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: Refuge

Geography: Americas > Northern America > United States of America

Year: 2022

Produced by: Curious Theatre Company (Denver, CO U.S.)

Creative Team: Director: Dee Covington | Written by: Andrew Rosendorf

Synopsis: Refuge follows the story of a teenage migrant from Honduras as she crosses the border into the harsh desert of Texas. Her journey is bracketed by the rancher who finds her passed out on his land, a Latina border control agent, and the animals trying to survive in the barren desert. The production uses puppetry and original music to turn the landscape into a tale examining immigration in the United States.

Source: https://www.curioustheatre.org/event/refuge/ | https://newplayexchange.org/script/2011358/refuge
Title: Return to the Nile: Tales of Migration

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2020

Produced by: Niagara Folk Art Multiculture Center

Creative Team: Director: Yasmine Kandil | Dramaturgy: Unlisted

Synopsis: In collaboration with Brock University Drama and in education and applied theatre program and the Niagara folk art Multicultural center, this theatrical piece was staged in collaboration with Egyptian migrants and newcomers that settled in the region. The students took on various stories and characters to portray the immigrant experience in Canada.

Source: https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.181.011
Title: Rogue Gestures/Foreign Bodies

Geography: Americas > Northern America > United States of America

Year: 2022

Produced by: Nava Dance Theatre

Creative Team: Director/Choreographer: Nadhi Thekkek, Dramaturgy: Kamala Devam and Shruti Abhishek

Synopsis: This ensemble dance piece uses community interviews, poetry, bharatanatyam, and experimental movement to tell the stories of South Asian immigrant women in the U.S. and shows how they are often exploited. This work is based around the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which brought “skilled workers” to the U.S., and takes inspiration from one of the dancers, Nadhi Thekkek’s mother, who was a nurse that immigrated through this Act.

Source: https://www.navadance.org/rogue-gestures | https://narthaki.com/info/anitasays/asdec24.html
Title: Room 2048

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2017

Produced by: Hong Kong Exile, A Multi-media Dance Theatre

Creative Team: Created by Hong Kong Exile (Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Milton Lim , Remy Siu) and Alex Tam

Synopsis: Room 2048 is a multimedia dance-theatre work that explores the fractured dreams and dislocated memories of the Cantonese diaspora. Set within a dream machine of digital light and smoke, three performers navigate a surreal landscape shaped by a past they never lived, a future fading away, and a present suspended in uncertainty. Through live-generated electronic sound, projection, and movement, Room 2048 evokes longing, deception, and timelessness—where identity is ghosted, invented, and mourned.

Source: https://www.hongkongexile.com/ninedfeight
Title: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.（2024）

Geography: Europe > Northern Europe > Lithuania

Year: 2024

Produced by:

Creative Team: Tom Stoppard | Playwright:Tom Stoppard Director: Yuri Butusov

Synopsis: In Yuri Butusov’s 2023 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two minor figures from Hamlet drift through a surreal, war-haunted limbo. Trapped in a looping reality, they flip a coin that never changes and question fate, identity, and free will—echoing Daoist philosophy. Amid eerie encounters with a trickster Player and ghostly presences, the pair confront existential dread, depersonalization, and missed chances for moral action in a world of ash, ropes, and corpses. Their journey becomes a meditation on complicity and lost agency.

Source: https://artfocusnow.com/news/somehow-we-missed-it-butusov-stages-stoppard/
Title: Rumore di acque

Geography: Europe > Southern Europe > Italy

Year: 2010

Produced by: Teatro delle Albe–Ravenna Teatro and Ravenna Festival, with the Circuito del Mito of the Region of Sicily

Creative Team: Conceived by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari; written and directed by Marco Martinelli; performed by Alessandro Renda; live music by Fratelli Mancuso

Synopsis: Rumore di acque is set on an imaginary Mediterranean island where a military official attempts to catalogue migrants who have drowned at sea in their attempt to reach Europe. Martinelli wrote the play after spending time in Sicily and listening to stories of migrants crossing from North Africa to the Italian coast. The use of live Sicilian music emphasises a cultural presence that remains with the living long after the dead have passed on. The production presents the Mediterranean as a mass grave, created by European border policy rather than water. The island is fictional but the piece draws on journeys of migration between North Africa and Sicily.

Source: Ravenna Festival, production and revival information: https://www.ravennafestival.org/download-pack/5-luglio-rumore-di-acque-ritorna-al-festival/ Teatro.it, original Ravenna production information and review: https://www.teatro.it/notizie/teatro/rumore-di-acque-teatro-delle-albe-teatro-rasi-ravenna
Title: Rwanda 94

Geography: Africa > Eastern Africa > Rwanda

Year: 2004

Produced by: Groupov with Théâtre de la Place and Théâtre National de la Communauté française de Belgique

Creative Team: Conceived by Groupov with Yolande Mukagasana; directed by Jacques Delcuvellerie

Synopsis: The Rwandan presentation of Rwanda 94 is a large-scale documentary production about the genocide against the Tutsi into the country whose history it reconstructed. Survivor Yolande Mukagasana appears as herself, placing direct testimony beside historical material developed by the ensemble. The production acknowledges displacement as part of the genocide’s continuing aftermath. Survivors and perpetrators moved across national borders, while families remained divided by disappearance or exile. Performing the work in Rwanda changed the relationship between testimony and audience because many spectators possessed their own memories of the events represented. The production describes itself as an attempt at symbolic reparation, asking what theatre can offer when revisiting the site of violence and trauma does not repair the lives or communities destroyed there.

Source: Groupov, production history and Rwandan presentation: https://www.groupov.be/index.php/spectacles/show/id/9 Article about Groupov: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/helix/article/view/102018
Title: SAIGON

Geography: Europe > Western Europe > France

Year: 2017

Produced by: Les Hommes Approximatifs; co-produced with Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, La Comédie de Valence, MC2 Grenoble, Festival d’Avignon and others

Creative Team: Directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen; dramaturgy by Jérémie Scheidler and Manon Worms

Synopsis: Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s SAIGON is a large-scale polyphonic theatre work moving between France and Vietnam. Set in a Vietnamese restaurant, the production alternates between Saigon in 1956, during the final year of French withdrawal from Indochina, and Paris in 1996, when the Vietnamese government allowed people to return to their country of birth. In its realist form, the production builds a cinematic and intimate social world where food and music are shared in their cultural contexts and their historical weight. Exploring the Vietnamese movement to France after colonial conflict, the production challenges a narrow idea of national identity, showing how France is shaped by its colonial histories and affective loss.

Source: Les Hommes Approximatifs, Production Page for SAIGON: https://www.leshommesapproximatifs.com/creation/saigon/ Piccolo Teatro, Event Listing for SAIGON: https://www.piccoloteatro.org/en/2023-2024/saigon
Title: Sakina’s Restaurant

Geography: Americas > Northern America > United States of America

Year: 2018

Produced by: Minetta Lane Theatre

Creative Team: Written by Assif Mandvi | Director: Kimberly Senior

Synopsis: The focus is on a Muslim family that immigrated to New York from India, and they have a restaurant. They bring over a new waiter from India to work at their restaurant. The two main characters are Hakim and Farrida, who made the journey from their home country to create new opportunities for themselves in America. Their children have gravitated towards the new life and have absorbed the culture more so then their parents. The characters are all performed by Aasif Mandvi himself, and even plays the daughter, Sakina. There is a bit of intrigue with the play, since Sakina is to be married as an adult, to a man from India but she is in love with a guy she met in New York.

Source: https://www.offoffonline.com/offoffonline/2018/10/14/sakinas-restaurant | https://www.theaterscene.net/plays/solo-plays/sakinas-restaurant/archive/ | https://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/reviews/review-of-sakinas-restaurant-starring-aasif-mandvi-at-minetta-lane-theatre
Title: Salesman in China

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2025

Produced by:

Creative Team: Jovanni Sy Co-written with Leanna Brodie
Suggested by the memoirs of Arthur Miller and Ying Ruocheng
Chinese Translations by Fang Zhang | Written and Director: Jovanni Sy Co-written with Leanna Brodie
Suggested by the memoirs of Arthur Miller and Ying Ruocheng
Chinese Translations by Fang Zhang

Synopsis: Synopsis：Salesman in China, by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy, dramatizes the true story of Arthur Miller’s 1983 journey to Beijing to direct Death of a Salesman in Mandarin. Collaborating with Chinese actor and translator Ying Ruocheng, the production became a landmark in U.S.–China cultural exchange. The play explores cross-cultural tension, artistic ambition, and personal sacrifice through a bilingual ensemble. Set amid post-Cultural Revolution China, it’s a moving portrait of theatrical collaboration, identity, and bridge-building across nations, generations, and ideologies—all under the shadow of Cold War politics.

Source: https://nac-cna.ca/en/event/35938