Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters

by Michael Balfour (Editor)

Exploring theater works created for, by, and with refugees, this hybrid collection of essays combines newly commissioned scholarly work with examples of writing by refugees themselves. These varied contributions illuminate performances that range from theater in Thai refugee camps to site-specific works staged in a run-down immigrant community in the United Kingdom. An exciting addition to the growing field of applied theater, Refugee Performance provides inspiring insight into the resilience and creativity of artists responding to one of the most critical issues of our time.

316 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2012

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read several of the essays here, but not all of them. The collection as a whole focuses on the tensions inherent in refugee performances--questions about accurately representing refugee voices, perspectives, and experiences; how to avoid appropriating, dominating, or exoticizing those voices; issues of performance culture(s); problems of how to ethically engage different audiences in genuinely democratic/supportive performances. These are all good and complicated questions, and some of the specific issues raised were really important. For instance, the final essay talks about a disabled Ethiopian refugee named Marcus, and one of the concerns raised by the people helping him gain legal status in Australia was that he would feel compelled to tell his story on stage--thereby making it a coerced, rather than free choice--because of his liminal status, and because telling one's story becomes a kind of currency for refugees to be spent in pursuit of residency status.

What I didn't find as useful in this book is that many of the essays deal with specific performances, productions, or theatrical events, and the artists/directors/facilitators write about those specific performances. While some of them are really interesting, it's also difficult to tell how broadly reliable some of the conclusions are, or whether or not the specific experiences provide good general guides for facilitating and understanding refugee performance.