 2000s. Intercultural dialogue is currently enjoying a second wave of prominence with several recently published reports by the European Union explicitly highlighting the relationship between this strategy’s transformational possibilities and the role of the arts. Crucially, in both European social policy and performance theory today, interculturalism is increasingly used to mean an embodied practice and site of encounter that strategically multiplies – rather than binarizing or reifying – cultural differences between individuals and within groups. This article compares the work of three European theatre companies who describe their work as theatrical interculturalism and use it as a means of practising and furthering intercultural dialogue: Kloppend Hert (Belgium), Terra Nova Productions (Northern Ireland) and Outlandish Theatre Platform (Republic of Ireland). (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This chapter surveys recent Irish works by migrant artists including theatre company Outlandish Theatre (OT) Platform, novelists Ifedinma Dimbo and Ebun Joseph, filmmaker Jijo Sebastian, poet/activist Christiana Obaro, and visual artist Vukasin Nedeljkovic. As an ensemble, these artists thematically rehearse similar terrain: the hyper in/visibility of racialized female migrants, the abuses experienced by those seeking asylum, gendered inequality and violence against and within migrant communities. This chapter focuses attention not only on the works themselves but on a few recurring contexts through which significant migrant arts practice has emerged. These include collaborative arts practices that pair professional and nonprofessional collaborators, self-publishing, and activist work – all contexts that present challenges for the work gaining critical traction due to the work’s perceived lack of professionalism. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Prykowska-Michalak, K., & Grabarczyk, I. (2023). “English with a Polish Accent and a Slight Touch of Irish”: Multilingualism in Polish Migrant Theatre. Text Matters (Łódź), 13, 298-. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.16

Issues of migration writing and migrant theatre have recently gained prominence, leading to an increase in research focused on analyzing the theatrical works of artists with a migrant background. This phenomenon is part of a broader trend in intercultural and, often, postcolonial studies. Contemporary Polish migrant theatre is a subject that has not been thoroughly explored yet. Among many methods applied in the study of migrant theatre, intercultural studies or the so-called new interculturalism take the lead. These concepts draw on bilingualism or multilingualism practices, which are slowly taking a more significant role in migrant theatre studies. This article analyzes two theatre plays staged by Polish migrants in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in the context of linguistic practices that exemplify and help define the concept of transnational drama. (abstract from the article)

This book investigates how migration has shaped and is reflected in Irish culture today; more specifically, it focuses on the representation of outsiders in Irish theatre and to the way in which theatre practitioners have dealt and engaged with debates of national and cultural identities, hybridity, multiculturalism and racism in post-nationalist Ireland up to 2008 – that is prior to the economic crisis that has swept the whole continent of Europe and the US over the past two years. Although multiculturalism has become an almost jaded theme in academia, much of the material presented here is fresh, original and highly relevant. Some plays are relatively unknown, and many of the texts remain unpublished. They have been staged on a small number of occasions, yet the topics they explore are central, not just to Irish society, but to any community in a global context that hosts immigrants. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The Celtic Tiger era witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of transnational migrants entering Ireland. By the 2011 Census, 17% of the population was born outside Ireland and much of what had been assumed about Irish identity (and theatre) could no longer hold. This groundbreaking anthology brings together six interviews and eight plays by migrant and Irish-born theatre artists who probe the impact of inward-migration and interculturalism in post-1990s Ireland. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Italy

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.

  • Claudia Andrea Cattaneo Clemente. (2022). Cantieri Meticci Theater Company: Method of work and staging of a creole-transcultural company (migrants, asylum seekers, political refugees). Zibaldone (L’Eliana), 10(1–2), 86–118. Available at: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8484834

The denomination Creole-transcultural theater was coined by the Italian researchers Maria Cristina Maureci and Marta Niccolai in 2015. It has been used to name a type of theatrical work and expression that combines collaborations between foreigners and locals, without categorically ranking or differentiating the contributions that both make in pursuit of artistic and social objectives. This occurs both at the level of dramaturgy and the creation and staging of the shows of various companies in the world. One of them is Cantieri Meticci, a Bologna company that has been working on this modality since 2005. Initially, the company focused only on cooperative work with refugees and political asylum seekers from some reception centers in Bologna. However, perceiving the need for a more cross-cultural relationship between immigrants and locals, it began to welcome Italian actors of all ages and origins. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This chapter describes and analyses three different urban occupation experiences in Rome. (1) The mobilisation of young adult activists that occupy an old factory facility in the peripheral area of the capital. This group pursues a community-based squatting, including migrant families and Roma people, while hosting a popular contemporary art museum. (2) The occupation of a public building in the downtown Rome that hosts hundreds of migrants. This squat offers many events, including concert and political meetings, becoming an important connecting place for radical left-wing activists in the city. (3) The occupation of the Valle Theatre by artists (especially actors) and activists. Instead of integrating the system, these agencies aim to create or re-found alternative institutions, asserting a sense of justice, social rights, a ‘right to the city’, creativity and ethics in opposition to the neoliberal system and cultural market. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The article analyses the 2010 play Rumore di Acque [Noise in the Waters] by the Teatro delle Albe and Andrea Segre’s 2014 docufilm Come il peso dell’acqua [Like the Weight of Water] as creative responses to the Mediterranean migrant crisis. In challenging the frozen representation and rhetoric of public reporting and discourse, characterized by recurring images of boats accompanied by the number of arriving or dead migrants, both works propose a critical reading of the migration phenomenon through a focus on individual stories. As the play and the docufilm themselves cross a sea of genres and expressive tools, they also place the migrant at the centre of an interrogation of national paradigms and Western societies. They ultimately call into question the exclusionary politics and policies of the contemporary world and identify in the empathy towards the human quest for freedom and recognition a lively engine of the early twenty-first-century global community, so profoundly marked by movement and displacement. (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)

Through the analysis of the Afro-Romagnole theater group Teatro delle Albe, the author is unpacking the interplay of production and reception of blackness in Italy through theater, media, politics, and civil society. The book intervenes in the debate between those interested in the political economy of globalization and those who choose a culturalist approach to racial issues by foregrounding the ways in which history, institutions, and popular culture in Italy imagine, represent and perform immigrants of a different ethnic background. The book struggles with the necessity to discuss blackness in Italy, against the backdrop of the near total absence of a national vocabulary on immigration, both at the academic level and in the public opinion. The research engages with terms such as stereotype, prejudice, nation, performance and race, with the understanding that the working parameters of ethnicity and stereotype overflow from a theoretical consideration of identity construction into issues of emotional investment of immigrants in their life projects. (abstracts from the book)

Recently a series of films made by immigrants to Italy have emerged. These nevertheless remain marginal to the national industry, in part as Italy has no centralized policies that support the development of a “new Italian cinema” legally. This affects the production/distribution strategies and representational modes of migration cinema. This essay focuses on MigrArti, a call opened by MiBAC in 2015, which promotes creative initiatives in the fields of cinema, music, theatre and art, enabling migrants to introduce their traditions and their values in Italian society and culture. The objective is threefold: to question the concept of “Italian cinema” in relation to cultural shifts; to provide a picture of the funding of migrant cinema in Italy; to analyse the structure of the MigrArti call, in order to understand which subjects, production/distribution models and themes gain support, and why.

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 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 chapter focuses on Teatro di Nascosto/Hidden Theatre, which has placed refugees and their stories at the centre of its work in order to attract the attention of the public and influence policymakers. More precisely, in this chapter the author discusses ‘hospitality’ in relation to Hidden Theatre director Henneman’s visits to the Middle East, and to asylum seekers and refugees in host European countries. Then the author illustrates the methodology adopted by Henneman to make theatrical events, analyzing two productions: Lontano dal Kurdistan (Faraway from Kurdistan) (1998) which deals with the first arrivals of Kurdish refugees in Italy, and Rifugia-ti (2005), which included European parliamentarians in its cast Stories are told as ‘Theatre Reportage’, a term coined by Henneman to indicate the combination of facts and performance that aims to influence people’s opinions on fundamental social issues. 

The research focuses on a particular type of transit place where many migrants live in Southern Italy: informal camps and shantytowns. Over the past four decades, their number has increased, and some have evolved from temporary shelters to permanent slums housing thousands of dwellers. This article addresses different artistic experiences from these places, considering the role played by migrants, the dynamics of appropriation and agency, and their relationship with local associations, professional artists, and political activists. The study analyses the artistic tendency to use camps and transit places as producers of images of marginality and aestheticised political backdrops. (taken from the article)

  • 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)

Originally started as a repository of migrants’ storytelling, the Rome-based Archive of Migrant Memories (AMM) gradually developed into an autonomous NGO geared to collect migrants’ voices and to represent their agency at a national level. AMM’s aim is to extend the uneven boundaries of national memory with new and creative self-narratives concerning postcolonial Italy and its silent unfolding as a multicultural country. Sharing filming and video-making with recently-arrived migrants has been AMM’s own way of documenting/representing this important change in Italian society. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This chapter appeals to critical ethnography to focus on collaborative creative practices across cultural and linguistic differences within an intercultural theatre group in the city of Bologna (Italy). Alongside the regular Company formed of members from a range of countries, the group organises a series of open workshops aimed at migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and Italians resident in the city. Both the Company and their workshops thus involve participants with hugely diverse linguistic and cultural repertoires, reflecting distinct individual trajectories of migration and mobility. Bridging sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the chapter thus addresses the creativity and transformative potential of translanguaging practices within spaces of cultural production and exchange. (by the publisher – at the link above)

Poland
  • Grossman, E. (2016). Dwu(wielo)języczny teatr w zglobelizowanym kontekście brytyjskim, czyli o różnych stylach dramatu migracyjno-transkulturowego. Teksty drugie, 3, 60–80. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/td/3288 

Focusing on selected bi(multi)lingual plays recently performed in the UK, the essay deals with the broader theme of intercultural communication and Polish migrants’ contribution to the local target culture. The author examines the possibility of creating a new transcultural form of theatre as an artistic means of facilitating mutual understanding and intercultural experiences. She suggests replacing the question of artistic merit by the shows’ function in reinforcing intercultural dialogue. The performances discussed are shown not only to strengthen the migrants’ integration but also to secure their feeling of emotional and cosmopolitan belonging to a globalized world without undermining their sense of human dignity and their belief in social equality. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This article examines devices of comedy, laughter and dramatic humour as technologies of ethics when it comes to staging migration in contemporary theatre. Looking at a tragic farce Hunting Cockroaches (1985), written by the Polish theatre artist Janusz Głowacki during his American exile, and a domestic melodrama Kim’s Convenience (2012), written by a Korean Canadian Ins Choi, this article examines comedy as a particular dramatic model that can challenge staging migrants as agentless and voiceless victims. (the abstract from the article) 

  • Prykowska-Michalak, K., & Grabarczyk, I. (2023). “English with a Polish Accent and a Slight Touch of Irish”: Multilingualism in Polish Migrant Theatre. Text Matters (Łódź), 13, 298-. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.16 

Issues of migration writing and migrant theatre have recently gained prominence, leading to an increase in research focused on analyzing the theatrical works of artists with a migrant background. This phenomenon is part of a broader trend in intercultural and, often, postcolonial studies. Contemporary Polish migrant theatre is a subject that has not been thoroughly explored yet. Among many methods applied in the study of migrant theatre, intercultural studies or the so-called new interculturalism take the lead. These concepts draw on bilingualism or multilingualism practices, which are slowly taking a more significant role in migrant theatre studies. This article analyzes two theatre plays staged by Polish migrants in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in the context of linguistic practices that exemplify and help define the concept of transnational drama. (abstract from the article)

Portugal

This article is concerned with the European public theatre system’s relationship with migration. Focusing on the Portuguese theatre landscape and especially Lisbon, the essay will map some of the major issues regarding theatre and migration today, identifying both systemic failures and structural and aesthetic shifts in the public theatres’ engagement with migrant communities. Contemporary performative approaches will be surveyed with a special emphasis on initiatives that go against crisis narratives and position migration as a structural component of society rather than a temporary challenge. The article proposes a shift from aesthesized theatre practices towards activist aesthetics, a politically responsive, participatory and durational practice that would not only introduce counter narratives on migration, but it would be instrumental in re-thinking our national cultural, literary and theatrical canons. (provided at the link above)

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)

Romania

Written from a practice-as-research perspective, this thesis focuses on the use of testimony in creating material for the stage. By using testimonial performance to explore aspects of the exilic and diasporic experience of Romanians in the UK and by making reference to the political and social tensions in the aftermath of the 1989 anti-communist revolution, this research aims at contributing to the understanding of how the experience of pain can reshape the cultural behaviour of a community and address feelings of belonging. (from the abstract)

Spain

In 2016, the Spanish Theatre Company (STC) opened the doors of its Cervantes Theatre (CT), the first British (and European) venue devoted to showcasing productions of Spanish and Latin American plays in a bilingual format. Four years on – and at a critical juncture given Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic – this article reflects on the current state and future prospects of this nascent migrant theatre initiative based in Southwark. (provided by the author)

In an effort to better portray the migratory situation in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish playwrights have been staging characters who are either torn by stereotypes confronting the unknown Other or who turn their backs to the cruel reality of drowned bodies. Ignacio del Moral in La Mirada del hombre oscuro (1991) and José Moreno Arenas in La playa (2004) endow their Spanish characters with sharp and provocative language while at the same time questioning their assumptions regarding the Other. In both plays, migrant characters remain silent, immobile and unable to react to or communicate with the Spaniards. This paper aims to discuss the silence and immobility of migrant characters and portray how they actually become an essential point of reference and eventually overpower the Spanish protagonists. José Moreno Arenas and Ignacio del Moral invite the audience/reader to reflect upon the accuracy of certain judgments toward the Other, to reexamine the way in which we perceive ourselves and the ones around us. (from the abstract)

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 article analyzes the discursive strategies of the migrant memory in the Spanish dramaturgy in the early years of the 21st century. The study reconstructs the “broken memories” of foreign immigration in Spain as a result of the simultaneous consolidative and deconstructive processes of the national historical modeling within a dialectical work between memory and forgetting. Jeronimo Lopez Mozo, Carles Batlle, Ignacio del Moral, Juan Diego Botto, Alberto de Casso Basterrechea and Malco Arija Martinez’s dramas relate the traumatic experience caused by the displacement of the migrant and the break of the historical linearity of its origin, by questioning the collective memory as a project of national homogeneity. The dramatic structure facilitates the deconstruction of the elements that maintain the historical narratives and subvert them in the theatrical reconstruction of the “postmemory”. (provided by the publisher – 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 )

In this article, the author proposes a study of the representation of the migrant in the theater and its evolution over time from a category of migrants that is often forgotten: children. Two works of contemporary Spanish theater are analyzed: “Irma Correa” is about rhythmic and poetic play, and in Helena Tornero rhythms and the effects of temporal superpositions are used to better denounce the drama of immigration. 

This article analyzes the contradictions that are at the heart of the careers of artists from the peripheries, between the injunction to internationalize in order to succeed and the forms of disaffiliation linked to migration. Also it explores the migration of Spanish artists to cities such as Paris, London or Berlin, which has accelerated since Spain joined the European Union, but this has not translated into greater international visibility for these artists. On the contrary, by leaving their original art scene, these artists can find themselves in a situation of “double absence”.

Turkey

What does migration-generated diversity mean for cultural policy and the performing arts scene in Germany and how is it promoted? Through bridging theory and practice, Özlem Canyürek introduces the concept of thinking and acting interculturally, and proposes a set of criteria as a stepping stone for a semantic shift in cultural policy towards achieving a fair and accessible performing arts scene for all. She delineates the framework conditions of a receptive cultural policy to envision cultural diversity in motion to enable the production and dissemination of multiplicity of thoughts, experiences, knowledge, worldviews, and aesthetics of an intercultural society. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

With a premier performance of Giden Tez Geri Dönmez (Those who leave do not easily return) on June 15, 1980, the Turkish Ensemble became the first Turkish theatre to appear in a major West German theatre. This essay analyzes the early projects of the ensemble, including the Turkenprojekt (Turkish project), Giden Tez Geri Dönmez, and Keşanlı Ali Destanı (The ballad of Ali from Keshan), to show how the ensemble shifted from an attempt to develop a complex theatre dealing with the reality of migrants in West Germany to the performance of Turkish culture for German and Turkish audiences. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

In order to re-consider the relationship between migration and society, Marc Hill and Erol Yildiz turn established certainties over and include the experience of migration. Their focus is on shared stories that show the versatility of urban community life. By doing so, they make migration the starting point of other analyses of society. Postmigrant visions serve as categories of the analysis of social situations of mobility and diversity, make ambiguities and marginalized memories that articulate social conditions visible. Contrasting ideas are put in the focus without overlooking conditions of dominance and structural barriers. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Muslims of the second and third generations, to call Germany their home. Benjamin Nickl examines through the social pragmatics of humour the dynamics that underpin these questions in the still-evolving popular culture space of German mainstream humour in the 21st century. The first book-length study on the topic to combine close readings of film, television, literary and online comedy, and transnational culture studies, Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment presents the argument that Turkish German humour has moved from margin to mainstream by intervening in cultural incompatibility and Islamophobia discourse. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Göze Saner and Saniye Dedeoğlu focus on the lives of Turkish/Kurdish women living in London. By bringing together two separate research projects, an ethnographic study of labour patterns and a participatory community theatre project (Migrant Steps), they examine the effects of neoliberalism on this particular demographic and critically assess possible strategies of resistance. The chapter asks if and how engaging with London outside the dominantly Turkish-speaking neighbourhoods may constitute a form of resistance and lead to positive transformations in the place of women within the home, the community, and the city, to greater freedom and empowerment, and to creating a space in which women can identify and define themselves outside the boundaries of being wife, mother, or daughter. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This doctoral thesis examines contemporary theatre practice and theatrical representation in the Federal Republic of Germany as a country of immigration. It traces the fates of five plays by two Turkish-German playwrights: Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu, who writes for the stage with Günter Senkel. The thesis focuses on these plays in performance and examines the dramatic and performance texts’ negotiations of 1) mimesis – the artistic representation of ‘the real’ – and 2) mimeticism – a mechanism identified by cultural theorist Rey Chow as relying on Platonic concepts of idealised ‘originals’ to keep certain subjects ‘in their place’. (by the author)

This book sheds light on the Turkish-German theater, while drawing attention to the ways in which it has intervened in, or “rescripted,” the theatrical establishment. The work thus provides a critical expansion of the Turkish-German studies archive through close reading of play-texts within their multiple performance contexts and histories. The author provides new insights into Turkish-German theater history and its place within and interventions in the German theatrical landscape, as well as its significance for contemporary theater practice and the postmigrant movement in particular. Furthermore, the book is sure to seed future scholarship on additional periods of Turkish-German theater history, but also on the impact of recent migrations and the potential limits of postmigrant theater. (from the review – https://www.proquest.com/docview/2700012552?parentSessionId=R0lihjZY8eBdTM%2F9xwyvAzX2B758lPnuOQ8QYKcG32s%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=14701&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals )

In March 2021, the theatre company, Seyyar Kumpanya (a collective of Turkish-speaking actors in London), created a digital project called ‘Migrant Shakespeare’. The directorial decision was made to transpose Shakespeare’s characters to the day-to-day contexts that socially and politically transform and define the migrant experience: Caliban becomes a hotel cleaner, King Lear a construction worker, Hamlet a meat packer and Katerina Minola a barmaid, simultaneously subservient while also ironically sarcastic and physically strong. Thus, at one level, all the actors were performing their own migrant identity. In this article the primary aim is to analyse the digital text of the ‘Migrant Shakespeare’ project. It attempts to understand how the experience of contemporary migration may be explored through the similar destabilization inherent in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. (abstract from the article)

The aim of this chapter is to historically contextualise and describe the emergence of Turkish post-migrant music theatre and opera against the background of multiculturality in Europe by means of two recent productions: Lege Wieg, and Tango Türk. Through the reinterpretation of traditions, post-migrant music theatre and opera offer points of access to issues of identity, belonging, distance and cultural representation that are most relevant to the integration debates but equally to people who have had little previous access to traditional opera and music theatre. (taken from the different parts of the article)

In this paper the author suggests comparing recent critical approaches and debates in the cultural field of transnational migration studies, with a focus on ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘post-migrant’ theatres. This focus will be narrowed down by looking particularly at the discourses of Turkish migration and diaspora surrounding the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin (Germany), the Arcola Ala-Turka company in Dalston-Hackney (UK), Theater RAST in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), the Turkish American Repertory Theater in Baldwin New York (U.S.), the ReOrient Festival in San Francisco (U.S.) and the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles (U.S.). The author questions the differences in the companies’ self-definitions in relation to their cultural climates and the retellings of the different pathways artists make within the scope of their works and careers. In addition, he explores how these founding ‘narratives of self’ in view of an increased social mobility could be explained through the wider discourses of transnational migration studies, as they are currently being developed in Europe and the U.S. (written by the author – access at the link above)

This article fills a very important gap in the field of research centered on the new wave of intellectual immigration from Turkey that took place in the 2010s. In particular, the fact that this research does not focus on the experiences of one or a few individuals, but rather attempts to capture a sense of the field that the immigrant artist from Turkey in particular is trying to integrate by analyzing and comparing in-depth interviews with policy reports, marks the research as a unique contribution to the field. (from the review – Basar D. Peer Review Report For: Exiled lives on the stage: Support networks and programs for artists at risk from Turkey in Germany. https://doi.org/10.21956/openreseurope.16990.r33608 )

Ukraine

The article provides an overview of the artistic and organisational evolution of theatres in Ukraine after February 24, 2022, the date the country was invaded by Russia. The author outlines characteristic features of this evolution, e.g. the active participation of many theatre groups in the volunteer movement, their assistance to the Ukrainian army and internally displaced persons, as well as the use of theatre spaces as shelters where performances can be presented. The article focuses particularly on plays written by Ukrainian playwrights since the invasion, which reflect the horror, the shock and confusion experienced by the civilian population at the initial stage of the ensued all-out war. It also highlights significant changes that have occurred in the repertoire of Ukrainian theatres, in particular their refusal to use Russian works of all genres, including operas and ballets. In addition, a good deal of attention is paid to the fact that the repertoire has been replenished with new performances that analyze the phenomenon of war. These performances, the article concludes, could generate interest far beyond the Ukrainian borders.  (from the website)

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)

UK

This article analyses Get Back (2016), a play written by Diego Ameixeiras and directed by Jorge Coira. The text serves to explore how the new Galician diaspora is represented through the arts. Issues related to migration, racism, and precariousness bloom naturally from a play that gathers four Galician migrants in London, together with a British-born character. Old and new waves of Galician migrants are juxtaposed through different characters, illustrating the complexity of this recent migratory phenomenon. (the abstract from the article)

During 2017, theatre maker Tom Bailey was Leverhulme Artist in Residence at UCL’s Migration Research Unit. The chapter consists of an interview with Tom regarding theatre work in the ‘Jungle’ in Calais and Good Chance Theatre, created with an aim to provide a space for migrants to engage with expressive arts; and extracts from an artistic ‘field guide’, made with photographer Tom Hatton, presented at the UCL Festival of Culture 2017. (taken from the chapter)

This article analyses the experience of creating Women of Power (2018) with a diverse group of refugees and asylum seekers in Leeds. Using the normative framework of a dialogic continuum of micro and macro dramaturgies to guide the analysis, the risks and tensions present in several forms of theatre facilitation are considered. The article examines the complexities of critical reflection and language in relation to creating theatre and draws on Nancy Fraser’s analysis of social injustice to consider the position of the facilitator when working with migrant populations. The article contends that an effective way to create an engaging aesthetic and to work as ‘redistributors’ of privilege may be to offer sustainable, dramatic and pragmatic structures for participants to add their voices to. (abstract from the article)

This article discusses “My Home”, a piece of verbatim theatre by London Bubble, which researched and portrayed people from the communities represented to explore stories from both long-established and more recent migrants who live in different parts of the city and are often overlooked in everyday British society. “My Home” is part of a long tradition of creative work that uses domestic space in performance and to tell stories about migration. (taken from the book)

This article discusses “Borderline” – a comedy about a tragedy, a hilarious pastiche of day-to-day life at the Calais Jungle, a refugee camp in France, before its recent clearance. Produced through a series of improvisation workshops by PsycheDelight, the play is cowritten and coperformed by ex-residents of the Jungle who have now found sanctuary in England.

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)

Written from a practice-as-research perspective, this thesis focuses on the use of testimony in creating material for the stage. By using testimonial performance to explore aspects of the exilic and diasporic experience of Romanians in the UK and by making reference to the political and social tensions in the aftermath of the 1989 anti-communist revolution, this research aims at contributing to the understanding of how the experience of pain can reshape the cultural behaviour of a community and address feelings of belonging. (from the abstract)

This article explores the transformative potential of participatory theatre methods for democratising social research. It utilizes participatory theatre techniques with a group of low-income, racialized and marginalized migrant mothers in London. The analysis explores the potential of participatory theatre methods to contest public discourses in contemporary Britain which cast migrant mothers as threats to social and cultural cohesion. This article contributes to debates on democratizing research on three levels: first, authors suggest that participatory theatre methods allow migrant mothers to articulate their subjugated knowledges and challenge pathologizing discourses of migrant mothers as outsiders of citizenship. Second, authors show that by enacting a range of strategies for social change through participatory theatre, the participants widen their repertoire of social action within and beyond the research process. Third, participatory theatre as a research method involves both participants and researchers in articulating their desires for social transformation. (from the introduction)

The aim of this study is to explore the participation of migrants in socio-cultural activities related to arts, theatre, concerts and sports events and its role in their subjective well-being. The empirical analysis relies on data derived from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey over the period 1984–2017 and the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study covering the period 2010–2013. The findings of the study suggest that socio-cultural integration can be an alternative policy of creating inclusive, secure and happier communities. (provided by the author)

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)

This book explores the notion of home in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, and asks how home and belonging can be rethought through the act of creative practices and collective writing with refugees and asylum seekers. Where Giorgio Agamben calls the refugee ‘the figure of our time’, this study places the question of home among those who experience its ruptures. Veering away from treating the refugee as a conceptual figure, the lived experiences and creative expressions of seeking asylum in Denmark and the United Kingdom are explored instead. The study produces a theoretical framework around home by drawing from a cross-disciplinary field of existential and political philosophy, narratology, performance studies and anthropology. Moreover, it argues that theatre studies is uniquely positioned to understand the performative and storied aspects of seeking asylum and the compromises of belonging made through the asylum process. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Grossman, E. (2016). Dwu(wielo)języczny teatr w zglobelizowanym kontekście brytyjskim, czyli o różnych stylach dramatu migracyjno-transkulturowego. Teksty drugie, 3, 60–80. Available at: https://journals.openedition.org/td/3288

Focusing on selected bi(multi)lingual plays recently performed in the UK, the essay deals with the broader theme of intercultural communication and Polish migrants’ contribution to the local target culture. The author examines the possibility of creating a new transcultural form of theatre as an artistic means of facilitating mutual understanding and intercultural experiences. She suggests replacing the question of artistic merit by the shows’ function in reinforcing intercultural dialogue. The performances discussed are shown not only to strengthen the migrants’ integration but also to secure their feeling of emotional and cosmopolitan belonging to a globalized world without undermining their sense of human dignity and their belief in social equality. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This article discusses Anders Lustgarten’s play, Lampedusa. The play is ostensibly about refugees and the Mediterranean crossing, as well as addressing EU migration, debt, and austerity. The article develops the idea of the debtor in neo-liberal economics suggesting that the refugee is required to become a debtor on settlement. While Lustgarten’s representation of refugees and migrants is not fully realised in that they are not enabled agents in the script or in performance, the article concludes that although the play is thus flawed, its characters’ search for moral restitution creates a thoughtful insight into British society and grounds for hope. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The book maps a previously underexamined territory of social, political, communal, cultural and personal performance that often defines the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Australia, Europe and the United States. Chapter 1 focuses on what Jeffers calls a ‘bureaucratic performance’, when the asylum seekers are forced to ‘perform’, as convincingly as possible, their stories of war, torture and flight in the courtrooms of their host countries (p. 16). Chapter 2 critically engages with the ways refugees are portrayed by the artists/representatives of these host cultures. It addresses the ‘complex question of the aesthetic representation of suffering’ (p. 72). Chapter 3 looks at the refugees’ own performative interventions, when they ‘stop outside the expectations of silence and invisibility that are often imposed upon them’ (p. 14) and thus act upon their own ‘wishful performatives’ (p. 93). In her last chapter, Jeffers studies the refugees’ ‘cultural expressions’. (from the review – https://www.proquest.com/docview/1504140544?accountid=14701&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals )

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)

This paper describes how participatory theater and walking methods forge a convivial research practice, which impacts on the lives of research participants. The research explored the experiences of migrant mothers and young girls, as these two groups are often problematized or pathologized in public and policy debates. This experiential process of reflecting and working together to bring alive personal experiences of what it means to be a migrant mother or migrant girl in London fosters new insights into what kind of practices support or hinder convivial ways of living with each other. In the end, the authors illustrate how the research practice of bringing groups together to share their lived experiences, through performance, can promote convivial ways of living. (from the introduction)

In this article, the authors reflect on their collaborative practice-as-research piece Project Finding Home, that arose from our experiences of working and living in the UK as ‘non-British’ citizens. Engaging with other refugee and migrant artists over three years, authors produced a series of films, and the article focuses on two of these films, one made with the participatory theatre company of Sanctuary, PSYCHEdelight, and one made with conceptual artist, Khaled Barakeh. The authors discuss how their respective uses of comedy (in PSYCHEdelight’s show Mohand and Peter) and visual representation (in Barakeh’s installation On the Ropes) resist singular views of migrant narratives. Discussing how their aesthetics informed our processes for showcasing who they are and what they do as artists to a wider audience, authors examine how artistic practice, its documentation, and its dissemination can question dominant aesthetic norms and existing migration and cultural policies in the UK and Europe. (provided by the authors – at the link above)

  • 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)

In this article the author introduces Creating Ground, a not-for-profit organisation that works with women from migrant backgrounds to promote intersectional anti-racist cross-cultural awareness, learning and sharing across different communities in South East London through collaborative arts and educational projects. She reflects on the use of participatory arts, social action and training to bring migrant women together, improve wellbeing and create change for these women at a personal and a community level. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

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)

Drawing on the recent UK-based theatre project “Migrations: Harbour Europe”, the chapter examines migrant theatre initiatives that practice resistance, political responsiveness and solidarity while resisting established narratives and fostering new aesthetics of migration and refugeedom. Musca argues that Migrations: Harbour Europe functions as a site for public discourse, positioning migrant identities and experiences firmly in the socio-political realm and advocating a rethinking of contemporary societies as migration societies in which asylum-seeking and refugeedom are structural issues rather than temporary ‘crises’. (provided by the publisher)

This article explores the performative nature of immigration infrastructure in the United Kingdom. The author discusses two plays about migration to the UK – Illegalised (2019) and The Claim (2019) – which each focus on its infrastructural aspects, arguing that these theatrical events can be situated alongside other performances in which such infrastructure is at play. Unlike many recent UK plays about transnational migration, Illegalised and The Claim theatricalise immigration systems, rather than the experiences of migrants themselves. The scope of this article is limited in its discussion of UK theatre and immigration infrastructure. (taken from the article)

This book introduces ongoing debates on the developing concept of “postmigration” and how it can be applied to arts and culture. The contributions resort to cultural expressions in literature, theatre, film, and art across various European societies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Denmark, and Germany. In the chapter “The cultural capital of postmigrants is enormous” the author draws our attention to the notion of “postmigrant theatre”: it is as an experimental artistic practice concerned with roles, bodies, and as an organisational process in itself, and it has a lot to offer the social sciences as a practice of knowledge construction. (abstract from the introduction to the book)

  • Prykowska-Michalak, K., & Grabarczyk, I. (2023). “English with a Polish Accent and a Slight Touch of Irish”: Multilingualism in Polish Migrant Theatre. Text Matters (Łódź), 13, 298-. Available at: https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.16

Issues of migration writing and migrant theatre have recently gained prominence, leading to an increase in research focused on analyzing the theatrical works of artists with a migrant background. This phenomenon is part of a broader trend in intercultural and, often, postcolonial studies. Contemporary Polish migrant theatre is a subject that has not been thoroughly explored yet. Among many methods applied in the study of migrant theatre, intercultural studies or the so-called new interculturalism take the lead. These concepts draw on bilingualism or multilingualism practices, which are slowly taking a more significant role in migrant theatre studies. This article analyzes two theatre plays staged by Polish migrants in Ireland and in the United Kingdom in the context of linguistic practices that exemplify and help define the concept of transnational drama. (abstract from the article)

Amanda Rogers’ monograph, which tackles transnational Asian theatre from a spatial perspective, highlights the wide range of approaches which can be taken to examine questions of Asian identity and ethnicity. The author explores the networks between artists of Asian descent (the bulk of them Singaporean Chinese travelling between English-speaking territories) as they perform ‘Asian’ work in international festivals and (often ethnically identified) theatres in places such as Singapore, London, Edinburgh, New York, and Los Angeles. The book is divided into three introductory chapters and six case studies. If the theoretical framework is consistent and nuanced, the disparity of case studies makes the work slightly unbalanced. Overall, Rogers’ work will provide an excellent point of departure for those interested in thinking through the triangular relationship between performance, ethnicity, and space. (from the review – https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/doi/full/10.1080/14631369.2016.1249649 )

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 argues that through community arts practice, forced migrants get the chance to enter into conversation with others as they gain access to public representation. It is argued that participatory arts involving refugees and asylum seekers offer a springboard to reconfigure the relation between citizenship and belonging in multicultural Britain. Specifically, this chapter investigates ways in which digital media allow community arts groups working with forced migrants to create new interstices, and spaces of freedom and transgression, whereby the symbolic borders that separate ‘us’ (citizens) and ‘them’ (non-citizens) can be negotiated. (taken from the introduction)

This article is about Migrants in Theatre, a movement made up of first-generation migrant theatre artists who joined efforts to campaign for more and better representation of UK based migrant theatre artists in British theatre. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the movement was able to garner momentum that has initiated change in the industry for when theatres reopen in the U.K. (from the article)

Three contemporary projects about migration are analysed and compared in this article: Anders Lustgarten’s 2015 play Lampedusa, the two volumes of Refugee Tales published in 2016 and 2017 by Comma Press and the anthology A Country of Refuge, edited by Lucy Popescu and published in 2016 as part of the Unbound project. What they have in common is the search for a language that is able to grasp and convey the complexity of migration from the point of view of all those involved: not only refugees and asylum seekers, but also coastguards, lawyers, interpreters, social workers, and many others. (from the article introduction)

Göze Saner and Saniye Dedeoğlu focus on the lives of Turkish/Kurdish women living in London. By bringing together two separate research projects, an ethnographic study of labour patterns and a participatory community theatre project (Migrant Steps), they examine the effects of neoliberalism on this particular demographic and critically assess possible strategies of resistance. The chapter asks if and how engaging with London outside the dominantly Turkish-speaking neighbourhoods may constitute a form of resistance and lead to positive transformations in the place of women within the home, the community, and the city, to greater freedom and empowerment, and to creating a space in which women can identify and define themselves outside the boundaries of being wife, mother, or daughter. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The interview tells us about “Migrant Steps” – a theatre project that engages migrant women living in the UK and Europe. Starting from the figure of a travelling tortoise and combining methodologies such as psycho-geography, performance art, physical theatre and autobiographical writing, the project explores the participants’ relationship with the cities where they live. (by the author)

This book offers a compelling study of contemporary developments in European migration studies and the representation of migration in the arts and cultural institutions. It introduces scholars and students to the concept of “postmigration”, offering a review of the origin of the concept (in Berlin) and how it has taken on a variety of meanings and works in different ways within different national, cultural and disciplinary contexts. The authors explore postmigrant theory in relation to art as well as the representation of migration and cultural diversity in cultural institutions, offering case studies of postmigrant analyses of contemporary works of art from Europe (mainly Denmark, Germany and Great Britain). (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This thesis examines the ways in which a sense of belonging can be more effectively facilitated for adult refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and their families through drama practices rooted in a relational ethic of care. Findings engendered by practice-based research projects in the London Boroughs of Hackney, Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge are articulated by this thesis. The methodologies which the author uses include practice-based research, interviews with participants and other practitioners and reading across the fields of performance studies, relational ethics, psychology and education. (by the author)

In March 2021, the theatre company, Seyyar Kumpanya (a collective of Turkish-speaking actors in London), created a digital project called ‘Migrant Shakespeare’. The directorial decision was made to transpose Shakespeare’s characters to the day-to-day contexts that socially and politically transform and define the migrant experience: Caliban becomes a hotel cleaner, King Lear a construction worker, Hamlet a meat packer and Katerina Minola a barmaid, simultaneously subservient while also ironically sarcastic and physically strong. Thus, at one level, all the actors were performing their own migrant identity. In this article the primary aim is to analyse the digital text of the ‘Migrant Shakespeare’ project. It attempts to understand how the experience of contemporary migration may be explored through the similar destabilization inherent in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. (abstract from the article)

In this paper the author suggests comparing recent critical approaches and debates in the cultural field of transnational migration studies, with a focus on ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘post-migrant’ theatres. This focus will be narrowed down by looking particularly at the discourses of Turkish migration and diaspora surrounding the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin (Germany), the Arcola Ala-Turka company in Dalston-Hackney (UK), Theater RAST in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), the Turkish American Repertory Theater in Baldwin New York (U.S.), the ReOrient Festival in San Francisco (U.S.) and the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles (U.S.). The author questions the differences in the companies’ self-definitions in relation to their cultural climates and the retellings of the different pathways artists make within the scope of their works and careers. In addition, he explores how these founding ‘narratives of self’ in view of an increased social mobility could be explained through the wider discourses of transnational migration studies, as they are currently being developed in Europe and the U.S. (written by the author – access at the link above)

Focusing on examples from theatre (“On the Move” festival, London International Festival of Theatre/Royal Court Theatre, London 2016), film (Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fuoccoamare,” 2016) and the visual arts (Ai Weiwei’s “Safe Passage,” Berlin 2016), this article proposes that in order to think through questions of efficacy and value of performance that seeks to engage with the pain of others, we must consider the interrelation of migration and excess. In an attempt at understanding excess as a sensibility that underpins the ethics and politics of performance in response to the ‘refugee crisis’, the article focuses on two interrelated areas: the aesthetics of the sincere and the obscene. In doing so, the author attempts to offer a way of thinking of the performance of ‘refugee crisis’ as excess in the logic of the neoliberal system, which perpetuates that system. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)