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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

Practice of staging migration; methodology

This section is devoted to literature on topic of practice of staging migration, which deals with processes of making theatre with migrants, voicing their stories through creative practice. Also this section pertains to methodology: authors describe how to work with the topic of theatre and migration.

In this chapter, the author intends to share experiences, ideas and suggestions for a new approach to making theatre with or about refugees—in this case, especially with refugees. The chapter deals with notions of community theatre and refugee theatre, and the arguments in this chapter are a mixture of a practitioner reflecting on his professional work in the last five years, an individual sharing his raw feelings and visceral reactions to a topic that is very personal to him, and an academic interfering and commenting every now and then. The chapter ends with suggestions for how to approach creating theatre with refugee participants.

In ‘Decolonizing Ethnography’ the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play about workers’ rights, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos Garcia and Lopez Juarez transformed the project’s activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Today’s challenges and developments: migration flows, globalization, diversification of educational pathways – clearly indicate that language teaching can no longer only take place within the framework of school and vocational training. Outside the context of schools, approaches which combine language learning with other goals of development or that are linked to concrete objectives appear most promising. A particularly challenging field is teaching languages to adult refugees, since language courses can seldom address the learning culture, the different learning speeds and key competencies adequately. In the wake of the current Corona crisis, the problem is becoming more pressing. By digitalization of language courses, there is the danger that people with better prerequisites benefit more from the offered courses than those more in need, and the gap between people with higher or lower learning success will widen further. The article uses the practical example JobAct Sprachkultur, which is a German programme for job placement, based on a combination of theatre methods, language learning and social work, to investigate the extent to which theatre methods can contribute to reducing educational inequality in the language acquisition of adult refugees/migrants. Based on a document analysis and qualitative spotlight surveys with the trainers of the program, the potentials and limitations of the theatre approach and its digital implementation can be shown. (provided by the publisher)

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)

Playing Inclusion: The Performing Arts in the Time of Migrations: Thinking, Creating and Acting Inclusion is a collection of essays written by theatrologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, performers, social theatre experts and facilitators, who describe and analyse with their different points of view and methodologies some experiences where performative arts and practices enact refexive, creative and active processes aimed at taking care of the complex migratory phenomenon. (taken from the introduction to the book)

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

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

In this paper the author reports on the use of Theater of the Oppressed in a long-term critical ethnography. Building on the work of performative ethnographers, she reviews the literature on the uses of drama in qualitative research and explores the traditional research lines that are blurred in the process. More importantly, she details the experiences collecting and analyzing data using Theater of the Oppressed. In other published accounts of performative ethnography, data collection is emphasized and data analysis is not usually discussed, in part, because the line between data collection and analysis is blurred in the use of theater as inquiry. The author not only examines that blurring but suggests a method of analysis that others might find useful. The study focused on the integration of English language learners in a Midwestern U.S. high school. The author used Theater of the Oppressed with teachers to explore their role in the bullying activities of students. The analysis reveals changes in awareness witnessed through the drama. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

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)

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)

This chapter addresses the methodological challenges presented by multi-sited, collaborative research design in TaPS, which provides a fruitful space for considering the benefits of mixed methods approaches. Multi-sited, multi-collaborator research projects frequently feature methodological variation. Whereas mixing methods addresses discrepancies between the different sites and cases that such a project brings together, collaborative research ensures that participants’ rationales for selecting and combining methods remain explicit. Emine Fişek illustrates these processes with reference to a hypothetical research project on theatre and performance practices responding to the European migrant crisis of 2015–16. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • 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 )

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)

This paper examines an experiment in theatre-making with a group of Roma refugee youth currently living in Toronto, Canada. A drama academic, a professional theatre director, an Executive Director of a Roma Community Centre, two Hungarian translators and nine Roma youth worked together to cross language and cultural borders in order to place theatre-making in a broader socio-political arena. Their primary goal was to awaken public officials, and a general public, to a better understanding of the youth’s experiences of ‘home’ and migration in order to garner support for their claims for refugee status. Using cultural geography, community-engaged public pedagogy and feminist science as different disciplinary lenses and theoretical frames through which to make sense of the tensions of such collaborative theatre projects, the author positions the work as a ‘theatre of little changes’ ultimately worth engaging in. (abstract by the author)

The concept of migration offers a useful organizing principle for an introduction to Latin American theatre, as it encompasses multiple theatre styles and practices. Issues of migration are often in the news (in Latin America and beyond), thereby offering a point of entry for students who may not have studied theatre in the past. Migration in its multiple forms (immigration, emigration, exile, return) has a long history in the theatres of the Americas, including not only contemporary plays set on the US-Mexico border, but also Puerto Rican and Argentine theatre from the first half of the twentieth century and recent theatre from Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina. As a liminal space, the stage offers unique possibilities for the representation of migration. Theatre is a privileged space for the consideration of the migrant’s experience of displacement, an intrinsically provisional space, continually redefined. Theatrical techniques used to evoke the displacements of immigration, exile, and return include: narrative and temporal disruption; multiple characters played by a single actor; the mixing of languages, with and without translation; the evocation of the absent or the disappeared; and satirical or grotesque exaggeration. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The undocumented immigrant is a recurring figure in the legal and cultural fields. By examining various stagings of this figure in contemporary US theatre, the author analyzes the intricate relationship between cultural and legal production and also observes law’s capacity to shape identity and practices of belonging. The dissertation relies on developments in legal anthropology and employs concepts of legal identity and legal consciousness to consider theatre’s engagement with unauthorized immigration. An explicit focus on law and its material consequences allows the author to problematize theatre scholarship’s privileging of ethnic/racial categories when approaching the overdetermined issue of identity. Importantly, as he investigates theatre’s contribution to the immigration debates, he theorizes how performance intersects with legal categorization and, in particular, how performance can counteract the legal nonexistence that characterizes life without papers. (introduction by the author)

In this study, Gad Guterman examines how the growing repertory of theatrical representations of undocumented immigrants “can bring those forced into spaces of nonexistence out of the shadows and, in so doing, mitigate the violence characteristic to those spaces.” Guterman’s significant contribution to the field is at least twofold: he not only moves away from the categorical conceptions of identity that dominate scholarship regarding this canon, but applies his meticulous examination of immigration law to the performative experiences of the undocumented as they erupt in reality, thereby illuminating the law’s power to “mold our sense of identity.” (from the review – https://www.jstor.org/stable/24582572 )

This dissertation rethinks applied theatre facilitation from a hemispheric perspective, to revalue its impact. A motivation for this research is the sparse dissemination of contemporary approaches to applied theatre coming from Latin America. Most of the existing texts in English are products of the Global North and inadvertently reproduce (neo)colonial epistemologies; a more decolonial framework is needed, from the perspective of the Global South, to allow a focus on experiential knowledge from below. The author looks at case studies in Latin American contexts of (de)humanization, from immigrant detention centers to victims’ groups, from displacement, disappearance and deportation to privileged detachment, in Colombia, Chile and California. Each case study generates distinct insights about negotiating complicity and resistance within violent state/institutional processes of isolation and confinement (understood here as dehumanizing enclosures). The main argument is that the impact of applied theatre is not only the effect on our ideas and (inter)actions, as in social change, but also a widened sense of what is possible in terms of ways of being and becoming in/with the world. (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)

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)

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 article focuses on one of Violeta Luna’s pieces on undocumented migration to the US (Body Parted/Cuerpo Partido 2008), as well as two works dealing with Mexico’s current state of emergency: Réquiem por una tierra perdida/Requiem for a Lost Land (2010-2014) and Vírgenes y Diosas/Virgins and Goddesses (2014-2015). In order to explore what these works can tell us about our present, the author relies mainly on contemporary expansions of the concept of biopolitics first advanced by Michel Foucault. Additionally, the author finds a foothold in cultural critics such as Ana Longoni, Rustom Bharucha, and others who have questioned the epistemologies on art and politics prevalent in Western art history. (taken from the article)

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

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

This book 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)

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 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.

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 features an investigation into the semantics of the term ‘practice’ coexisting in a multidisciplinary research context. The background of the discussion is a government-funded study with refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland, where process drama, music and dance were used to facilitate second language learning – an approach known as performative language pedagogy. The research is framed by exploratory practice, a methodology that considers ‘practice-as-research’ and ‘understanding-for-practice’ in second language education. An investigation of the meaning(s) of the term ‘practice’ was imperative as a semantic gap existed between the use of the term ‘practice’ in exploratory practice (the research methodology underpinning the study) and the concept of ‘practice’ in performative language pedagogy (the teaching approach used in the study). This article presents findings from twelve qualitative interviews with teacher/artists and practitioners that point towards a shared understanding of practice when working with refugees in language education settings. (from the abstract to the article)

  • Rousseau, C., Gauthier, M.-F., Benoît, M., Lacroix, L., Moran, A., Viger Rojas, M., & Bourassa, D. (2006). Playing with identities, transforming shared realities: school theatre workshop for immigrant and refugee adolescents. Santé mentale au Québec, 31(2), 135‑152. https://doi.org/10.7202/014808ar Available at: Link to the source

The drama workshop program described in this article was designed to facilitate the adjustment of newly arrived immigrant teens. The aim of the program is to make it easier for adolescents to adjust to their new environment through creative group work around identity issues. The workshops are inspired both from playback theater and from Boal’s form theater which emphasizes the collective transformation of the singular experience. The qualitative assessment of the program effects on the adolescents suggests that the workshops constitute a safe space of expression, in which the team and the ritual nature of the play hold the participants. The workshops also address the life transformation associated both with adolescence and migration and help the elaboration of the losses linked to the migratory journey and the construction of a hybrid identity. (provided by the author – at the link above)

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)

Ethnotheatre transforms research about human experiences into a dramatic presentation for an audience. Johnny Saldaña, one of the best-known practitioners of this research tradition, outlines the key principles and practices of ethnotheatre in this clear, concise volume. He covers the preparation of a dramatic presentation from the research and writing stages to the elements of stage production. Saldaña nurtures playwrights through adaptation and stage exercises, and delves into the complex ethical questions of turning the personal into theatre. Throughout, he emphasizes the vital importance of creating good theatre as well as good research for impact on an audience and performers. The volume includes multiple scenes from contemporary ethnodramas plus two complete play scripts as exemplars of the genre. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

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

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 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)

The book provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. The author reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory-conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances-offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani etc., the author explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book is a timely, eloquent and urgent call to theatre makers and academics working in the field of applied theatre to interrogate the existing critical discourses and political aspirations of contemporary practices and to develop new practical and theoretical vocabularies to advance the field. The reframing of the arts with the emphasis on its future social utility has meant that theatre makers working with people often identified as socially excluded – for example, prisoners, elders or refugees – are asked to describe and account for their work based on the anticipated and prescribed educational and social outcomes of it. The language of social inclusion, crime reduction and community cohesion frames and limits much of the discourse in the field. Thompson’s Performance Affect responds to this context. (from the review – https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/doi/full/10.1080/10486801.2011.562058 )

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)

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 )

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 )

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)

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)

Exploring the experiences of early to mid-twentieth century British theatre-makers in Russia, this book imagines how these travellers interpreted  Russian realism, symbolism, constructivism, agitprop, pageantry, dance or cinema. With some searching for an alternative to the corporate West End, some for experimental techniques  and others still for methods that might politically inspire their audiences, did these journeys make any differences to their practice? And how did distinctly Russian techniques affect British theatre history? Migrating Modernist Performance seeks to answer these questions, reimagining the experiences and creative output of a range of, often under-researched, practitioners. What emerges is a dynamic collection of performances that bridge geographical, aesthetic, chronological and political divides. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)