In the first case, individual stories and/or the global situation of refugees becomes the material for a theatrical work that aims to raise awareness. Often these works are made by professional theatre artists who are not refugees themselves. This is the most compromising type of refugee theatre because it does not meet the basic democratic principle of “nothing about us without us.” It is true that even in this type of refugee theatre, there are very important examples, like The Jungle by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson or The Claim by Tim Cowbury and Mark Maughan.
In the second case, people with migration experience become participants in theatrical works themselves. This is already better, but there can also be a range of different power dynamics: sometimes, this type of show may have non-refugees writing these works and exploiting refugees with their narrative while other times it could actually feature refugees taking full control over their story and how it is being told.
In the third case, refugee theatre aims to help people with refugee experiences, whether it is with creative self-expression; the lease of tension and frustration through storytelling; therapeutic processing of trauma; or reflective feedback sessions that allow them to replay certain situations and draw conclusions from them, thereby leading to personal growth. This is often the method used in helping refugees integrate and assimilate. The ideal situation, of course, is when all three of these are combined in one work that is about, with, and for refugees, thus having people with refugee experience directly involved in creating and producing work about themselves, raising awareness about migration situations, and growing through the reproduction and reflection of their experiences.
I believe that the role of art, especially performative art, is not simply to comment on catastrophe or dramatic events but to participate directly in the process of change. By raising awareness, becoming a forum for discussion of politics, broadcasting marginalized experiences, and amplifying the voices of those who are not being listened to, theatre affects the way society is structured. Refugee theatre received particular attention after the migrant crisis in the mid-2010s, but the connection between theatre and refugees goes back much further.
From the very beginning of their journey, refugees are forced to dramatize their lives, especially when they find themselves in a situation of bureaucratic mazes. Much depends on a refugee’s ability to convincingly construct a “sympathetic” self-narrative in the face of the migration administrations in the countries they arrive in.
Immediately after the end of World War II in 1945, the largest refugee camp in Denmark was set up in Oksbøl city, with some thirty-five thousand German civilians living there. In this camp, there was the Theater-Oxbøl with eight hundred seats. Recently FLUGT — Refugee Museum of Denmark launched an audio performance on the site where the camp used to be. This performance was impactful, as it allowed the audience to experience the atmosphere of that time and to be transported to the Theater-Oxbøl.
Another example is Dwight Conquergood, who in his 1988 article “Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee Camp: Performance, Communication, and Culture,” writes about how rich in performative events Ban Vinai Camp in Thailand was for highlanders. He writes: “Camp Ban Vinai may lack many things—water, housing, sewage disposal system—but not performance. The camp is an embarrassment of riches in terms of cultural performance. No matter where you go in the camp, at almost any hour of the day or night, you can simultaneously hear two or three performances.” These performances ranged from simple storytelling to folk singing to ritual performances for the dead that incorporated drumming, dancing, stylized lamentation and ritual chanting, manipulation of funerary artifacts, incense, fire, and animal sacrifice.
Interestingly, in this article the author notes the large presence of cultural performances in refugee camps in general: in addition to Ban Vinai, he visited eleven other camps in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Nigeria. He attributes this to the fact that in refugee camps, people fall into a liminal state in which a significant part of their identity is lost and a new one has not yet been formed. This—and plenty of free time—allows refugees to experiment with their identities and strategies of adaptation, survival, and resistance. Conquergood writes: “Through its reflexive capacities, performance enables people to take stock of their situation and through this self-knowledge to cope better. There are good reasons why in the crucible of refugee crisis, performative behaviors intensify.”
Many researchers at the intersection of performance and migration have noted that the refugee experience is highly performative, even without the inclusion of the refugee in participatory theatrical practices. Alison Jeffers writes about this at length in the first chapter of Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities, where she describes what she calls “bureaucratic performance.” From the very beginning of their journey, refugees are forced to dramatize their lives, especially when they find themselves in a situation of bureaucratic mazes. Much depends on a refugee’s ability to convincingly construct a “sympathetic” self-narrative in the face of the migration administrations in the countries they arrive in.
There are a huge number of cases where refugees are denied residency permits and deported simply because their story is not believed. This is especially common for queer refugees seeking asylum, who are often discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Bureaucrats in many European countries often use legally gray areas to deny subsidies or the right to stay based on a lack of trust in a refugee’s story. Even after being placed in a refugee camp or receiving documents and beginning the assimilation process into their new country, the migrant’s performance of their personal identity does not cease.
