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

Archives: Productions

304 entries

Title: Follow Your Heart

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2018

Produced by: Evolution Dance Theatre and Richmond Hill Center for Performing Arts

Creative Team: Director: Unlisted | Dramaturgy: Unlisted

Synopsis: Follow your heart is a middle eastern dance piece that explores the relationship of a couple whose love fights against odds to stay alive when they are separated by distance. The couple is separated by country and culture. This piece follows love and migration.

Source: https://evolutiondancetheatre.com/followyourheart-2016/ | https://thefreedomtheatre.org/ | https://ibsenscope.com/news/conference/enemy-of-the- | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59701738 | https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.181.011 | https://tarragontheatre.com/plays/2022-2023/behind-the-moon/ | https://www.passemuraille.ca/19-20-season-shows/suitcase-adrenaline/ | https://www.newcitystage.com/2008/03/06/review-our-enemies-lively-scenes-of- | https://arabstages.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2020/11/review-of-the-selected-works-of- | https://www.silkroadarchives.org/blog/2017/3/1/our-enemies-lively-scenes-of-love- | https://www.intermissionmagazine.ca/reviews/migraaaants-ttfu/ | https://ttdb.ca/shows/migraaaants/
Title: Forgiveness

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2023

Produced by: A collaboration of Arts Club Theatre Company (Vancouver) and Theatre Calgary

Creative Team: Source Author: Mark Sakamoto | Stage Adaptation: Hiro Kanagawa | Director: Stafford Arima

Synopsis: Forgiveness is a sweeping intergenerational drama based on Mark Sakamoto’s memoir, tracing the parallel wartime experiences of two families: Mitsue, a Japanese Canadian woman forcibly interned by her own government, and Ralph, a white Canadian soldier held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, whose eventual connection through their children brings unresolved trauma into confrontation. Structured through a non-linear, multi-narrative theatrical form that moves across decades, continents, and perspectives, often juxtaposing scenes and employing ensemble storytelling, the play situates migration within a framework of forced displacement, incarceration, and wartime rupture, rather than voluntary movement. By interweaving personal memory with national history, it exposes the long-term effects of racism, state violence, and inherited trauma, while ultimately foregrounding the ethical possibility and difficulty of reconciliation. The work raises urgent questions about how histories of injustice are remembered, represented, and healed, positioning forgiveness not as absolution but as an active, intergenerational ethical choice.

Source: https://artsclub.com/media/2022-2023/pdfs/forgiveness-media-release.pdf
Title: Frankenstein’s Boy

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2014

Produced by: Eldritch Theatre

Creative Team: Eric Woolfe | Playwright: Eric Woolfe Director: Marjorie Chan

Synopsis: Synopsis：Frankenstein’s Boy is a darkly comic retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic, blending horror, romance, and puppetry. In an intimate theatre, two performers conjure a creature stitched from body parts and borrowed texts, navigating themes of identity, monstrosity, and love. The show blurs the line between terror and laughter, inviting audiences into a gothic world where the grotesque meets the beautiful, and nothing—human or otherwise—is quite what it seems.

Source: https://eldritchtheatre.ca/frankensteinsboy/
Title: FRATERNITÉ, Conte fantastique

Geography: Europe > Western Europe > France

Year: 2021

Produced by: Les Hommes Approximatifs; executive production with Festival d’Avignon

Creative Team: Created with the ensemble and directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen; dramaturgy by Hugo Soubise and Manon Worms; design by Alice Duchange.

Synopsis: FRATERNITÉ takes place in 2021 and imagines that half of humanity has suddenly disappeared. Those that are displaced and left behind gather in Centres for Healing and Consolation, where workers attempt to preserve memories of missing relatives. The production involves a multilingual ensemble which includes professional performers and people recruited through other community based processes. Their characters speak Arabic and Vietnamese alongside other languages, creating a society whose memories cannot be contained within one national narrative. Nguyen’s research included organisations attempting to restore contact between families separated by war or migration. It also considered the work of identifying the bodies of migrants who have drowned while crossing the Mediterranean. The production’s speculative catastrophe therefore develops from recognisable histories of disappearance, asking how institutions may care for displaced people when faced with prolonged uncertainty.

Source: Festival d’Avignon, official production page and full credits: https://festival-avignon.com/en/edition-2021/programme/fraternity-a-fantastic-tale-59288 Festival d’Avignon, production interview with Caroline Guiela Nguyen: https://festival-avignon.com/storage/document/77/69377_60d09fbb84ebd.pdf AUSTRIA
Title: Free as Injuns

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2012

Produced by: Produced by Native Earth Performing Arts

Creative Team: Tara Beagan | Playwright: Tara Beagan Director: Ruth Madoc-Jones

Synopsis: Synopsis：In free as injuns, Tara Beagan reimagines Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms through a distinctly Aboriginal-Canadian lens. Set on a farm layered with symbolic soil, the play follows Ephraim, a domineering settler-father, and his three embittered sons, whose resentment grows upon learning their inheritance may pass to their father’s new, half-Indigenous wife. Amid haunting maternal echoes and a fraught love triangle between Even, his father’s wife, and legacy, the play explores land, identity, desire, and colonial inheritance.

Source: https://www.mooneyontheatre.com/2012/03/02/review-free-as-injuns-native-earth/
Title: Ga Ting

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2014

Produced by: Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre

Creative Team: Minh Ly | Playwright:Minh Ly Director:Rick Tae

Synopsis: Ga Ting centers on a grieving older Chinese Canadian couple, Mai and Hong, who invite their deceased son’s boyfriend, Matt, to dinner after their son’s sudden death. As tensions rise, the three confront deep cultural and generational divides over sexuality, love, and acceptance. Set in a single evening, the play explores themes of grief, homophobia, mental health, and identity through raw emotional exchanges. Minh Ly’s drama offers an intimate, often painful look at family, reconciliation, and the human cost of silence.

Source: https://vact.ca/shows-and-events/ga-ting/
Title: Gathering Memories With My Eyelashes

Geography: Africa > Northern Africa > Egypt

Year: 2026

Produced by: Orient Productions through Premières II x 2B Continued, with the French Embassy and FEF-Création

Creative Team: Written, directed and performed by Nanda Mohammad; performed with Mohammad’s mother

Synopsis: Gathering Memories With My Eyelashes places Syrian performer Nanda Mohammad in dialogue with her mother as they reconstruct a family history dispersed by exile. Through the use of official documents and photos, recollections span details that do not always align. The production begins with the Kurdish history of Mohammad’s grandparents before tracing the bureaucratic uncertainty created by her Iraqi father and Syrian mother. Nationality is therefore experienced through family law as much as through national territory. The mother and daughter remember departure differently. This exposes how exile can divide people who have lived through the same events. Mohammad’s attempt to recover Syria eventually confronts the impossibility of restoring the place preserved in memory. The performance presents diasporic identity as an ongoing act of interpretation.

Source: Ahram Online, performance and production information: https://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/5/35/565674/Arts–Culture/Stage–Street/Syrian-playwright-Na nda-Mohammad-confronts-exile-a.aspx Algeria:
Title: Good Morning, Viet Mom

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2018

Produced by: Cahoots Theatre Company and Soaring Skies Collective

Creative Team: Playwright: Franco Nguyen | Director: Byron Abalos | Performed by: Franco Nguyen

Synopsis: A young filmmaker goes to Vietnam looking for inspiration for his first feature film and finds an unexpected subject – his mom. Part stand-up comedy, part storytelling, and part documentary film, Franco Nguyen takes centre stage to share stories about growing up, living with mom, and Vietnam.

Source: https://ttdb.ca/shows/good-morning-viet-mom/ | https://www.cbc.ca/arts/exhibitionists/good-morning-viet-mom-franco-nguyen-s-hit-one-man-show-is-a-love-letter-to- | https://nowtoronto.com/culture/next-stage-review-good-morning-viet-mom/
Title: Gwangjang Market (광장시장)

Geography: Asia > Eastern Asia > South Korea

Year: 2025

Produced by: Doosan Art Center

Creative Team: Written by Yun Mi-hyeon; composed and musically directed by Na Sil-in; directed by Lee So-young; choreography by Bae Yu-ri

Synopsis: Gwangjang Market centres on Aung, a young migrant student who comes from Myanmar to South Korea to study music. After her father is killed during Myanmar’s pro-democracy protests, economic survival interrupts her artistic ambitions. She begins delivering food around Seoul’s Gwangjang Market and gradually forms relationships with the people working there. For Aung, The market becomes a location of settlement created through everyday labour. The production follows how a displaced aspiration can change after arrival. Food functions as a means of hospitality while also revealing the work performed by migrants which creates communities after settlement.

Source: Doosan Art Center, official production archive and full creative team: https://www.doosanartcenter.com/ko/performance/1637 NewDaily, production preview and background: https://www.newdaily.co.kr/site/data/html/2025/05/29/2025052900081.html Korearetro, article: https://www.korearetro.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1405
Title: Hannibal

Geography: Europe > Western Europe > Belgium

Year: 2024

Produced by: KVS; co-produced with Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, La Monnaie and international partners

Creative Team: Directed by Junior Mthombeni and Michael De Cock; dramaturgy by Gerardo Salinas; musical dramaturgy by Tom Swaak.

Synopsis: Hannibal reinterprets the Carthaginian general’s movement from North Africa towards Rome through an ensemble of artists working across European and African traditions. The artists are inspired by the story of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Ancient military movement is connected to contemporary political rhetoric about migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Opera is placed beside hip-hop and slam, while artists from different countries share the stage. Created through a European research project on migration narratives, the production asks how older cultural stories continue to shape which travellers are remembered as founders and which are described as invaders.

Source: KVS, official evening programme and production credits: https://www.kvs.be/en/evening-programme-hannibal Theaterkrant, review of the production: https://www.theaterkrant.nl/recensie/hannibal/michael-de-cock-junior-mthombeni-kvs/ NETHERLANDS