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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

Exile

This category features books/dissertations/book chapters on exile. An exile is a person who is expatriated by force, whereas the term migrant describes a person who leaves his homeland by choice. The exile leaves his country of origin for reasons of political opinion, race or religion, whereas the migrant leaves for economic motives in search of a better life. Furthermore, the exile cannot return to his country of origin whereas return is possible for the migrant. 1

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

Dedicated to the stories of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles, this collection investigates how these stories are interwoven with art, art practices, activism, reception, and (re)-presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration, flight, and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries.(from the book jacket)

Through the examples of The Last Caravansérail by Ariane Mnouchkine and 81 avenue Victor Hugo by Olivier Coulon-Jablonka, Barbara Mallais-Chastanier and Camille Plagnet, this article aims to study the stage development of testimonies of refugees on the contemporary scene. Based on the selection of words, the temporalities of the story and the political biases they imply, these shows also allow us to question the aesthetic choices linked to the staging of the testimony. The stage treatment of the exile story is never free from a point of view which situates and directs it, sometimes escaping the artists themselves. Indeed, the subject of migration refers to highly publicized news, to political speeches and positions, but also to a literary and poetic imagination. Thus, any staging handling these stories encounters a certain fantasy of exile, whether it emanates from the artistic team or from the public who receive it, and the aim here is to uncover its traces and unravel the ideological postulates which invite themselves to the heart of aesthetics. (translated from the abstract)

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 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)

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. (from the article)

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)

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

This article discusses Snow in August, a Buddhist-inflected play by Chinese French Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. In the play Gao uses the hagiographic story of a Chan Buddhist master and semi-autobiographical narrative as platforms for asking probing questions about the nature of exile and the relationship between art and politics. Gao believes that art is strictly a personal affair rather than an institution of moral teaching or social engagement. Religious rhetoric has a special place in Gao’s theatre, because the religious discourses are constructed as venues wherein heterogeneous values and performance styles are negotiated. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This collection on theatre and performance and the ‘exilic’ voice comprises eleven essays that examine from various academic points of view the presentation and representation of ‘Other/ed’ bodies, languages, and territories on (mostly) US stages. It investigates dramatic and performative renderings of ‘America’ as an exilic place, investigating how ‘America’ and exile are imagined, challenged and theatricalized in the works of various theatre artists in the light of the current political climate in the USA. (provided by the publisher)

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 )

In this study of post-exile plays by Gao Xingjian, Mary Mazzilli explores his plays as examples of postdramatic transnationalism: a transnational artistic and theatrical trend that is fluid, flexible and full of variety of styles and influences. The book relates artist’s plays to postdramatic theatre and provides close textual and dramatic analysis that will help readers to better understand his complex work, and also to see it in the context of the work of contemporary playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Among the plays discussed are: The Other Shore; Between Life and Death – compared in detail to Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her life; Dialogue and Rebuttal, and its relationship to Beckett’s Happy Days; Nocturnal Wanderer, Weekend Quartet, Snow in August, Ballade Nocturne etc. (from the abstract provided by the publisher)

This book examines the life and art of those contemporary artists who, by force or by choice, find themselves on other shores; for whom the hardship of exile is both an existential ordeal and an opportunity to exercise their creative abilities, professional competence, and artistic resources. It argues that the exilic challenge enables the migrant artist to (re)establish new artistic devices, new laws and a new language of communication in both his/her everyday life and artistic work. It celebrates the creative propensity and artistic success that the state of exile can offer to an artist forced to deal with the typical exilic conditions of pain of displacement, nostalgia, and loss. The creative output and the fame of the artists selected for this study (Joseph Brodsky, Eugenio Barba, Wajdi Mouawad, Josef Nadj, Derek Walcott, and Atom Egoyan), present a variety of ‘success stories’ in exile that challenge the view of the exilic state as one of mourning, depression, disbelief, and constant suffering. (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)

The book 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)

This is an interview with Wajdi Mouawad. Born in Lebanon in 1968, he experienced the start of the civil war and exile, first in France, then in Quebec where he created his first shows. He is a rare star in contemporary theater, and his sense of tragedy infuses his plays with a poetic intensity which ignites the spectators and, among them, a large number of young people.

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 )

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 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 book offers a variety of voices, cultural perspectives, and analytical approaches, while introducing a range of dramatic works. The collection opens with Rudakoff’s autobiographical introduction, which positions the analytical, political, and artistic dimensions of performing exile within the uniqueness of personal experience. The second part of the book, entitled “A Theoretical Primer on Exile,” written by Yana Meerzon, maps the conceptual dimensions of performing exile, situating personal experience within a broader theoretical discourse on the subject. In its third part, “The Essays,” the collection demonstrates this multiplicity of migration and its various political, aesthetic, and psychological dimensions through a selection of twelve thought-provoking disquisitions. (from the review – https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/article/718535 )

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 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 )