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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

Labor migrants

Labor migrants are people who have left their country to get better working opportunities. They are also called economic migrants. In this section we have gathered the works about their experiences.

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)

This article examines the potential cultural and political implications of a series of theatre workshops and presentations that took place in Ontario, Canada, between 2009 and 2011. The project, entitled Growing Together: A Celebration of Migrant Workers, involved extensive interviews with and the direct creative participation of regionally situated Latin American and Caribbean seasonal migrant agricultural workers. The theatrical activity under discussion is engaged via a number of key concerns from a text entitled ‘Affective Assemblages: Ethics beyond Enjoyment’ in which Simone Bignall proposes that the thought of Gilles Deleuze contains elements that can serve to amplify ‘the realm of practical ethics beyond rights-based and state-mediated sources of justice’ by embracing ‘unmediated qualities of interpersonal relationship as defining aspects of political and ethical life’. (the description provided by OMNI)

Studies that utilize participatory action research (PAR) methods in immigrant communities draw on participatory methods to explore immigrant health and incorporation. In this paper, the author argues that PAR methodology and principles can be maximized in immigrant communities if it asserts migrants’ lived experiences as “expertise” on the global institutionalization of migration and low-wage migrant work in the US. She provides data on the Filipino migrant experience and a PAR project with Filipino domestic workers in New York City. Also the author discusses kuwentohan, or talk story in Tagalog, and theater as forms of participatory collection and analysis that captures the complex dynamics of migration from macro to micro scales. The political potential of PAR in migrant communities presents itself when migrant workers recount their own experience and begin to understand that those individual stories are part of a larger story of forced migration, labor export policy, and low-wage work. (by the author – at the link above)

  • Mendoza, R. (2010). Some No-Place Like Home: Thirdspace Production in Cherríe Moraga’s “Watsonville.” Confluencia, 26(1), 132–140. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27923482

The text explores Cherrie Moraga’s play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, and its critique of capitalist spatial practice. The play subverts dominant spatial regulations and creates a communal, resistant thirdspace in response to the alienating spatial regime imposed by capitalism. It addresses the spatial struggles of Chicanas/os / Latinas/os, particularly in response to border control and migrant worker exploitation. The play also challenges abstract space and the use of visual signs to impose abstraction onto nature. It creates a thirdspace within the theater itself, transforming the audience space and allowing workers to become “actors” and perform “themselves.” The text also discusses the transformative power of love in breaking through controls to find understanding and community. Additionally, it examines the role of nature, particularly in the context of an earthquake, in countering the abstract space of capitalism. The play presents a complex and multi-layered resistance to both capitalism’s abstract space and Catholicism. (provided by JSTOR AI)

This article is a reflection on the use of theatre creation in qualitative research with migrant farm workers in Ontario, Canada. In this article the author examines how the fundamentally embodied and kinesthetic dimensions of seasonal agricultural workers’ lives in Canada highlight the need to seek out and develop corresponding embodied approaches that are able to access and accurately represent the fraught and dynamic nature of workers’ experiences. This article contributes to debates concerning the role of the arts in qualitative and action research, as well as to those researchers who are seeking innovative ways of designing and implementing qualitative research in the areas of precarious work and citizenship. (provided by the author – at the link above)

This article addresses a stated need within the food justice movement scholarship to increase the attention paid to the political socialization of hired farm hands in industrial agriculture. In Canada, tackling the problem of farm worker equity has particular social and political contours related to the Canadian horticultural industry’s reliance on a state-managed migrant agricultural labour program designed to fill the sector’s labour market demands. As Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) produces relations of ‘unfree labour’, engaging migrant farm workers in social movement initiatives can be particularly challenging. Critical educational interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’ contribution to contemporary social movements in Canada must therefore confront the socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm workers’ opportunities to participate as full members of their communities. In this article, I argue that social justice oriented approaches to community-based arts can provide a means for increasing the social movement contributions of farm workers employed through managed labour migration schema such as Canada’s SAWP. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Framed within the geopolitics of empathy, we describe the process of taking a testimonial play, based on verbatim research interview transcripts with Filipina domestic workers, their families, employers, and nanny agents in Vancouver, Canada, to the Philippines to present to audiences there, including to members of domestic workers’ families. Interviews with seven family members who attended the play offer some clues to assessing performance as a space for critical, sometimes uncomfortable forms of empathy. Rather than a purely affirming experience, we argue that empathy can lead to a fuller recognition of the suffering on which one’s good life depends and challenge fantasies of the good life, in this case, attainable through migration to Canada. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

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)