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: Cargo

Geography: Europe > Northern Europe > United Kingdom

Year: 2016

Produced by: Arcola Theatre, London Link: https://theagency.co.uk/news/cargo-directed-by-david-mercatali-opens-at-the-arcola-theatre/

Creative Team: Written by Tess Berry-Hart; directed by David Mercatali

Synopsis: Set inside a darkened cargo container Tess Berry-Hart’s Cargo tells the story of a group of exiles who are trying to reach Europe. It is inspired by Berry-Hart’s work around the Calais refugee camp as a founding member of Calais Action, the grassroots collective. The confined staging produces an effective physical secrecy as the production highlights the absence of a safe legal passage for migrants and refugees seeking safety and security. With a fully immersive set made of recycled packing materials, staged in the round, the production provides a close up, visceral experience. The characters’ hopes for security and safety are placed under the pressure of politics and betrayal. Highlighting the smugglers’ treatment of refugees and the methods migrants use to get into crates emphasises how boarders produce physical vulnerability and often force people into hidden routes. Cargo asks the audience what happens when survival and safety depends on hope and luck as the production exposes the violence and risk built into restricted mobility.

Source: The Agency, news post on Cargo: https://theagency.co.uk/news/cargo-directed-by-david-mercatali-opens-at-the-arcola-theatre/ Broadway World, Review of Cargo: https://www.broadwayworld.com/uk-regional/article/Photo-Flash-In-Rehearsal-for-Tess-Berry-Harts-CA RGO-at-the-Arcola-Theatre-20160629 Migrant Voice, Blog Post on Cargo: https://www.migrantvoice.org/migrationmatters/new-play-set-in-a-040716152644
Title: Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2013

Produced by: Tarragon Theatre

Creative Team: David Yee | Playwright: David Yee Director: Nina Lee Aquino

Synopsis: Synopsis：From the shore of Ko Phi Phi in Thailand to a suburb in Utah to a mysterious Kafkaesque hole in the ground, carried away on the crest of a wave gives us brief glimpses into the lives of a sphinx-like escort, a grieving father, a conflicted priest, brothers of legend, a felonious housewife, an accountant of time, an orphaned boy, a radio shock jock and a man who finds things. Each are connected, primarily, by the cataclysmic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed the lives of over a quarter million people. In a series of vignettes, carried away on the crest of a wave illustrates the ripple effect of one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history and ponders what happens when the events that bind us together are the same events that tear us apart.

Source: https://ttdb.ca/shows/carried-away-on-the-crest-of-a-wave/
Title: Carried by the River

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2025

Produced by: Tarragon Theatre (Extraspace, Toronto)

Creative Team: Playwright: Diana Tso | Director/Choreographer: William Yong

Synopsis: Carried by the River is a poetic, intergenerational drama that follows Kai, a Chinese Canadian woman who, upon the death of her mother, discovers that she was abandoned at birth under China’s one-child policy and adopted into a diasporic life in Canada, prompting a return journey to China in search of her origins. Structured through a lyrical, non-linear form that blends realism with magic realism, featuring spirit animals, ancestral presences, and fluid transitions between the living and the dead, the play constructs a dreamlike theatrical landscape where memory, myth, and identity intertwine. It situates migration within a framework of transnational adoption, gendered displacement, and diasporic return, foregrounding how state policies (such as the one-child policy) produce invisible forms of forced separation that reverberate across generations. By staging the search for origins as both emotional and epistemological, the work interrogates questions of belonging, sexuality, and cultural inheritance, raising ethical concerns about who gets to claim identity, how histories of abandonment are narrated, and whether “home” can ever be recovered when one’s origins are structurally obscured.

Source: https://www.fetechinoise.ca/blog/2025/carried-by-the-river
Title: Case Farmakonisi or the Justice of the Water

Geography: Europe > Southern Europe > Greece

Year: 2015

Produced by:

Creative Team: Azas, Anestis | Director – Documentary theater

Synopsis: A documentary performance investigating the 2014 Farmakonisi shipwreck and the politics of Europe’s border regime, using testimony and documentary material to question responsibility, legal accountability, and the meaning of “justice” at sea.

Source: https://www.critical-stages.org/14/refugee-narratives-case-farmakonisi-or-the-justice-of-the-water-by-anestis-azas/
Title: Chile Con Carne

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2013

Produced by:

Creative Team: Carmen Aguirre | Playwright and Director: Carmen Aguirre

Synopsis: In Chile Con Carne, eight-year-old Manuelita, a Chilean refugee, recounts her journey from Chile to 1970s Vancouver following a military coup. As her politically active family adjusts to exile, Manuelita struggles to fit in at school while secretly campaigning to save her favorite tree, Cedar, from destruction. Through imaginative storytelling, she reenacts moments from her past and present, gradually confronting trauma, identity, and belonging. Her story weaves personal resilience with political legacy in a touching and humorous solo performance.

Source: https://www.mooneyontheatre.com/2013/04/03/review-chile-con-carne-alameda-theatre-company/(Review)
Title: Ching Chong Chinaman

Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada

Year: 2013

Produced by: fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company

Creative Team: Lauren Yee | Playwright: Lauren Yee Director: Nina Lee Aquino

Synopsis: Synopsis：The ultra-assimilated Wong family is as Chinese-American as apple pie: teenager Upton dreams of World of Warcraft superstardom; his sister Desi dreams of early admission to Princeton. Unfortunately, Upton’s chores and homework get in the way of his 24/7 videogaming, and Desi’s math grades don’t fit the Asian-American stereotype. Then Upton comes up with a novel solution for both problems: he acquires a Chinese indentured servant, who harbors an American dream of his own.

Source:
Title: Closed Lands

Geography: Europe > Northern Europe > United Kingdom

Year: 2020

Produced by: LegalAliens

Creative Team: Simon Grangeat | Playwright: Simon Grangeat Director: Becka McFadden
Translated by: Laure Fernandez and LegalAliens

Synopsis: Closed Lands, by French playwright Simon Grangeat, fuses poetry, satire, reportage, and multimedia to chart modern walls from Berlin to “Fortress Europe.” Performed by migrant actors rotating roles, the production uses live camera and shifting personas to expose borders, bureaucracy, and spectacle, critiquing the free world’s obsession with walls and its return to collective shame.

Source: https://legalalienstheatre.com/closed-lands-2/
Title: Common Ground

Geography: Europe > Western Europe > Germany

Year: 2014

Produced by: Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin

Creative Team: By Yael Ronen and Ensemble; directed by Yael Ronen

Synopsis: Common Ground is a devised theatre piece about the afterlives of Yugoslav nationalism and war in contemporary Berlin. Bringing together performers with connections to Belgrade, Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Prijedor, the production asks how people shaped by opposing sides of conflict can inhabit a city. With autobiographical influence and an ensemble focus, the production combines political discussion and dark humour to confront the everyday lives and experiences of contemporary Berliners. Developed through a trip to Bosnia and meetings with family members of the protagonist actors. Common Ground considers the movement of former Yugoslavian refugees and migrants to Germany after the wars of the 1990s. Ronen examines how nationalism survives beyond the borders of the former nation-state and permeates memories and transnational diasporas.

Source: Gorki Theatre, Event listing for Common Ground: https://www.gorki.de/en/common-ground Berlin Global, Event Listing for Common Ground: https://www.berlinglobal.org/index.php?director-yael-ronen-portrays-the-history-of-former-yugoslavia-thr ough-song-and-dance= Taipei Times, Review of Common Ground by Diane Baker: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2016/09/23/2003655740
Title: Community-Bird Migrants (異鄉鳥)

Geography: Asia > Eastern Asia > Taiwan

Year: 2025

Produced by: Sun Son Theatre; presented by Taipei Performing Arts Center as part of Taipei Children’s Arts Festival

Creative Team: Created and performed by Chang Wei-Loy and Chen Zi-Yin; object and visual creation by Chang Wei-Loy; music by Chen Zi-Yin

Synopsis: Community-Bird Migrants uses images of migratory birds to consider the lives of people who move to Taiwan for work or settlement. The production presents a fable of human migration and departure as attempts to make a new home are understood through the migratory patterns of birds. Inspired by real news stories and poems from Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds, puppetry and shadow work allow movement between territories to remain visible without reducing the migrant experience to a direct documentary testimony. The production is particularly useful for thinking about how migration is introduced to younger audiences. With the use of birds, the production asks what hoopers when people build relationships in a place reached through shared movement.

Source: Taipei Performing Arts Center, festival production page: https://tpac.org.taipei/en/festival-tcaf/2025/event/1211 Sun Son Theatre, official production page: https://www.sunsontheatre.com/%E7%95%B0%E9%84%89%E9%B3%A5
Title: Compassion. The History of the Machine Gun

Geography: Europe > Western Europe > Germany

Year: 2016

Produced by: Schaubühne Berlin and International Institute of Political Murder with the PROSPERO European theatre network

Creative Team: Text and direction by Milo Rau; created with performers Ursina Lardi and Consolate Sipérius; design by Anton Lukas.

Synopsis: Compassion places the account of a European aid worker beside that of a Belgian-Burundian performer. Their stories move between refugee routes through the Mediterranean and the conflicts of Central Africa. The production questions why some deaths produce extensive European sympathy while others are treated as distant background events. Interviews with NGO workers and people affected by war inform the text, but the production also exposes the theatrical construction of humanitarian testimony. A photograph or emotional story may create compassion while leaving the political causes of displacement untouched. The contrast between the two performers makes unequal authority visible: one has the institutional power to travel as a helper, while the other is associated with the region being helped. Migration is examined through the European systems that represent suffering and decide which displaced people can become recognisable victims.

Source: International Institute of Political Murder, official production page: https://international-institute.de/en/compassion-the-history-of-the-machine-gun/ Academy of the Arts of the World, performance listing and production background: https://www.adkdw.org/en/article/1286_compassion_the_history_of_the_machine_gun