Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism [1st ed.] 9783030414092, 9783030414108

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Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism Yana Meerzon

Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism “In Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism Yana Meerzon sets the cosmopolitan subject centre-stage and examines its philosophical origins, its importance in the contemporary political context of the global rise of demagoguery and rightwing nationalism, and its signifi cance in the contemporary theatre. This rigorous and scholarly work extends Meerzon’s existing published research on exilic performance to examine what she names as today’s ‘theatre of cosmopolitanism’. Defi ning this theatrical form as originating ‘at two axes of meaning: as a social phenomenon and as an aesthetic condition’, the book draws on a rich and complex range of sources to offer an impassioned argument for the continuing value of cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan subject in uncertain times.” —Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in Drama, University of Ulster, UK “This is an erudite and detailed study of cosmopolitan theatre, covering a range of performances from the Global North. Meerzon reviews the meaning and function of the fi gure of the ‘traveller’ in the twenty-first century in order to think about subjectivity and the ethical potential of theatre at a time of global upheaval. Timely and necessary.” —Marilena Zaroulia, Lecturer in Performance Arts, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK

Yana Meerzon

Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism

Yana Meerzon University of Ottawa Ottawa, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-41409-2    ISBN 978-3-030-41410-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Koukichi Takahashi / EyeEm, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Irina, Dmitri, Alexander, and Eugenie

Acknowledgements

This project took its inspiration from the conference Local Cosmopolitanisms/ Cosmopolitismes locaux that took place in Fall 2014 at the University of Ottawa. Later I discussed my ideas with many colleagues and friends, both in Canada and internationally, to whom I am extremely grateful for their insights, suggestions, critical thoughts, and interest in this topic. This list includes Patrice Pavis, Freddie Rokem, Janelle Reinelt, Peter Boenisch, Christopher Balme, Steve Wilmer, Joerg Esleben, Veronika Ambros, Tibor Egervari, Ric Knowles, Inge Arteel, Guy Cools, Josette Ferral, Judith Rudakoff, Margherita Laera, R.  Darren Gobert, Magda Romanska, Szabolcs Musca, and Silvija Jestrovic, among many others. As I worked on this book, I participated in projects and partnerships that are particularly echoed in these pages. They include my work with Katharina Pewny on theatre and multilingualism (2018, 2019) and my two-volume publication on theatre and immigration in Canada (2019), generously supported by Roberta Barker, as well as my collaboration with David Dean, Natalia Vesselova, and Daniel McNeil on the project Performance, Migration and Stereotypes. A Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported several initiatives related to this project, including the 2017 international conference, the collection of articles entitled Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and this volume. J. Douglas Clayton’s hard work on the style of this book was invaluable. During the many hours we spent discussing this project, I came to think of him as a true collaborator if not co-author of this manuscript. Aisling vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Murphy helped with the final touches of the manuscript, looking after technical aspects of preparing this text for publication. This book would not have emerged without the generous help of the artists to whom it is dedicated. I am forever grateful to the many performers, writers, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and managers of the various companies, with whom I corresponded, spoke, and shared my ideas regarding theatre and cosmopolitanism. The map of my encounters is truly international, if not global. A special thank you goes to many kind people, although here I can name only some of them. They include Art Babayants, Ken Cameron, Una Memisevic, Tim Carlson, Candice Edmunds, Mani Soleymanlou, Natasha Davis, Anton de Groot, Anita Majumdar, David Herd, Dragan Todorovic, Charlotte Bongaerts, Lars Boot, Elke Janssens, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, James Long, Maiko Yamamoto, An-Marie Lambrechts, Lily McLeish, Karthika Nair, Damien Jalet, Anna Pincus, Julia Wieninger, Fleur Palezzi, and Charlotte Farcet. I have presented materials related to this work at many conferences, including the International Federation for Theatre Research (2014, 2018), the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (2017, 2018), and the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance (2018, 2019), as well as gave keynote lectures and invited talks at Ghent University, Kent University, Northwestern University, University of Amsterdam, University of Toronto, Masaryk University, McMaster University, and Concordia Universities. Some of my ideas that appear in this book were previously published in the journals Theatre Research in Canada (2015), Modern Drama (2018), and Ottawa Hispanic Studies (2018) and the book Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies edited by Judith Rudakoff (2017). My special thanks go to my family, who were simply stoic in supporting this project. Without their patience, understanding, and belief, this book would have never come to life.

Contents

1 Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New Cosmopolitanism  1 Part I Encounters in Language  33 2 Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging the Décalage of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism 35 3 ‘Speaking in Tongues’: Staging Hospitality of (Non) Translation 75 Part II Encounters in Body 115 4 Dramaturgies of the Body: Staging Stranger-­Fetishism in a Cosmopolitan Solo Performance117 5 Staging Cosmoprolis: Constructing the Chorus Play155

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Part III Encounters in Time, Space, and History 195 6 Dramaturgies of the Gaze: On the Intimate Realities of Cosmopolitanism197 7 Staging Affective Citizenship: Constructing Communities of Hope237 8 To Be a Cosmopolitan: Concluding Remarks275 Index285

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New Cosmopolitanism

Today, as the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky argues, we have entered a new phase of Modernist culture: it is now characterized by the exigencies of hyper. ‘Hyper capitalism, hyperclass, hyper-power, hyper-­ terrorism, hyper-individualism, hypermarket, hypertext’ (Lipovetsky 2004, 155) are directly connected to the economic practices of late capitalism. Global wars, the information overload, the acceleration of time, and the malady of hyper-consumption all result in the processes of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing subjectivity. ‘The hypermodern individual’—Lipovetsky writes—‘lives a life characterized by flexibility, adaptability, and a demand of continuous improvement, both in the work place and throughout his/her general life’ (153). For this individual, the global supermarket and the workplace have turned into places of worship. Bojana Kunst arrives at similar conclusions, declaring, ‘contemporary society places great emphasis on creativity, imagination, and dynamism’, so that the only tangible product of late capitalism is ‘models of subjectivity’ (2015, 19). Kunst examines the role played by the performing arts in re-fashioning this subjectivity. In response to her own question of ‘how and what does art actually produce in contemporary capitalism?’ (17), Kunst suggests that the only commodity created by the performing arts is the artist at work (19). Using these statements as a starting point, I seek in this book to analyse how this new subjectivity is constructed and staged in the theatres of © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_1

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hypermodernity. The focus and theoretical approaches in this book, however, differ from those of Kunst, who studies theatre and cultural performance, which reflects its own modes of production and is tightly connected to the material and economic conditions of labour. I am interested in individual artists, their craft, and the philosophical discourses that underlie this production of subjectivity. Specifically, I am drawn to those works that produce subjectivity as a reflection of one more exigency of the hyper: the new regimes of mobility (Schiller and Salazar 2013). They include mass migration, refuge and asylum seeking, political and self-imposed exile, economic migration, work-related travel, and tourism. However, instead of juxtaposing stasis as settlement and migration as movement in their relational perspectives, I see regimes of mobility as shaping the world of hypermodernity in the dimensions of simultaneity, relationality, and temporality and evoking the image of a new nomadism, which re-enforces non-belonging and produces anxiety in settled populations (Landry 2017, 26). Paradox and incongruity are the basis of this new nomadism, as it generates cosmopolitan cultural practices and consciousness and at the same time leads to neo-nationalism and false patriotism. New nomadism functions as a civic city, where diversities converge and interact (27). It also spawns questions of who can be considered a responsible citizen, as we increasingly witness more and more people declaring multiple cultural, linguistic, and civic affiliations. Marked by its cultural heterogeneity, the civic city serves as a model of the post-migrant society or new cosmopolitanism, emerging as an alternative scenario to the practices and mythologies of the nation state. At the centre of this construction is the hypermodern individual, someone perpetually on the move between work and leisure, rushed to produce and achieve, often switching languages and cultures, partners and values, driven by various commitments. We must remember, of course, that not all travellers and travelling are created equal. In this book I make a fundamental distinction between the so-called jet-setters as privileged travellers, whose status in the power-­ geometry of global mobility is defined by their wealth and power (Massey 2014, 62), and refugees and asylum seekers, whose movement across the space-time continuum is forced and precarious. As a Western academic who travels on a Canadian passport conveniently approved and acknowledged by the international community, I admit that my work is marked by my privileged position and freedom of movement. It was not always like that: my own journey of immigration was marked by various anxieties, hard work, and personal sacrifice. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to

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recognize my privilege as a hypermodern individual. By the same token, this book is a study of theatre performances made by and addressed to hypermodern individuals like myself, who possess the financial, legal, and linguistic means to access them. Like Marilena Zaroulia, who examines ‘the relation between the so-called European “refugee crisis” and the multiple meanings and performances of excess’ (2018, 181), I analyse performative representations of migration aimed at ‘those of us who have not had a direct experience of forced displacement’ and whose meaning therefore ‘exceeds us’ (181). The major question I seek to answer is: what values can the performing arts offer a hypermodern nomad? Indeed, what’s Hecuba to him or her? For Bojana Kunst, the answer is clear: our assumption that art can have some political and/or social impact is invalid (2015, 20); the only function it can fulfil is to become a repository of philosophical observations and emotional experiences. I concur with this statement but take her position further in this book, arguing that watching a theatre performance live and experiencing it as an embodied practice can foster self-reflection: it can create an epiphany, a fortuitous philosophical moment of self-recognition. The cosmopolitan spectator is obliged to contemplate their position as a privileged subject and encouraged to step outside the historical moment in which they live. In this post-Brechtian gesture of alienating self from self, cosmopolitan theatre can impose a moment of recognition. Not only can it make a person of privilege suddenly recognize the other within themselves; it can incite them to take the first step towards an ethical dialogue with the other outside the self. In making these suggestions, however utopian they may sound, I follow, on the one hand, Zygmunt Bauman, who advocates dialogue as the only way to overcome the indifference, if not animosity, that late capitalism produces towards strangers (2016, 2017), and, on the other hand, Erika Fischer-Lichte, who has already suggested that the transformative power of performance can involve spectators in an active loop of aesthetic and affective experiences, which invokes questions of ethics and sets in motion the mechanisms for one’s encounter with oneself (2008, 40–52). In her more recent work, Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between three modes of this transformative aesthetics, such as ‘the aesthetics of impact, of autonomy and of reception’ (2018, 18), which ‘transform the viewer into an emotional, feeling subject and, in this respect, is comparable to the empathy aesthetics of the eighteenth century’ (16). Transformative aesthetics is based on the act of somatic and emotional encounter between the stage and the audience; it envisions a viewer in a state of ‘permanent activity’ (11),

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energetically and creatively involved in the act of receiving or co-­ constructing the work of art (13). Building further on this theory, I examine the performative logic of the encounter as a relational activity (Bourriaud 1998) and the rhizomatic stillness of multiple selves. By focusing on the fundamental elements of the theatre performance, such as language, body, and time/space, I seek to theorize the performative mechanisms involved in conceptualizing, constructing, and performing the new cosmopolitanism. The objective is to create a map of the artistic strategies and philosophical preoccupations that inform the work of the many artists whose practices and sensibilities are clearly cosmopolitan. The underlying theme of this book is the notion of the divided self, whereas the analyses presented are shaped by the focus on motion. * * *

The Cosmopolitan Subjectivity of the Divided Self The concept of self as we know it today goes back to the Renaissance and the work of Petrarch, who ‘by reading the ancient writers had to experience his own being as a unique and autonomous self which he could objectify, act upon, and compare to other such autonomous selves’ (Melton 1998, 68). In this process, Petrarch recognized the Western subject’s tendency to ‘general[ly] turn inward’ as ‘a reaction to the knowledge that human beings were no longer one with the cosmos’ (68). This reading of the self as a unique entity marked the philosophical thought of the Enlightenment and the Romantic worldview of the Sturm und Drang writers, who proposed an idealized model of the self-willed tragic character ready for self-sacrifice. Nietzsche’s philosophical nihilism radically changed the concept of self, which is now recognized as something invented and projected by the onlooker onto the subject. This led to the notion of the reading self as something constructed through language and as an act of memory that ‘provides the continuity which allows a sense of identity’ (73). Today we often define the sense of self through the act of encounter—an action that emphasizes the relational nature of the self as self and the self as other—so that a cosmopolitan subject often emerges as someone in the process of being re-fractured and redefined. As Peter Boenisch suggests, ‘today subjectivity is not supported as an expression of “authentic self” or “ideological misrecognition”’; it asserts ‘a subjective

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position of formal self-reflexivity that always maintains a distance from itself and thereby can never become identical with itself’ (2003, 112). Constructed relationally through a theatre performance, in which information and energy are exchanged between artist and viewers, cosmopolitan subjectivity can be revealed (a) historically through the relation of the self to personal memory and forgetting and to the collective history of a nation; (b) socially in the relation of the self to society, as seen in identity politics—the self as other and the self as part of a group; (c) philosophically and ethically, as the responsibility of the self to oneself and to the other; and (d) as an aesthetic activity, constructed through the relation of the self to the self through arts. Cosmopolitan theatre utilizes devices of relational dramaturgy (Boenisch 2014; Pewny et al. 2014) to bring about an encounter between the spectator and the work of art, thereby confronting its audiences with resurfacing national, cultural, and ideological traditions and requiring our ‘radical relation to our histories, subjectivities and identities’ (Boenisch 2003, 128). The encounter—both as a dramaturgical device on stage and as a gesture of theoretical conceptualization—serves as this study’s central metaphor and facilitates discussion of the complex workings of cosmopolitan theatre. I use the notion of encounter to speak of the live theatrical work as a social, performative, philosophical, and aesthetic event, when several independent subjects come together to form new environments for intellectual, emotional, and affectual collaborations. In its social dimensions, the encounter can take place at a border-crossing, in a zone of economic exchange or a (military) conflict, and as a gesture of creating a place for dialogue or an imagined community (Anderson 1991). In its philosophical dimensions, it can be an experience itself or ‘the passage and departure toward the other’ (Derrida 2001, 103). As a performative category, the encounter can serve as a collision of conflictual forces which takes place between (1) agents of action in the dramatic world, such as characters; (2) agents of action in the dramatic world and material elements of the performance, such as performers’ bodies, objects, media, and space; (3) the material elements of the performance; and (4) all the elements of performance mentioned above plus the spectator. As a category of aesthetics, the encounter can be a state of mind or an aesthetic illusion, conditioned by the act of experiencing a work of art (Wolf 2013, 13–14). The aesthetic encounter requires the re-centring of the self as an (imaginary) immersion into the newly constructed world of performance; it implies splitting subjectivity into two separate consciousnesses—an observing ego and an

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experiencing ego (16). This ontological split of self—as the participating self and the observing self—becomes the major mechanism for constructing subjectivity in cosmopolitan theatre and thus constitutes the object of this study. In other words, in this book I aim to shift the discussion of the ethics of encounter from the self (us)/other (them) paradigm to the self as other formula and produce a new understanding of subjectivity as embodied self, conditioned by its material and cultural situation. Thanks to our ability to speak, act, narrate, and ascribe actions to other persons, we can stage our own vulnerability and our relationships with the world. The embodied self never functions through abstract categories of being: one’s corporeality is tightly interconnected with and reflects one’s historical situation, biography, and sense of the present. Theatre has the unique power to stage this encounter of self as other. It favours encounter as its special creative methodology and uses the ‘dialectics of a standstill’ as the spectator’s meeting point with oneself as other (Rokem 2000, 182). To better understand this dynamic, I suggest a theoretical model of the theatrical encounter as an atomic cell with the divided self of the cosmopolitan artist in its centre. This model stems from my previous research into the aesthetics of theatre in exile (Meerzon 2012), in which I defined the exilic condition as a past/present or here/there binary. This binary configures the exile’s life journey as a tripartite beginning-middle-end structure, in which the journey unfolds from the point of departure to the point of arrival, with no return possible. In this book, I propose to rethink this trajectory by opening the past/present binary of exile into the simultaneity of cosmopolitanism: a rhizomatic process of becoming that reflects the position of the cosmopolitan subject who is constantly on the move and forced by the conditions of labour, politics, or physical and economic upheaval to seek new opportunities elsewhere. This type of intercultural encounter is reflected in cosmopolitan performances, which frequently focus on the multicultural and multilingual urbanite torn between the accelerated time of hyper-consumption and hyper-productivity and the stillness of nothingness, when an individual feels ‘crushed by the empty period of time in his/ her life’ (Lipovetsky 2004, 60). These performances mirror the effects of cultural globality, which constructs a cosmopolitan persona out of the divided self (Fig. 1.1). The nucleus of the proposed model stands for this fluent identity of the cosmopolitan subject. The floating outer orbits of the model represent the artistic and personal challenges faced by the cosmopolitan artist, including the economic conditions of work, the chosen subject matter, the material,

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Fig. 1.1  Alamy stock vector by Paulo Gomez. (Image ID: H7JNX4)

and the media. Much like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, these floating orbits stand for exterior variables which also influence the making of the divided self. These variables reflect the instability, ambiguity, and irregularity of the cultural, financial, and material circumstances that condition the work of a cosmopolitan artist. So often theatre performance becomes a space for individual artistic encounters where imagined communities of global risk (Beck 2011) can be enacted and analysed. Speaking of the divided self in such general terms, I realize, presents a certain danger of involuntarily slipping into essentialist thinking, which associates travel with privilege. It can also approximate cosmopolitanism to political and social utopia, envisioning the figure of the cosmopolitan traveller only as a privileged subject, standing apart from and above the realities of modern migration. To avoid this slippage, in what follows I trace a brief history of the figure of the cosmopolitan traveller or stranger and how its place and reception have changed in Western philosophical thought. * * * The etymology of the Greek word cosmopolis implies an unresolved paradox. Cosmos refers to a universal order as established by nature; polis

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speaks of the order made by people. Positioned between the state and the cosmos, cosmopolitanism signifies negotiation across differences; the tactics of dialogue, listening, and compromise define its mediations. The ideology of cosmopolitanism—as it is known in Western philosophical traditions—originates with Diogenes’s postulate ‘I am a citizen of the world’ and the stoics’ migratory practices, marked by their curiosity and respect for new places and people. Diogenes’s saying suggests that one’s loyalties as a citizen do not necessary lie with one place, but with the universe (Appiah 2005, 271–278). This idea links today’s cosmopolitan subject to the practices of mobility. These practices imagine and construct a cosmopolitan subject as radicant, a being ‘caught between the need of a connection with its environment and the forces of uprooting, between globalization and singularity, between identity and opening to the other’ (Bourriaud 2009, 51). Permanent exile is the destiny of the radicant, while their lifestyle reflects the political and economic practices of late capitalism. Being ‘[a]n object of negotiation’ and ‘a mode of thought based on translation’ (54), this radicant ‘can no longer count on a stable environment; he is doomed to be exiled from himself and summoned to invent the nomad culture that the contemporary world requires’ (77). Michael Cronin identifies these practices as cultural cosmopolitanism (2006), whereby the cosmopolitan subject acts as an involuntary translator of its meanings and experiences (11), someone who can stand outside singular locations and traditions, interrogating oneself and the world. Transnational artists, whose work comprises the bulk of the case studies in this book, are cultural cosmopolitans, since they constantly work across languages, multiple modes of artistic and economic production, and politics. They also negotiate forms of artistic production and reception; thus they help create the conditions of performative in-betweenness (Fischer-­ Lichte 2014, 12–13), in which an encounter between the agents of action takes place and where their subjectivity—oneself as the other in the context of one’s personal life experiences and as the subject of history— is staged. Although historically cosmopolitanism was already popular with the early Christians, who believed that ‘people of all nations can become “fellow-­citizens with the saints”’ (Kleingeld and Brown 2014), this conceptual thinking did not gain momentum until the Enlightenment. The rise of international trade, the growth of the Western empires, and the discovery of the new lands contributed to the idea and practice of world

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mobility; these events also enabled the ‘emergence of a notion of human rights and a philosophical focus on human reason’ (2014). From Diderot to Hume, from Voltaire to Jefferson and Kant, the philosophers of the time subscribed to the ‘attitude of open-mindedness and impartiality. A cosmopolitan was someone who was not subservient to a particular religious or political authority, someone who was not biased by particular loyalties or cultural prejudice’ (2014). For example, the French philosopher Montesquieu, a true patriot of his own country and one of the first advocates of such cosmopolitanism, was himself a renowned traveller. He recognized cosmopolitanism as ‘the notion of human sociability’ (Kristeva 1991, 128) and advocated the wellbeing of any community in its function as ‘an international society made possible by the development of trade’ (130). Montesquieu saw Europe as a unified nation based on respectful interactions between neighbours, so that ethics was detrimental to his political programme. He warned his fellow contemporaries against the dangers of the juridical distinction between the rights of a man and the rights of a citizen. ‘Montesquieu’s cosmopolitism was the consequence of his fundamental concern to turn politics into a space of possible freedom. His “Modernism” is to be understood as a rejection of unified society for the sake of a coordinated diversity’ (133). In the philosophical work that followed Montesquieu’s thought, including Voltaire’s Candide, the idea emerged of the journey into a foreign land as a process of learning something new about others and something profound about oneself. In Voltaire’s time, it was customary ‘to leave one’s homeland in order to enter other climes, mentalities, and governments’, but it was also understood that this departure was to be ‘undertaken only to return to oneself and one’s home’ (133). In this philosophical context, the foreigner could turn into a mythological figure or ‘the metaphor of the distance at which we should place ourselves in order to revive the dynamics of ideological and social transformation’ (134). The rise of pejorative narratives about the cosmopolitan as a cross between a trustworthy, sedimentary patriot and a suspiciously mobile foreigner began in the early nineteenth century and arose out of the practices and ideologies of the nation state. Even earlier, traces of these narratives can be found in the writings of Diderot and Rousseau, as well as in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the foundational document of Western democratic consciousness: ‘Basing itself on a universal human nature that the Enlightenment learned to conceive and to respect, the Declaration shifts from the universal notion—“men”—to the

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“political associations” that must preserve their rights, and encounters the historical reality of the “essential political association,” which turns out to be the nation’ (Kristeva 1991, 148). In this context, a private person possesses less value than a citizen; the latter turns into a political object, whose ‘national identification is the essential expression of his sovereignty’ (149). As a citizen, this individual has now become identified by their duties towards the nation, whereas the foreigner turns into a stranger, someone who ‘does not belong to the group’ (95), and so must be denied all the privileges that come with citizenship. The negative consequences of such discourse have been reflected in the juridical and political systems of the nation states. The rhetoric of an anthropological or folk nationalism was articulated in the cultural and geographical imperative of a nation, rooted in the rituals of simple people, who eat, live, pray, and dance together (Sennett 2011, 58–60). The identity of a national subject became directly linked to the concepts of territory and time as something given in its linear and uninterrupted forms, so that a true national subject would not possess self-awareness or self-estrangement, which originates in the experiences and narratives of displacement, foreignness, and strangeness. The political consequences of such nationalist philosophy and the upheavals of history made banishment and exile a commonplace in the twentieth century (Brodsky 1995, 22). They created the figure of the unwelcome and suspicious stranger, who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’ (Simmel 1950, 402). Georg Simmel, the nineteenth-century German sociologist and philosopher, positioned the stranger in the discourse of distance, uncertainty, and disturbance, declaring the practice of free travel dangerous (1950, 402–405). As a form of mobility, foreignness presupposes freedom, the stranger’s acceptance of both the anxiety and the excitement of the journey. To Simmel, however, mobility can turn a reliable citizen into an uncontrollable engine of diversity. The foreigner, Simmel explained, is a trader. An isolated encounter with a trader can be beneficial to the economy; but if the foreigner settles, they can disrupt a self-sufficient community. Not being committed to the customs or habits of the group, the stranger ‘embodies that synthesis of nearness and distance’ (404). This synthesis makes the stranger’s view objective; but with objectivity comes detachment from one’s responsibilities to the group. By recognizing objectivity and freedom as two paradoxical but interconnected conditions of the experience and mindset of the stranger, Simmel set the stage for Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the flâneur (1983) and Edward Said’s work on exile (2000).

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Benjamin’s flâneur was a bohemian and a dandy, a detached observer of his day and history, someone from an economically stable and educated class. Benjamin traces the origins of flâneurism to the nineteenth-century panorama literature with flâneur serving as a detective discovering the physiology of the emerging urban lifestyle. Strolling is the flâneur’s occupation; it provides them with ‘the best prospects’ of the city and vindicates their ‘idleness’ (Benjamin 1983, 41). At the same time, the flâneur ‘only seems to be indolent, for behind this indolence there is the watchfulness of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant’ (41). This separation between the gaze, contemplation, and experience makes the flâneur a foreigner and a stranger. In fact, in Modernist thought and experience, the stranger becomes a perfect example and even a fetish of the cosmopolitan mindset. Stranger-fetishism, Sara Ahmed explains, is rooted in our prejudice and obsession with the figure of the stranger as alien (Ahmed 2010, 2): the stranger is someone who invades the territory to which I belong and so (allegedly) destroys the safety of my community. Not surprisingly, we often trace the philosophical and artistic origins of Modernist philosophy and the historical avant-garde in arts to ‘stateless citizens, renegades, exiles, turncoats’ (Bourriaud 2009, 76). Many avant-garde artists sought the artistic devices needed to portray the subjectivity of the flâneur and the sense of rupture and dissonance that marks their consciousness. Often, they opted for the artistic strategies of fragmentation, suspension of disbelief, syncopation, distorted point of view, and grotesque to reflect this condition of being a stranger. They also mixed autobiographical and memory narratives with surrealist imagery to depict the alienating power of the voyage as a separation of the gaze from the experience, of appearance from desire, of self from other, and of self from oneself. In this way they can be said to have often practised the aesthetics of exilic performative (Meerzon 2012). If during the twentieth-century interwar period the word ‘cosmopolitanism’ had acquired a pejorative meaning, in the years after WWII, in the period of post-colonial and independence movements, the stranger turned into the protagonist of banishment and political exile. Edward Said defined exile as a condition of loss and forgetting, something ‘strangely compelling to speak about but terrible to experience’ (Said 2000, 1). Whether forced or self-imposed, exile can easily turn into an ‘unhealable rift, forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’ (1). However, at the core of the exilic drive is the act of resistance: an individual standing against the state. As banishment, exile often results

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in a state of sorrow and personal marginality, but it can be also an invitation to grow up, to welcome one’s capacity for reinventing oneself. It was Hannah Arendt who suggested that after WWII our view of the world must drastically change (1994 [1943]). Recently, the refugee—an exile forced to leave their country of birth and settlement to seek safety—has become a central preoccupation of political philosophy, with Giorgio Agamben proposing that the refugee is perhaps ‘the only category in which one may see today […] the forms and limits of a coming political community’ (2008, 90). A refugee, stripped of their rights as a citizen, represents the essence of the so-called naked life, which the bureaucracy of the nation state tends to undermine. Thus, Agamben insists, the right of movement and asylum ‘must no longer be considered as the conceptual category’ (94). In this argument, Agamben makes a philosophical and political leap impossible to achieve through the logic of immobility or settlement. To continue this line of argument, Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a further deliberation on freedom of mobility as a fundamental right (2006). To him, the idea of a cosmopolitan citizen who belongs to the human community is concretized through this citizen’s willingness to take an interest in the lives, the practices, and the beliefs of others. According to Appiah, ‘cosmopolitanism begins with conversation across boundaries’, and so it ‘encourages us to embrace both local and universal loyalties and allegiances and denies that they necessarily come into conflict with each other’ (Seifikar 2008, 307–308). Appiah’s position echoes the views of that long-standing advocate of human diversity, Stuart Hall, who mobilized the concept of cultural and social conjuncture as a manifestation of ‘related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different tempos’ but condensed within one historical moment and political space (Hall 1979, 14). Ulrich Beck takes this idea further: he defines cosmopolitanism as a newly imagined community of global risk, which emerges as the result of the ‘global interconnectivity between people and states, endorsing the end of the “global other”’ (2011, 1348). He proposes a rethink of Kant’s view of cosmopolitanism as ‘something active, a task, a conscious and voluntary choice, clearly the affair of an elite’, as now something mundane, banal, and coercive (1348). This new cosmopolitanism must be understood as cosmopolitan realism (Rumford 2013, 102–107), the process of cosmopolitization taking place ‘behind the façade of persisting national spaces, jurisdictions and labels, even as national flags continue to be raised and national attitudes, identities, and consciousness remain

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dominant’ (Beck 2011, 1348). Since the global other is now amidst us, the question becomes ‘how can strangers—constructed as members of imagined national communities—be turned into neighbours?’ (1349); for now ‘we’ cannot remain safely locked within the binaries of methodological nationalism. In this sociological scenario, the ‘we’ appears vulnerable, divided, and as much at risk as the ‘other’. Beck’s proposal leads the way to Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that today’s world resembles the world of proto-nationalist discourses of the late eighteenth century (2014, 262). The new cosmopolitanism, emerging from the circumstances of exile, asylum seeking, work-related travel, and cultural tourism, must be defined as a work-in-progress and a work-in-process (262), in which the new cosmopolitan subjectivity—the phenomenon of rupture and the figure of the cosmopolitan patriot—emerges (Appiah 2006). The practice of cosmopolitanism comprises transcultural and multilingual modes of experience; it is ‘neither local/national nor international, but both at once’ (Simpson 2005, 145), being equally rooted in the collective tendencies of localization and nationalism and in globalization through the (in)voluntary re-settlement of populations, as well as in economic migration, asylum seeking, and nomadism. To defend cosmopolitanism today becomes increasingly difficult, for in order to fully enjoy the uncertainty of a journey, of sitting at a bus stop or in an airport waiting room, one is obliged to rely on one’s physical safety, financial security, an internationally recognized type of citizenship, and guaranteed employment. At the same time, without utopian discourses that at their core uphold the ideals of freedom and democracy, it will be simply impossible to resist the rising practices and ideologies of populism, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. It is not surprising that in her recent book For a Left Populism, such a fierce advocate of the political Left as Chantal Mouffe argues that the time has come for the Left to reclaim its political weight. In seeking to reconstruct the peoples’—the emphasis on the plural implying the diversity of the group—or the collective we of ‘the workers, the immigrants, and the precious middle class’ (Mouffe 2018, 24), the New Left must fight for ‘the radicalization of democracy’ (24). It must use devices of populist performance, including affect, to mobilize these new peoples as ‘a collective subject apt to launch a political offensive in order to establish a new hegemonic formation within the liberal democratic framework’ (80). Cosmopolitan theatre exemplifies one of the versions of such political performance, since it enables us to confront our own biases and question our own prejudices.

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Having watched the work of cosmopolitan artists and discussed what travelling means to them, I find it rather naive to regard the life these artists lead on the road only as privilege, being in control, and holding power. The ability to move as one wishes can be liberating, just as moving from one place to another can be helpful in seeking job opportunities and self-­ growth, but it is not necessarily easier than being settled. Life on the road involves labour and effort. It depends on one’s skills at negotiation and willingness to take risks. It relies on management, not emotion. It maintains business partnerships not friendships. And it requires living on standby, being ready to relocate, available to begin a new project, a new enterprise, or a new commitment at any given moment in time or space. Bojana Kunst describes this phenomenon as ‘an artist at work’ (2015), a form of social and economic engagement that not only defines the process of making an artistic project but also spills into its aesthetics. It also reflects the unstable work conditions that often affect the consciousness of cosmopolitan artists, making them politically engaged, carrying the guilt of their survival and success within the work. As a result, they often advocate transnational dialogue over confrontation and rely on translation both as their work strategy and as an aesthetic principle. Their performances are also often characterized by the slow pace of the artistic construction, and their making is marked by estrangement, multilingualism, and interdisciplinarity, which serve to mobilize the aesthetic protocols of motion and nomadism. These artists/strangers are also pensive travellers and narrators of historical acts of destruction, often inventing various recipes for social interaction. Frequently, cosmopolitan theatre not only reflects the world offstage but also constructs the so-called common spaces of the post-­ national and post-multicultural state (Dib et al. 2008). Because their work originates in multicultural urban centres, it tends to address as many forms of peoples’ movement as we know today. Some productions dramatize the current refugee crisis and stories of individuals forced to flee their homes; others focus on the experience of erasure and the impossibility of return. Some study the anxiety of travel experienced by second-generation immigrants; others conceive of the journey as a form of memory and a history-­ making. Often these works stage the ambiguity, the anxiety, the fear, the excitement, and the uncertainty that come with being on the road. Such experiences can be shared by many people, including those forced into travelling, whose journey is characterized by mortal dangers with often no real hope for survival, and by those who enjoy travelling. Yet one thing is clear about the chosen works and this project devoted to them: nothing

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else resembles such journeys. For those who have never experienced the horrors of flight, no power of imagination or representation can adequately convey this ordeal. Mass migration involves nations falling apart and new societies being formed, often growing independently of their hosts, in the dangerous parallel societies of refugee camps. It is marked by human trafficking and the new social hierarchies emerging within the underprivileged, unemployed, often racially profiled, physically and morally exhausted, and hence explosive migrant communities. Finding themselves in this political plight, the artists examined in this study insist that in the history of the flight of peoples there cannot be any righteous or disengaged persons. Everybody involved in the movement of populations is implicated—physically, politically, and ethically. * * *

Cosmopolitan Theatre: Trying on a New Definition In defining the political, artistic, and ethical practices of cosmopolitan theatre, I take my inspiration from Rebecca Walkowitz’s work on critical cosmopolitanism in literature (2006). Walkowitz identifies critical cosmopolitanism as a type of philosophical and artistic practice that reaches ‘beyond the nation […] comparing, distinguishing, and judging among different versions of transnational thought’ (2006, 2). This practice reflects cosmopolitan artists’ personal conditions of movement, be it the experience of a refugee displaced by war, an asylum seeker, or an economic migrant. It encourages these artists’ adoption of a transnational position and multiple points of view. Thus, in their critical attitude to the world, cosmopolitan artists often ‘emphasize the conditions of limited or suspended agency, and they ask us how the conditions of belonging are bound up in the production, classification, and reception of literary narratives’ (4). In literature, critical cosmopolitanism originated in the practices of Modernism, as exemplified in the work of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald, among others. It emerged as ‘a type of philosophical interrogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject’ (Walkowitz 2006, 8). Stylistically, it used the

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devices of suspended perception and emphasized artistic composition as time sense (Stein 1926). Aesthetically, it rested upon two principles: ‘an aversion of heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the centre that assume a constant distinction between who is seeing and what is seen’ (Walkowitz 2006, 2). Such a point of view implied ‘double consciousness, comparison, negation, and persistent self-reflection’ (2); it mobilized the use of ‘imitation and parody’ and ‘the processes and political contexts of knowing and recognizing’ (7). In its narrative procedures, the artists of critical cosmopolitanism sought to showcase their ‘distrust of civilizing processes’ (4) and advocated the role of literature and the performing arts in disseminating knowledge. The centripetal and centrifugal forces of history and travelling created the patterns of international transgression that characterized this work, and often the topics of border-crossing and cultural encounter constituted its subject matter. Many ideological and artistic tendencies of critical cosmopolitanism find new urgency in contemporary performance practices, since they engage with the political and social consequences of migration. Today’s theatre of cosmopolitanism—as I propose to analyse it—originates at two axes of meaning: as a social phenomenon and as an aesthetic condition. As a social phenomenon, cosmopolitan theatre is marked by the economic situation and personal mobility of its makers. There is an urgent need to talk about global migration as a cause for transnational encounters, the emergence of globalized models of economics, and their positive and negative outcomes but also about how these phenomena trigger new nationalism, which rejects the global other and embraces the traditional values of the nation state (Valluvan 2019). For these reasons, a major focus of this study is the theatrical events created by transnational theatre artists for international audiences, who gather at international theatre festivals, and for those urban and cosmopolitan spectators, sometime migrants themselves, who are concerned with the changing political climate of our time, seek and believe in political impact of a theatrical encounter, and attend local and touring productions dedicated to these topics. This practice creates performative encounters of cosmopolitan ecology (Knowles 2017), characterized by ‘the production of sociality’ and ‘communal forms of collaboration’ (Kunst 2015, 53). Accordingly, one of the economic tactics of cosmopolitan theatre is to generate transcultural encounters shaped by the ‘shifts in late capitalism’ (56). In fact, in its modes of production, cosmopolitan theatre often relies on international capital,

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labour, and partnerships, for its ideological models stem from the principles of interconnectedness that also characterize the social workings of globalization. The funding systems within which cosmopolitan theatres operate are diverse and difficult to systematize. They include state funding and private donations, corporate sponsorships, personal collaborations, and grass-roots initiatives. What makes these practices similar is the companies’ and individual artists’ apprehension and often dependency on such collaborations. The goal of such collaborations is often to ensure the individual artists and their companies’ participation in prestigious international festivals and subsequent transnational touring. This financial model also conditions the subject matter of cosmopolitan theatre, which frequently has at its centre the figure of a traveller whose human rights have been violated and for whom the audience’s sympathy is elicited. Questions of displacement and border-crossing, home and belonging, divided subjectivities and hybrid identities tend to dominate the individual stories told in this type of theatre. The artists’ recognition of their personal responsibility in telling the stories of intercultural encounter underpins the sense of privilege that many of their performances share, so that they frequently make questions of ethics and representation the cornerstone of their works. Moreover, cosmopolitan theatre invites its spectators to recognize the individual within the group, thereby creating a unique collaborative space to interrogate the future of democracy. As an artistic practice, cosmopolitan theatre is also difficult to define and systematize. Often it addresses the fundamental gap between representation and re-enactment, questioning the encounter principle that motivates any type of live performance (Rebellato 2009, 78). Frequently, its dramatic investigation is centred on an individual in crisis—someone in the midst of a physical and existential journey, to whom the state of personal liminality has become the new norm. Positioned between cultures, traditions, linguistic practices, and economic models, these individuals identify with many, often conflicting, points of view. Simultaneously, they bear allegiance to different nations, while claiming their personal linguistic and cultural position of multiplicity as the new authenticity and truth. The parallax of writing, speaking, or performing (Aciman 2011)—the suspension of time and memory and the possibility of encountering one’s own self—functions in these works as an act of interpretation and repository of individual experiences. Many cosmopolitan performances stage the phenomenon of the divided self to illustrate the psychological and the cultural outcomes of being cosmopolitan on stage. They often infuse the aesthetics

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of their productions with Brechtian estrangement, which enables theatre audiences to recognize themselves as subjects of divided subjectivity. It helps them become aware of the I as myself and I as other offstage. Many cosmopolitan theatre makers, in other words, explore the condition of liminality as their personal place of nostalgia, melancholia, and also privilege. At the same time, they identify fear of the other as the source of the hatred, xenophobia, racism, and hostility that characterize today’s world. They use dramaturgical tactics of fragmentation and deconstruction, uncanny and vertigo, multilingualism, space/time simultaneity, audience displacement, and immersion as linking devices between the critical cosmopolitanism of the historical avant-garde and its contemporary forms. Such works capitalize on Appadurai’s idea that imagination unfolds beyond borders, cultures, or languages, so that it becomes more inclusive than just the idea of global diversity (2017, 1–5). Because cosmopolitan theatre is made by subjects who often find themselves torn between many cultures, traditions, and linguistic practices, it relies greatly upon these artists’ autobiographical and self-reflective narratives. These narratives reveal the cosmopolitan artist’s ‘focus on the self as a creative resource’ to bridge the transcultural gaps of everyday encounter and ‘intercultural dramaturgy’ (Rudakoff 2014, 151). Their performances are often characterized by a dual vector, pointing simultaneously at the artist’s personal experience and demonstrating the freedom to engage with the works, traditions, and customs of other cultures. It is not surprising that many works discussed in this book have been presented within the frameworks of international theatre festivals, either in Europe or North America. Just as the conceptual underpinnings of this book stem from the Western philosophical tradition, the selected theatre and performance projects reflect Western theatrical traditions as well. In constructing its fictional worlds and characters, cosmopolitan theatre focuses on the phenomenological idea of the human body as a receptacle of one’s histories and memories. In its semiotic functions, the body of the cosmopolitan traveller turns into an object of our gaze and contemplation and thus becomes the other. As a manifestation of Freudian uncanny, the stranger’s body foregrounds the deep disconnect we carry within our own selves and towards the other (Ahmed 2000, 51–52). The case studies examined in this book emphasize our fascination, both positive and otherwise, with strangeness as difference and the sameness of not belonging. In this context, the colour of one’s skin, our gait, and the gestures we produce, the sounds we make, that is, the materiality of the body, become the

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fundamental markers of foreignness that differentiate between the right of the man and the right of the citizen (Kristeva 1991, 96–97). Capitalizing on this fascination with strangeness, therefore, cosmopolitan theatre foregrounds the materiality of the actor’s body and stages it as a tension between the body of the performer and their character, each collapsing into the other. Like new interculturalism, which defines the embodied experiences of hybridity, cosmopolitan theatre ‘represents a conceptual, processual, embodied lived condition driven by one’s own multiple affiliations to cultures, nations and faiths’ (Mitra 2015, 15). The artist’s position as an insider-outsider results in an embodied view of their own liminality as someone who experiences two or more cultures at the same time; and thus in its performative manifestations, theatrical cosmopolitanism often engages with those ‘cultural exchanges that operate primarily at a corporeal level’ (23). Issues of language and body constitute the focal points of the first and second parts of this volume. In many cosmopolitan theatre practices, the actors’ voices are separated from their bodies, and multilingual and sound-based scripts or (syn)aesthetic playtexts are generated (Machon 2009). This performance device identifies the work with language and fosters the paradigms of polyglot theatre (Carlson 2006). Cosmopolitan artists are very often multilingual: they rely on the phatic power of words, turning the dramatic dialogue into music. The chorus, whether the speech of many spoken in one voice or the speech of one character enunciated by many voices, is one of these devices. By using the chorus as a type of contrapuntal construction, when ‘two contradictory themes [are] playing at the same time and creating a harmonious melody’ (Said 2010, xii), cosmopolitan theatre investigates such common strategies of encounter as shock and surprise, déjà vu, mirroring, and repetition. The creation of an emotive soundscape may constitute one of the political devices of such a work, since many artists refuse to translate their multilingual texts into any of the official language(s) of their target audiences. By so doing, they challenge the ideological foundations of the nation state, rooted in the dominance of one language, ethnicity, and culture, and make multilingualism the leading paradigm of today’s social, political, and cultural interactions between peoples within one nation and across borders. The two other performative categories to be analysed are space and time. In cosmopolitan theatre, the theatrical space becomes a philosophical construct; it can serve as an unlocalized non-place, a Theatrum Mundi approach, a representation of movement without progression, or a version of Beckett’s existentialism transformed into a sociological and spatial

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problem (Rae 2006, 20). Cosmopolitan theatre often strips the stage of any markers of a domestic, national, or international location (Rebellato 2009, 81), so that in its referential functions it acquires the status of a non-place and serves as a representation of stillness in motion without progression (Rae 2006, 20). In this way, cosmopolitan theatre forces our imagination to unfold beyond borders, cultures, or languages and demands inclusivity rather than mere global diversity. It aspires to create theatrical communitas on and off stage, and it uses the dramaturgy of walking as a spatial-temporal tactic to activate its spectators’ mechanisms of self-­ reflection. Since it is ‘through bodies being in contact with space [,] that we perceive the world around us and relations to that world’ (Briginshaw 2001, 1), the action of moving on foot, individually or in a group, creates both a temporal community of refuge and a separation between the subject and the landscape. In order to bring the idea of an empty space to life, cosmopolitan theatre works across performative disciplines: it engages dialogue, dance, music, performance installations, and the immersive and participatory practices of activism to speak to the conditions of confusion, relationality, and non-belonging produced by living on the road. This confusion generates a deeper focus on issues of subjectivity: by evoking the practices of vernacular cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan theatre frequently engages with Freudian anxiety, double consciousness, repetition, and the uncanny. Breaking the self into multiples is one example of how this form of theatre can evoke and interrogate non-representational relations between self and identity, character and actor, fictional world and theatre space. Capitalizing on the devices of postdramatic performance (Lehmann 2006), cosmopolitan theatre often strips characters of their identity, turning them into fragments and abstractions of language, crafting character as a device of the postdramatic text (Barnett 2008). At the level of reception, cosmopolitan theatre offers its audiences the possibility of self-encounter, inviting the privileged individual to contemplate their role in a world of increasing social and political precarity. Silvija Jestrovic identifies such reflection as interference—a device of relational aesthetics that connects the performance back to its audiences in a gesture of ‘associative thinking and excessive meaning making’ (2016, 351), a gesture tightly connected to the very concrete images of social and environmental disasters taking place outside the theatrical space. Jestrovic evokes a highly personalized memory of her encounters with would-be immigrants to Britain in the Pas-de-Calais region of France which conditioned her engagement with an installation by Takehisa Kosugi: the

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associations evoked speak to the psychosomatic power of reception imposed by relational aesthetics (353). Watching a play of echoes, reminiscences, associations, gaps, and evocations, we ‘need to remember that what it is is not what must be’ (Rebellato 2009, 79), a phenomenon identified by Peggy Phelan as the flow of possibilities and filling the gap between the truth and the representation (1992). Cosmopolitan artists capitalize on immersive experiences of watching live theatre as they aim to mobilize the stage/audience encounter and so create new zones of contact. Constructing such zones—whether in the case of a traditional performance or in more experiential forms of participatory theatre—presupposes practising new levels of proximity and trust between performers and spectators, thus enabling affective citizenship (Parati 2017) and enacting performative communities of hope (Dolan 2005). * * *

On Methodological Considerations As I am interested in the close interconnections between politics and aesthetics and seek to address these questions, I continuously refer to certain aesthetic theories of political performance developed by Erika Fischer-­Lichte (2008), Christopher Balme (1999), Marvin Carlson (2006), Jill Dolan (2005), Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo (2007), and Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006), among many others. These studies offer different conceptualizations of contemporary theatre. Their shared methodology involves the comparative analysis of international productions that challenge and enrich existing theatre aesthetics in order to evoke the history of the present. Each seeks to build either a historiography and taxonomy of the artistic devices of the chosen phenomenon (e.g. syncretic theatre) or its grounded theory (as in the case of postdramatic theatre). My objectives are less ambitious, since I aim only to offer a set of analytical categories to examine the working of critical cosmopolitanism in theatre today. In terms of geographical scope, most of the case studies in this volume examine productions developed, performed, and toured in North America (including Canada) and Europe. My choice of performances for each case study was also conditioned by the advantages and the limitations of global movement, since, even as a Canadian theatre scholar

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able to travel freely across the world, my exposure to international theatre work is restricted by my place of residence (Ottawa); my financial, professional, and family obligations; as well as the languages I speak. Accordingly, although this book seeks to be inclusive, I do recognize its limitations and so do not aspire to offer a comprehensive picture of all the possible techniques of staging divided subjectivity or all possible varieties of cosmopolitan theatre. I do, however, aim to describe, examine, and define its principal political and ethical functions and outcomes. In selecting my examples, I follow Edward Said’s advice to study individual texts and writings that make a ‘collective body of texts’ gathered under ‘a discursive formation’ (1979, 23)—orientalism in his case and cosmopolitanism in mine. Said’s approach was anthropological, as he examined a wide range of scholarly and artistic texts, personal accounts of travelling, political treaties, and religious and philosophical studies, all of which collectively served to draw a picture of orientalism. ‘The unity of the large ensemble of texts I analyse,’ Said wrote, ‘is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each other’ (1979, 23) and hence share methodologies of representation, political and thematic concerns, and artistic technologies of constructing the discourse of orientalism. Said used the method of close reading of individual texts to show that historically and geographically they reflected the artistic imaginations of individuals, who had grown up within the imperialist practices of their own countries. He wanted to ‘reveal the dialect between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his[her] work is a contribution’ (24). By analogy, the plays and the productions I have chosen for this project are also deeply interconnected. Because they use images and references of displacement to capture today’s history, the stories these works tell are deeply informed by their makers’ personal histories of movement. The hybrid or divided self of the cosmopolitan artist—whether a first- or second-generation (im)migrant—often constitutes the subject matter of the chosen works. My analytical methodology is twofold: first, I examine how the chosen theatrical works are structured and what patterns they employ in order to create meaning. Then, I analyse how these narrative and performative patterns stimulate responses in audiences, that is to say, how they stage the implied receiver (Iser 1974). In doing so, I elaborate on Jill Dolan’s assertion that theatre possesses the best ‘apparatus’—‘its liveness, the potential it holds for real social exchange, its mortality, its openness to human interactions that life outside this magical space prohibits’—for creating utopia

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on stage and in the auditorium (2005, 63). In a sense, this volume is itself a type of cosmopolitan production, since it describes an impossibility: a (theatre) performance which provides a creative articulation of a social utopia and invites its audiences to take ‘a leap of faith’ regarding the possibilities of the cosmopolitan lifestyle and interpersonal conduct. Such a performance does not prescribe a one-way transition from the experience of performance to the experience of a cosmopolitan subject or anticipate that the act of watching can turn into the act of doing. What such theatre offers, however, is a moment of provocation—either in its subject matter or in its artistry—that turns into a moment of stillness, which allows the spectator to experience a pause and hence an encounter with the self as other. To better understand how this strategy works, I propose to examine the chosen performances from the perspective of their construction, assuming that a model spectator is already built into the work of art. For this purpose, I adopt the theory of aesthetic response, which studies how an artwork impacts its implied receivers (Iser 1974). An examination of the never-occluded gap between the artist’s intention and the receiver’s interpretation of it leads me to make a series of observations on how cosmopolitan subjectivity is staged. I argue that by using performative and narrative techniques of distraction, cosmopolitan theatre generates aesthetic pleasure as the audience’s participation in the performance, which establishes new ‘connections between perception and thought’ (Iser 1974, xiv) and enables the spectator to encounter the self. Here again, my thinking approximates Dolan’s, when she cites the phenomenon of utopian performative as an affect or a ‘present-tense relationship between performers and spectators in a particular historical moment and a specific geographic location’ (Dolan 2005, 65). Our encounters with cosmopolitan theatre practices can thus become ‘effective and pleasurable methods for contemplating visions of a better world’ and ‘reanimate a humanism that can incorporate love, hope, and commonality alongside a deep understanding of difference’ (64). Such aspirations can be utopian in themselves, but as many theatre theoreticians have already argued, we cannot underestimate the power of the political impact produced by a collectively shared emotion. This is the core of Dolan’s argument: that theatre holds a unique power to provoke and make us experience this social emotion, which can lead to the emergence, even if momentarily, of ‘inarticulate spontaneous communitas’, a ‘glimpse of the no-place [which] we can reach only through feeling, together’ (65–66).

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This approach is not unique. Susan Bennett had already established important links between reception theory and performance (1997, 20–86), which further fostered impressive scholarship on theatre audiences. My focus, however, is not the actual theatregoers of globalization and cosmopolitanism (Freshwater 2009); instead I turn to philosophical, linguistic, intermedial, and interdisciplinary theories of aesthetic encounter in order to examine the performative strategies of constructing a model spectator (De Marinis 1987, 102). The model spectator is a hypothetical construct; it differs from the empirical one in that it refers to the dramaturgical and performative strategies within the work of art, which suggest ‘the manner of interpretation anticipated by the text [production in my case—YM] and written into it’ (102). Studying these dramaturgical and performative strategies of making theatre of cosmopolitanism can help our better understanding of how this divided self of hypermodernity is made. It also prompts the use of philosophical, linguistic, and interdisciplinary theories of spectator dramaturgy. * * *

On the Layout of the Book This book is structured in three parts: Encounters in Language, Encounters in Body, and Encounters in Time, Space, and History. Each of these parts consists of two chapters that study individual experiences of constructing hypermodern subjectivity (Chaps. 2, 4, and 6) and analyse the placement and work of this individual within the group (Chaps. 3, 5, and 7). Part I, Encounters in Language, examines the dramaturgy of the cosmopolitan encounter in language: the way its theatrical speech act (Lehmann 2011, 38–39) is manifested in mono-, bi-, and multilingual performances of immigration and multiculturalism. Geographically, it focuses on English Canada and Quebec, citing milestones of bi- and multilingual Canadian theatre. Chapter 2 investigates the complexity of the divided self as a place for multilingual, multi-contextual, and multicultural encounters within an autobiographical solo performance, the self being constructed from within, the way we narrate our view of who we are to others. In Chap. 3, I analyse the same problematics applied to a multilingual dramatic dialogue, looking into how one’s subjectivity can be constructed from without: that is, how it emerges through peoples’ multiple

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interpersonal interactions and how others construct our own stories for us and often instead of us. Language plays a primary role here: it becomes a place to experiment with one’s sense of belonging and helps to recognize (one)self as other. In a solo performance produced by a cosmopolitan artist, we often observe a centrifugal movement, away from the defining power of the performer’s mother tongue. When it comes to constructing a multilingual dialogue, we often detect a centripetal drive. An untranslated, multilingual dialogue has the power to put the addressee (whether a fictional character on stage or an audience member) in the position of partial not-knowing, a condition that can mobilize one’s encounter with oneself. Part II, Encounters in Body, examines the dramaturgy of the cosmopolitan encounter in solo performances (Chap. 4) and multi-bodied works or chorus plays (Chap. 5). Unlike Part I, it does not focus on a single geography; rather, it studies a set of international theatre works (mostly European and North American) which thematically, politically, and artistically speak to the benefits and failures of cosmopolitan consciousness and practices. Cosmopolitan actors often perform both as themselves and as the characters they enact. Thus, a theatrical encounter in body refers to the continuous loop of cultural, logical, ethical, and aesthetic recognitions and adjustments that take place within the body of such a performer and between the stage and the audience. The productions studied in Part II range from performance arts to dance and from intermedial installations to autobiographical theatre. Being genre-diverse, the selected case studies present the array of methodological patterns and routines that define the aesthetics and ethics of staging body in the cosmopolitan theatre. For its theoretical framework, Part II uses Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of stranger-fetishism, when the ‘I’ imagines the other as alien and as a fetish (2010, 2). Stranger-fetishism refers to our view of the body as ‘a visual signifier of difference’ and an impassable psychological and physical border that separates the I from the other (44–45). Chapters 4 and 5 study this performative construction of the other on stage, the ways it capitalizes on the irresolvable dialectic between the individual body and the body politic. It often marks the relationship between bodies and ‘suggests that the particular body carries traces of the differences that are registered in the bodies of others’ (44). Part III, Encounters in Time, Space, and History, is devoted to the encounter between the stage and the audience, as it takes place in the spatial-temporal continuum of cosmopolitan theatre. In Chap. 6,

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proximity, intimacy, gaze, and immersive listening are examined as principal devices of the audience’s experiences of authenticity in the controlled settings of one-to-one performances. These productions foreground the spectator’s solitude and challenge the expectations of trust implied in immersive theatre practices. They provide their spectators with a chance to recognize the uncanny difference between the ‘I’ and myself as other. Chapter 7 contains an additional focus on the principles of audience construction as communitas. By addressing their audiences as a collective of theatregoers, theatrical events—both those that unfold in designated theatre spaces as traditional or participatory performances and those that take place elsewhere as immersive and durational projects—can make their cosmopolitan spectators/participants aware of their own singularity. In Part III, the work of cosmopolitan spectators is foregrounded in their relational activity as navigators of the encounter and co-creators of the performative event. Here the spectator’s subjectivity is revealed through the power of performative transformation (Fischer-Lichte 2008), when the meaning of a production and its emotional, cultural, social, and political semiosis stem from the audience’s direct and highly personal (physical, tactile, kinetic, and sensorial) encounters with the material elements of performance. I build on this idea by arguing that cosmopolitan theatre can bring an individual spectator to recognize their own divided self as other in the context of their personal life experiences and as a subject of history. * * *

In Lieu of Concluding Remarks I began working on this project five years ago when it seemed somewhat possible to think of cosmopolitanism as a type of transnational consciousness and everyday practice. The late Zygmunt Bauman, for example, fearlessly advocated the notion of cosmopolitanism. As the world was becoming increasingly hostile towards difference—the other, the refugee, the nomad—Bauman spoke of the dangers of building fences. He recognized the panic of migration as a crisis of current political systems: in their attempts to protect the work of their own apparatus, institutions of power often capitalize on peoples’ collective anxieties and fears and thus construct the figural and metaphorical barriers of nationalism. ‘Strangers tend to cause anxiety precisely because of being “strange”’, Bauman wrote

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(2016, 8); but ‘the policy of mutual separation and keeping one’s distance, building walls instead of bridges […] lead nowhere but onto the wasteland of mutual mistrust, estrangement and aggravation’ (18). Learning how to embrace difference and act in dialogue, through conversation, can serve as an antidote to raising fences; it can also lead to adopting, perhaps unconditionally, the politics of hospitality. Cosmopolitanism—a type of social consciousness which promotes competence in co-residing with people of different backgrounds and interest in the wellbeing of the collective—may be seen as another antidote to the issue of fence-building that Bauman described. During these five years, however, many political pillars of Western democracy have fallen. From Donald Trump’s xenophobia and anti-­ immigrant discourse to Brexit, Hungarian and Italian neo-nationalism, repeated instances of antisemitism, including the attack at the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg that took in Monsey, Rockland County, during Hanukah of 2019, and even the pandemic of COVID19,  the world has been catapulted into another major paradigm shift that propagates not only hostility to the other but also militarization of borders and calls for national defence. It also brings back shadows of the past, exemplified in such movements as Generation Identity, which reinforces violence, aggression, and antagonism to each and to the other. With time, therefore, this project— which began as an exercise in contemplation of the divided subjectivity of the cosmopolitan self—has turned into a political endeavour, a gesture of warning and an act of resistance, aspiring to raise awareness of the dangers created by the practices of exclusion. However utopian and privileged the idea of cosmopolitanism can be, without its basic imperatives—such as right for free movement, curiosity towards the other, openness to the encounter, embracing difference, and a transnational mindset—our march into an unknown future, I wish to argue, can be extremely dark and problematic, since it seems that history is about to repeat itself. Performance arts can function as ‘a laboratory of identities’ (Bourriaud 2009, 51) and as a training ground for offstage behaviour. Cosmopolitan theatre, as I seek to demonstrate, can also serve as a reminder that in everyday life there is still potential for transnational encounters and communication, with many artists making the formation of partnerships and practising dialogue across national divisions the driving imperative of their collaborations. The image of Brecht’s Mother Courage, forced by the historical conditions of her time to march through battle fields, negotiate her morals, and trade security and the lives of her children for personal profit,

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has been hovering over the past decade. It is not surprising, therefore, that politically engaged artists of cosmopolitan consciousness, being deeply concerned with the fate of ordinary people in times of great historical experiments when each person’s moral values and beliefs get tested, often choose the aesthetics of Brechtian theatre to remind audiences of their ethical responsibilities for themselves and for the other. The ethics of the encounter—our obligation to recognize the other as oneself—is the shared philosophical imperative of the theatres of cosmopolitanism, whether the encounter is a form of artistic construction, the artists’ work in the rehearsal hall and on stage, or the audiences’ engagement with the given performance. This project, in other words, is dedicated to the work of those politically engaged artists and companies, who continuously practise cosmopolitan philosophy, ways of life and making art, both in their rehearsal halls and on stage. As I also seek to argue, cosmopolitanism does not liberate anyone from the responsibility of taking a moral, ethical, and political stand. Manifested as the artist’s worldview, it encourages them to direct a pointed critical look at the conditions of migration and rising nationalism. It also prompts the questions of the political and philosophical impact that today’s theatre and performance arts can make on their immediate spectators.

Bibliography Aciman, André. 2011. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. Beyond Human Rights. Social Engineering 15: 90–95. Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 2017. Democracy Fatigue. In The Great Regression, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger, 1–12. Cambridge: Polity Press. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New  York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Arendt, Hannah. 1994. We Refugees. In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson, 110–120. Boston: Faber and Faber.

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Balme, Christopher B. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barnett, David. 2008. When Is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14–23. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2017. Symptoms in Search of an Object and a Name. In The Great Regression, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger, 13–25. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2011. Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk. American Behavioral Scientist 55 (10): 1346–1361. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. The Flaneur. In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, 35–66. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Verso. Bennett, Susan. 1997. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 2014. Epilogue: Global Pathways. In The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures, Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, 259–277. London and New York: Routledge. Boenisch, Peter M. 2003. CoMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality in Contemporary Theatre. Theatre Research International 28 (1): 34–45. ———. 2014. Acts of Spectating: The Dramaturgy of the Audience’s Experiences in Contemporary Theatre. In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, ed. Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, 225–243. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses Du Réel. ———. 2009. The Radicant. Translated by James Gussen and Lili Porten. New York: Lukas and Sternberg Press. Briginshaw, Valerie A. 2001. Dance, Space and Subjectivity. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. The Condition We Call Exile. In On Grief and Reason: Essays, 22–35. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Carlson, Marvin. 2006. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New  York: Routledge. De Marinis, Marco. 1987. Dramaturgy of the Spectator. The Drama Review 31 (2): 100–114. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London and New York: Routledge. Dib, Kamal, Ian Donaldson, and Brittany Turcotte. 2008. Integration and Identity in Canada: The Importance of Multicultural Common Spaces. Canadian Ethnic Studies 40 (1): 161–187. Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. London: Routledge. ———. 2014. Introduction: Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking ‘Intercultural Theatre’: Toward an Experience and Theory of Performance beyond Postcolonialism. In The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures, Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, 1–24. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. Transformative Aesthetics—Reflections on the Metamorphic Power of Art. In Transformative Aesthetics, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz, 1–25. New York: Routledge. Freshwater, Helen. 2009. Theatre & Audience. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo. 2007. Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-­ Cultural Transactions in Australasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Stuart. 1979. The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today 23 (1): 14–20. Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Jestrovic, Silvija. 2016. Reading into Soundscapes: Between Ma and Concretization. Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 36 (1–2): 347–365. Kleingeld, Pauline, and Eric Brown. 2014. Cosmopolitanism. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University. Knowles, Ric. 2017. Performing the Intercultural City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Winchester: John Hunt Publishing. Landry, Charles. 2017. The Civic City in a Nomadic World. NAI010 Publishers. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-­ Munby. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. Postdramatic Theatre: A Decade Later. In Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre Ten Years After, ed. Ivan Medenica, 31–47. Belgrade: Anthology of Essays by Faculty of Dramatic Arts 20. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2004. Les Temps Hypermodernes. Paris: Grasset. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)Aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Massey, Dorren. 2014. Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John Bird et  al., 60–70. London and New York: Routledge. Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile – Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Melton, Judith M. 1998. Face of Exile. In Autobiographical Journeys. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Mitra, Royona. 2015. Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a Left Populism. New York: Verso. Parati, Graziella. 2017. Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy. In Proximities and Affect in Literature and Film. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Pewny, Katharina, Johan Callens, and Jeroen Coppens, eds. 2014. Dramaturgies in the New Millennium: Relationality, Performativity and Potentiality, Schriftenreihe Forum Modernes Theater. Vol. 44. Tübingen: Narr Verlag. Phelan, Peggy. 1992. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Rae, Paul. 2006. Where Is the Cosmopolitan Stage? Contemporary Theatre Review 16 (1): 8–22. Rebellato, Dan. 2009. Theatre & Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rokem, Freddie. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Rudakoff, Judith. 2014. Transcultural Dramaturgy Methods. In The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska, 151–157. New  York: Routledge. Rumford, Chris. 2013. The Globalization of Strangeness. New York: Routledge. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Said, Miriam. 2010. Edward Said and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. In Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy, ed. May Telmissany and Stephanie Tara Schwartz, XI–XVI. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Schiller, Nina Glick, and Noel B. Salazar. 2013. Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (2): 183–200. Seifikar, Mohammad Hossein. 2008. Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy/Revue Africaine de Philosophie XXI: 307–314. Sennett, Richard. 2011. The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile. London: Notting Hill Editions. Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Stranger. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 402–408. Glencoe: Free Press. Simpson, David. 2005. The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case of Translation. European Romantic Review 16 (2): 141–152. Stein, Gertrude. 1926. Composition as Explanation. The Dial; a Semi - monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information (1880–1929) (October 1): 0_015. http://search.proquest.com/docview/89687990/.

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Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2019. The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolf, Werner. 2013. Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Zaroulia, Marilena. 2018. Performing that Which Exceeds Us: Aesthetics of Sincerity and Obscenity During ‘the Refugee Crisis’. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23 (2): 179–192.

PART I

Encounters in Language

CHAPTER 2

Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging the Décalage of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

With the increased mobility of the world’s populations, as well as rapid developments in media and digital technologies, multilingualism and its translingual practices (Canagarajah 2013) have become a common form of personal expression and communication of the everyday. Today’s theatre often reflects these practices: language—the product of the socio-­ cultural and temporal context in which it originates and to which it refers (Carlson 2006, 3)—emerges as the focus of its artistic experiments and politics. Cosmopolitan theatre is at the forefront of theatrical multilingualism. Not only does it speak in different voices and accents on stage; it also employs heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1991; Carlson 2006, 19) to reflect the cosmopolitan artist’s biography. Cosmopolitan theatre uses multilingualism to address such common themes as border identity and exclusion in order to dramatize both traumatic and pleasurable encounters between the traveller and the world. For a monolingual subject, an encounter with a new language is not easy. It creates ‘the sensation of having your world turned upside down or inverted’ (Marlatt 1984, 222). At the moment of border-crossing, this encounter can produce ‘a sense of the relativity of both language and reality, as much as it [can lead] to a curiosity about other people’s realities’ (222). Cosmopolitan artists frequently investigate these experiences; they recognize ‘the essential duplicity of language, its capacity to mean several things at once, its figurative and transformational powers’ (222). The tension between one’s mother tongue and the (in)ability to express oneself © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_2

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properly in a second language constitutes one major aspect of their work. This conflict may be experienced by a fictional character, by the writer who has created a multilingual character, or by the audience member who watches the play. What interests me here is how multilingualism occurs— specifically, the role vernacular multilingualism plays in constructing theatrical narratives of a cosmopolitan encounter. Because they are constantly articulating themselves in several languages and listening to others switching and mixing codes on a daily basis, multilingual speakers are obliged to be simultaneously alert to the workings of language and distant from it. Multilingualism also generates pockets of (not-)knowing, which compel the interlocutors to experience moments of self-reflection and self-­ estrangement. Multilingual theatre uses language to depict our divided self as situated between experience and repetition, repetition as distortion, and trace, something that Christopher Balme identifies as a polyethnic state (1999, 116) and Marvin Carlson calls a polyglot theatre made by ‘culturally hybrid artists of modern global communities’ (2006, 149). Here I argue, after Balme, that staging vernacular multilingualism ‘attains a kind of laboratory function in the Brechtian sense of being an “experimentelle Vorschau-Bühne” for a better society’ (1999, 116). This statement begs the question of how artists with hyphenated subjectivities negotiate their identity through language. What devices of dramatic writing and performance making are at their disposal? What political mechanisms of social engagement does multilingual cosmopolitan theatre use? To respond to these questions, I now turn to the evolution of multilingual practices in Canadian theatre. This chapter studies several autobiographical solo performances, in which Canadian immigrant and cosmopolitan artists investigate constructing the divided self in language. The productions chosen for this chapter stage the conditions of cosmopolitanism from inside, the ways these conditions are experienced by the travelling subjects themselves through their personal translingual practices of communication. These examples discuss theatrically how we—the subjects of the global movements—approach questions of belonging and identity, language acquisition and expressing oneself with an accent, seeking a home, and losing one’s roots, from the position of internal and external displacement, challenging the phenomenological and cultural place of the mother tongue. The sample productions include Vinci by Robert Lepage (1986);1 Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens (1998–2001),2 which explores the condition of internal exile; Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas (1993),3 a performance of crossing borders through

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the construction and dismantling of stereotypes; Trois: Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou (2011–2014),4 an Iranian-Quebecois theatre artist’s exploration of his multifaceted self through language; and Wajdi Mouawad’s one-woman show Sœurs (2014),5 the author’s ironic commentary on multilingualism as a device of conflict mediation. Temporally, these solo performances coincide with several decades in Canadian history underscored by the policies and politics of multiculturalism. Politically, they approximate ‘the performance of hybridity in post-colonial monodrama, in which a tension is created between clearly differentiated characters and the fact that they overlap through the medium of a single performing body’ (Carlson 2006, 148). Before offering a detailed analysis of these solo plays, I will briefly outline the cultural context in which they originated and introduce the theoretical lenses necessary to scrutinize them. * * *

Immigration and Multiculturalism in Canada Immigration has always been central to Canada’s nation-building project, despite being full of practices and narratives of oppression, specifically seen in the encounters between Canadian Indigenous populations and white settlers. The modern history of this immigration project, however, should be viewed in the context of the country’s cultural renaissance, which began after WWII. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Canada had been recruiting European immigrants, who significantly contributed to the country’s growth and urbanization. After WWII, the emphasis shifted to Canada’s diversity and the cultural, linguistic, and religious multiplicity resulting from immigration. In 1962, due to its rapidly developing economy and pressure from international communities as well as from ethnic groups inside the country, Canada became one of three Western nations (the others being the USA and Australia) to open their doors to international migration. In 1971 the federal government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced the multiculturalism policy as its commitment to protect and promote diversity, recognize the rights of Indigenous populations, and support Canada’s two official languages. This policy led to the establishment of the Ministry of Multiculturalism in 1973 and the passing of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988. This legislation provided financial and institutional support to artists interested in engaging more

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actively with the artistic representation on stage of multilingual and immigrant subjects and their cultural practices, but it also constituted the state’s response to ‘the emergence of Quebec separatism’ and ‘the increased politicization of cultural minorities’ (Mackey 1999, 63), with the state wishing to ‘institutionalize various forms of difference, thereby controlling access to power’ (63). The Canadian Multiculturalism Act recognized the ‘cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society’ and acknowledged ‘the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage’. It guaranteed ethnic groups and individuals ‘equal treatment and equal protection under the law, while respecting and valuing their diversity’; and it sought to promote the ‘creativity that arises from the interaction between individuals and communities of different origins’ (Canadian Multiculturalism Act; R.S.C., 1985, c. 24 [4th Supp.]). The Canadian Multiculturalism Act enhanced Canadians’ attachment to the concept of civic nationalism, which ‘envisions the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values’ (Ignatieff 1994, 3–4). Despite the obvious good intentions of the policy, however, its rhetoric revealed the ideologically familiar us/them or we/strangers paradigm. The policy suggested recognizing the country’s diversity as a discourse of origins, fostering a danger of further ghettoizing ethnic communities and encouraging the country’s fragmentation. In fact, it enabled the Canadian government to better ‘manage and deflect real and perceived threats to the unity of the “nation” of Canada’ (Fatona 2011, 61). Charles Taylor famously called this practice ‘the politics of recognition’ (1994), which distinguishes the Canadian national identity as multicultural but also as deeply conflicted, negotiated, and connected to the notion of the nation’s self-identification. Canadian immigrant cultural production, including its theatre, has rendered this controversy highly visible. It has underpinned the idea of multicultural theatre as a welcoming Canadian common space, a public site where people of different ethnicities might gather together to create a new ‘Canadian narrative that enables Canadians to see how people who inhabit this massive space came together as a nation over time’ (Dib et al. 2008, 162). * * *

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Canadian Immigrant Theatre: On Aesthetic and Political Paradigms As a powerful cultural and educative institution, able to speak to the country’s diverse spectatorship, immigrant theatre utilizes the discursive practices of multilingualism to foster a dialogue embracing both the dominant culture and those of immigrants. It proclaims that in today’s climate of shifting political paradigms, we must seriously examine the position of the immigrant artist as a richly symbiotic, cosmopolitan subject able to challenge the dominant administrative and financial structures of the country. By creating new repertoire, forming companies, and educating audiences about immigration, immigrant artists challenge the myth of Canadian nationhood and provide venues for the shaping of a new common space, in which the synergies produced by a multicultural, multilingual, multi-­ racial, and multi-confessional population can be mobilized. In this context theatre can incite artists of different cultural and linguistic origins to speak across the hyphens and engage in a dialogue with these new audiences of present-day Canada. Theatre productions created by immigrant artists can generate utopian performative values, whereby spectators of different backgrounds gather ‘to see people perform live, hoping, perhaps, for moments of transformation that might let them reconsider and change the world outside the theatre, from its macro to its micro arrangements’ (Dolan 2001, 455). Thus, immigrant theatre engages with the discursive practices of multilingualism not only as a mechanism for reconstructing migration on stage but also as a recipe for mobilizing a new Canadian identity offstage. Through its gesture of cultural transgression, it can bring together new theatrical communities, where people can envision a new common future. The utopian programme of immigrant theatre is to generate an imagined cosmopolitan community and thereby reinvent the nation. Central to this process is the notion of the mother tongue, which originated in the period of Enlightenment and has been associated historically with the ideology and legislative practices of the nation state. At the time, it was firmly linked to the concept of one’s ‘privileged language’ (Yildiz 2012, 204) and denoted our most visceral experience of identity making. According to the paradigm of monolingualism, when we encounter our own self and the world for the first time, we do it through our mother tongue. Thus we are ‘organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation’ (3). As a result, ‘the possibility of writing in non-native languages or in multiple languages at the same time’ is

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dismissed (10). People have, however, practised multilingualism for centuries. For artists of minority or post-colonial cultures, such as Franz Kafka or Aimé Césaire, writing in their mother tongue always presented a problem, since for them, their mother tongue functioned as ‘a site of alienation and disjuncture’, ‘a carrier of state violence […] and social abjection’ (205). Language politics always had a strong impact on the cultural makeup and legislations of Canada. For example, in 1963 the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism established the need to recognize French as a minority language and ‘recommended the formal recognition of French-speaking Canadians as a distinct and equal society within Canada’ (Makarenko 2007). With the arrival of Pierre Trudeau’s government in 1968, the rhetoric of multiculturalism and bilingualism emerged ‘as a government-sanctioned mentality: as a way of looking at life and at the world; for the ways it shapes our sense of self and our place of human history’ (Bissoondath 1994, 7). In 1969, the Official Languages Act established French and English as the official languages of Canada, mandating all federal institutions, including government and public agencies, as well as Crown corporations, to provide their services in French and/or English. This legislation had especial resonance in Quebec, which in 1974 had implemented the provincial Official Languages Act (also known as Bill 101 or Law 101), which recognized French as the official language of the province. In 1977 the Parti Québécois government passed the Charter of the French Language, which required all immigrant children in the province’s public schools to be taught in French. Canadian immigrant theatre artists have been exploring this tension between multilingualism and monolingualism since the early 1990s, partly in response to the promise of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act to protect all ‘languages other than English and French […] in harmony with the national commitment to the official languages of Canada’ (Canadian Multiculturalism Act; R.S.C., 1985, c. 24 [4th Supp.]). This legislation supported Trudeau’s carefully crafted idea of diverse ethnic and cultural communities receiving government-sponsored assistance for preserving and developing their heritage while also accepting official bilingualism. In plays written by Canadian immigrant artists and about immigration, language often functions as a mechanism for constructing the divided self on stage. These performances frequently reveal the workings of immigrant multilingualism as the psychological, cultural, and artistic processes adopted by migrant subjects to re-assess their position as cosmopolitan citizens. They use the concept of the mother tongue as a marker of their

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characters’ otherness or strangeness, no matter how irritating, exotic, threatening, or mystical this strangeness can be, and thus blur the boundaries between the dominant language(s) and those of the minority. At the same time, ‘not all multilingualisms are created equal’ (Karpinski 2017, 154). In its practices of migration, settlement, and diaspora, multilingualism is also tightly connected to the manifestations of power. ‘In multilingual spaces, languages are deployed not just horizontally, that is, in synchronic contiguity, or next to each other, but also vertically, one above another, reflecting stratified histories and hierarchies of extra-­ linguistic agency and the socio-symbolic power of different groups’ (154). Today’s multilingualism can be produced from above—a practice ‘linked to economic privilege, free mobility, and commodity exchange’ of the educated elite (154) —or from below, a practice associated with migration, as well as with ‘ “minor” languages, non-marketability, and invisibility’ (154). Politically, performing multilingual voices can help resist ‘nationalist stereotypes’ and enact a ‘multicultural democratic equality’ (Carlson 2006, 143). Dramaturgically, it can bring the voices of the cultural margins to centre stage. Theatrically, multilingual performance can force its audiences to confront their own fears of, and excitement about, vernacular cosmopolitanism. Multilingual performance, because its subject is formal experiment, can turn into a case of theatrical jabberwocky. The potential of this experiment, I suggest, is best revealed within the autobiographical solo performances produced by second-generation immigrant and cosmopolitan artists. To illustrate this statement, I now turn to the analysis of Canadian solo performances that rehearse the practices, and offer models, of multi-, inter-, and transcultural encounter on stage. I discuss this work in its historical context, beginning with Robert Lepage’s work and solo performance Vinci. * * *

Vinci: On Décalage of I as Other and I as Myself The legacy of Robert Lepage’s work resides in the richness and diversity of his artistic projects which are often marked by the artist’s cosmopolitan worldview and personal life. Even so, the 2018 production SLĀ V: A Theatrical Odyssey Based on Slave Songs, directed and produced by Robert Lepage and Betty Bonifassi, proved highly controversial, and Lepage’s project Kanata evoked a fury of protests from Canadian Indigenous

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artists, although it was supported by the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris and opened there under the title Kanata—Épisode 1—La Controverse in December 2018. Although this controversy is beyond the scope of the current project, it reflects Lepage’s polemical position as ‘a man of the world’, who is always ‘on the move’ (Bovet 2000, 3). Much as his theatre in general, the two recent productions reflect Lepage’s ‘interest in travel and in other cultures’ (3). His theatre, old and new, often ‘wanders the globe in search of ever-changing environments in which it can create a new recipe of intercultural exchange. […] Like the cultures they describe, his works can be full of contradictions, prejudices, and rush judgements based on insufficient information. At the centre of this work is the liberal humanist ideal of a universal human nature’ (Carson 2000, 44). This is the reason to begin the analysis of theatre and cosmopolitanism in Canada with a close-up on Lepage’s work. A native of Quebec City, Lepage remains both a proud citizen of that community as the cultural space from which many of his characters stem and an outsider. His autobiographical show 887, created in 2015, presents the multi-layered identity of the artist who, in the Quebec City of the 1960s, spent his youth amidst the social and political controversies of the time. Though deeply rooted in these experiences, Lepage still brands his work as being produced by a stranger: [Lepage recognizes his difference] in personal and geographical terms, (specifically as a gay artist in a predominantly heterosexual culture, as a Francophone separatist and a Quebecois voice in an Anglo-dominated nation, and in opposition even to that as a voice speaking largely from outside the Province […]). He also defines himself as an outsider in artistic terms […], a completely self-sufficient performer, an auteur, combining the functions of director, designer, lighting-engineer, lead actor and even dramatist. (Innes 2009, 122)

This position of an outsider—partly justified by the circumstances of the artist’s life and partly chosen as his artistic credo—makes Lepage a typical example of the cosmopolitan artist-flâneur. His theatre often re-imagines and mythologizes this sense of being as the other and the location as elsewhere: ‘A successful production communicates a traveller’s experience’, Lepage explains (1998, 33). One’s deep and responsible engagement with a place that is new to them guarantees the meaningfulness of the artistic utterance, whereas ‘a show that hasn’t achieved a deep resonance, rather

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resembles a series of postcards brought home by a tourist who has seen ten cities in two weeks’ (33). Lepage recognizes the elsewhere as a mirror image of his home culture (30–32), so that the cultural encounter as self-­ fashioning serves as a prominent characteristic of his theatre. Sometimes, however, Lepage’s work comes close to cultural appropriation and neo-colonialism. Since the 1980s, Lepage has been devising a repository of performative devices to stage this elsewhere on stage. It includes inventing stories about international travel and intercultural encounter, mixing languages (both verbal and stage idioms) and borrowing elements from different cultural traditions. Language has always been one of the major focus points of this experiment. Lepage’s theatrical multilingualism is a marker ‘of the plurality of human cultures’ (Bovet 2000, 3), and it acquires literal and metaphorical connotations on his stage. A bilingual subject himself, Lepage stages multilingualism as a condition of fashioning the divided self and as an artistic device to better understand the context that brought it about. Lepage’s ‘use of various languages might, therefore, be considered as a realistic representation of the Babelistic world in which we live […]. However, a closer examination shows that multilingualism in Lepage’s work is more like a symbolic key to a larger, ideological philosophy of communication’ (3). His early solo performance Vinci (1986) presents the essence of the artist’s attitude towards the elsewhere and exemplifies his tendency to portray the world as cosmopolitan and thus deeply interconnected. In Vinci, Lepage tells a story of loss, depression, and self-searching as experienced, imagined, and narrated by a young Quebecois, Philippe. The play is an autobiographical exploration of Lepage’s personal struggle as an aspiring artist. It ‘follows the protagonist on his self-exploratory journey, prompted by an artistic integrity crisis’ (Albacan 2016, 135). This crisis, in turn, had been triggered by the suicide of Philippe’s close friend Marc, ‘a photographer (also) unable to accept artistic compromise’ (135). Vinci opens with the projection onto the stage of a poem that summarizes Lepage’s philosophical life search: Traveler: come and go through the eye, through the soul Visitor: look and see again touched through the eye, touched through the soul Confronter: vain or perish with the eye or with the lover Come, see, conquer // Veni, vidi, vinci.6 (Lepage Vinci, 1987 Min.2)

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This opening sequence ends with the word VINCI (not vici) as an image is projected of several airplanes crisscrossing the night sky, a well-known trope of travel literature and performance, and a signifier of the protagonist’s personal journey. The word and the title reference both the goal of Philippe’s voyage—to ‘search for artistic and spiritual enlightenment’ in the land of the Old Italian masters (Albacan 2016, 135)—and the name of Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius has become Lepage’s personal inspiration. On his journey of self-discovery, Philippe encounters many strangers: some are real; some are the figments of his imagination. His deceased friend Marc appears in Philippe’s nightmares, whereas Leonardo himself meets the protagonist in Florence’s public baths, so that, on the journey to the self, the improbable becomes possible. Most importantly, in Vinci, the strangers Philippe meets and the characters Lepage enacts serve to ‘fragment Lepage’s identity’. The play thus turns into ‘a distortion of self-­ image rife with contradictions and paradox. Just as fun-house mirrors manipulate an image, Lepage’s characterizations manipulate—literally and figuratively—the performer’s voice, body, identity and theatrical space. Fragmentation of identity allows Lepage to balance persona and character in a complex negotiation of self and other in which neither takes precedence’ (Bunzli 2000, 21). Playing with language serves Lepage to bring this fragmentation of identity to life. In Vinci, switching languages works like a theatrical decoration or costume change, so that multilingualism becomes an indexical sign, a pointer used to make Lepage’s characters appear radically different to Philippe himself and to Lepage’s primary Quebecois audience. A blind tour guide, the narrator and framing device in the play, speaks Italian and heavily accented French. A London bus driver communicates in English only, whereas a French female student has a gentrified Parisian accent. In their midst is Philippe, who speaks Quebecois French and whose identity remains separate from, but variously multiplied by, the others. Thus language turns into a mechanism of differentiation. It helps Lepage separate the I from the other as well as the I from the self. Robert Levesque, one of the most attentive reviewers of this work, interprets Vinci as ‘the nine stages of initiation and the nine types of sensations transmitted to the audience’ (1986), all intended to underscore the theatrical estrangement, since the concept of distance is associated with the endeavour of a physical journey as well as the ability of a theatre performance to initiate an encounter with the self. James Bunzli identifies such distancing with the device of décalage (2000, 29–33). Translated

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from the French as ‘gap’, ‘shift’, or ‘difference’, décalage is tightly connected to the experience of mirroring and doubling. In Vinci, it acquires both literal and metaphoric meaning, since travel mobilizes estrangement. Décalage refers to Philippe’s feeling of jetlag and being an outsider in a new country, and it activates the sensation of paradox based on the character’s emotional, physical, and cultural displacement. Vinci is a work of postmodern aesthetics, exemplifying the theatre practice of constructing self as ‘a fragmented and dislocated speaking subject’ (Geis 1993, 2). This subject is ‘open to replication and dissemination’. It therefore rejects ‘the dynamic of response inherent in dialogue’ (2). To evoke this subject on stage, many theatre artists ‘have turned toward the monologue as a way of “speaking” about the attempt to enter subjectivity’ (3). The cosmopolitan lifestyle nourishes this dislocated speaking subject and thus stimulates the dialogue with one’s self. Based on a constant re-­ mapping and re-fashioning of the self, cosmopolitanism enables heteroglossia within a single utterance. It characterizes the individual’s performative behaviour in the everyday and forces the artist to seek newer means of expression on stage. Solo performance relies on the rhetorical features of the dramatic monologue, including repetitions, interruptions, and everyday vocabulary. It presupposes one voice multiplied by many, reflecting the cognitive and performing processes that make up the subjectivity of the divided self. The principle ‘I speak therefore I am’ functions as an act of personal reassertion; as a result, the distance between the author and the speaker is challenged, the identity of the author being collapsed into that of the character. Characterized by Bakhtin’s notion of double-voicedness as simultaneity, solo performance also functions as an expression of the author’s deeply subjective place and emphasizes the dramatic qualities of a monologue, in which ‘the speaker is in conflict not [only] with the external world but with himself’ (Howe 1996, 13). Solitude, the basis of monologic speech, embraces the author’s voice, the characters’ voices, and those of the (in)visible addressee, fused together and diversified at the same time. Thus, the monologicity of the authorial consciousness turns into a heteroglossic structure, characterized by temporal and cognitive simultaneities. Here, the stratified utterance of the narrator reflects the fragmented experiences and mobile identity of the cosmopolitan self. The artist’s voice reproduces languages, cultures, and histories familiar to them. It is also characterized by an intricate temporal narrative framework.

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The speaker’s past experience is reflected in their present, the time of the narration, or the performance itself. In Vinci, French remains the foundational language of communication. However, when Philippe arrives to London, the narrative switches into English to signify a geography new to the character. At the level of reception, the switch aims at positioning Lepage’s audiences as tourists, specifically Quebecois tourists of the mid-1980s, unacquainted with extensive travel. As Philippe moves through London’s attractions, we hear the English text played on the loudspeakers, the figure of a bus driver being projected as a shadow puppet. In a manner reminiscent of a surrealist performance, the driver says: ‘This may give some of you little-French Canadians nausea, dizziness, or a strange impression of a décalage … You’re driving on the wrong side. You are a Canadian, aren’t you? Look into the mirror’ (Vinci quoted in Bunzli 2000, 29). In this scene, in other words, Lepage re-enacts the sense of dizziness and personal estrangement that a traveller might experience when arriving in a new land and entering a new linguistic system. For the privileged subject exemplified by Philippe, this moment of encounter can be highly disconcerting as well as eye-opening. Confronted by a language different to their own, the jet-setter loses control over communication and thus their cultural power. The privileged subject is obliged to face their own position of comfort and question the role of their own ethics towards the other. Philippe, and by extension his audiences, is also forced to suddenly recognize his own vulnerability. Philippe’s gaze as a tourist is redirected back into his own internal, conflicted self, a gesture that underlines the power of a solo performance. To a certain extent, this effect of distancing created by the character’s linguistic encounter approximates the relation of Philippe’s character to its maker, Lepage. Here the autobiographical act becomes a gesture of ‘memory reconstruction’ (Attarian 2010, 185). It allows the artist to reconnect with their past and becomes a mechanism for ‘creating a new past in the present’ (185). This search for the lost past and the artist’s process of re-­ mapping themselves in the present produces another layer of onstage heteroglossia that also functions as an affirmation of the artist’s professional and cultural difference. By asserting a sense of professional dignity and pride, an artist like Lepage insists on synechism as a stylistic idiosyncrasy in their work, so that the productions this artist creates seem to be a result of the amalgamation of one’s inherited cultural traditions and those of a new world. Vinci stages a tension between continuity and difference; it evokes

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an intricate interconnection between the artist/character’s mother tongue and the other languages he speaks.  In Vinci these interconnections are further explored through the intermedial potential of the theatre performance and the décalage of its soundscapes. Lepage employs sound-image montage and associative techniques of storytelling as dramaturgical strategies of his narration, in order to emphasize the ‘relocation of sensations’ experienced by the spectator (Albacan 2016, 139). He mobilizes onstage multilingualism through the visualization of sound, ‘performed via the subtitles projected on screen, in front of the audience’ (139). This environment becomes the outer, visual expression of the inner décalage, the distancing of his own self that Philippe experiences in the new land. Irony plays a special role in Lepage’s work: not only it is used to comment on Philippe’s cultural encounters, it also serves as a device of uncanny, when laughter turns into distress and anxiety, when an image becomes its double, and when the alter-ego of the fictional character collapses into the ego of its creator-performer. Irony turns Vinci into performative automythology (Dundjerovic 2007), when the actor-author Lepage ‘constructs theatrical space through the interface of the human body with the stage and media technology’ (48). Lepage—as Philippe—places himself at the centre of rehearsing and performing processes, using technology as his ‘creative partner-performer’ (49). The fictional character Philippe serves Lepage as a vehicle ‘to transport the actor-creator into the physical environment of his play’ (51). This vehicle does not, however, presuppose a fusion of actor and character. What the audience witnesses is another type of décalage: a clear performative distinction between the actor/author Robert Lepage and his character. The closing scene—‘Vinci (A Hillside of Olive Trees)’—exemplifies this approach. On stage, the town of Vinci is presented from a bird’s eye perspective, as if seen from the nearby hills. This contemplative view triggers ‘the necessity of closure’ (Albacan 2016, 155) for the protagonist, a closure eventually achieved through his dialogue with his deceased friend Marc. Preceded by Scene 8—‘The Shower Room, Firenze’, in which an improbable encounter between Philippe and Leonardo is enacted—the last scene becomes a metaphor. As Philippe ‘runs to the side of the stage as if to “jump in the void” from the edge of a cliff, above the village’, in a gesture repeating Leonardo’s scientific quest, the stage depicts ‘the performer’s silhouette with huge open wings’, an image that ‘generate[s] the impression of flight’ (155). It also suggests a transformation that could have been achieved only through Philippe’s physical journey, from Quebec to the Old World, and through the devices

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of self-distancing: ‘Engendered by the medial switches and dislocations, and the quick, unexpected shifts between sensations of immediacy and hypermediacy’ (Albacan 2016, 156), Vinci enacts the character’s spiritual change. This focus on difference as separateness of the self distinguishes Lepage’s early work from today’s solo performances produced by migrant artists, since, in their theatre, identity fragmentation and multilingualism are often intended to depict difference rather than sameness. In the context of a cosmopolitan encounter created through the practices of forced migration, crisis emerges as the solo performance’s ‘dramaturgical strategy’ (Stephenson 2010, 51), with the personal trauma of displacement as its subject and migration as the action’s cataclysm. In my next example, Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens, the protagonist’s displacement and her embodied multilingualism appear as conditions of internal exile and décalage. * * *

Je me souviens: The Décalage of Internal Exile It was Friedrich Nietzsche who suggested that the I begins to account for itself in the consequences of the trauma inflicted upon it. Punishment, Nietzsche proposed, is ‘the instrument of making memor(ies)’ (Butler 2007, 21). The liminal state of in-betweenness, in which many cosmopolitan subjects live, creates punishing or distant gazes that compel the traveller to give an account of themselves. Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens, an autobiographical solo play subtitled Memories of an Expatriate Anglophone Montrealaise Quebecoise Exiled in Canada, exemplifies a theatre work in which an account of the self as other takes place. It unfolds in the simultaneity of the past as something that has conditioned the subject’s speech before the narration takes place and of the present as something that unfolds while the storyteller is speaking. It reveals the artist’s subjectivity in the process of negotiating the norms and the conditions of her utterance. Such tension characterizes making the self the relational subject, when the I is constructed not necessarily within the I/You paradigm but in the ‘moments of unknowingness about oneself [which] tend to emerge in the context of relations to others’ (Butler 2007, 29). In theatre, this philosophical postulate becomes a dramaturgical device, so that an account of the self as other can take place in the presence of the sought-for and acknowledged addressee. Thus it always appears as performative.

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Written by an Anglophone, Black woman from Montreal, whose family has been living in Quebec for several generations,7 Je me souviens stages the scenario of punishment described by Nietzsche and caused by the circumstances of internal exile, when someone becomes a stranger in one’s own homeland. Although not a migrant subject by birth or force, Lorena, the play’s autobiographical protagonist, feels that she neither belongs nor is accepted by the white mainstream Francophone culture of Quebec (Gale 2003, 67–69). When she moves to Vancouver, where the action begins, she discovers that she cannot identify as an English-Canadian either. In the letter to her Montreal friends, Lorena describes her encounter with the strange city in terms typical of what we call immigrant culture shock. She also learns that the English of English Canada is not her native English of Montreal, so Lorena loses the sense of belonging for a second time, now a loss not only of the space/time continuum but also of the linguistic one. Politically, Je me souviens occupies a special place in the theatre of cosmopolitanism: not only does it stage the nationalism of Quebec as the cause of Gale’s physical and psychological displacement, but it also presents Lorena as an advocate of the rights of the outsider: ‘Nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 2002, the play explores cultural and linguistic tensions, particularly the reality of being marginalized in Jacques Parizeau’s pure laine Quebec’ (Wasserman 2009, 3). It unflinchingly investigates the consequences of the racist gaze and insists on the multiplicity of selves, which, in its complexity, goes beyond hyphenated identities. Moreover, Je me souviens signifies more ‘than just the differences between two geographically, culturally and linguistically distant cities that are part of the same large nation. […] The play stages numerous Canadians (embodied by the sole performer) to interrogate the confusing and paradoxical parameters of Canadianness’ (Tompkins 2006, 56). Language becomes a vehicle for constructing and revealing such multiplicity: the play stages Lorena’s bilingualism as the only social scenario in which the Canada of a common space can be imagined. It continues the traditions of Quebec’s minority literature written in English, in that it ‘displays a disconnect between language, territory, and ethnicity’ (Moss 2012, 62). Culturally, the play speaks to Quebec Anglophone playwrights’ struggle to stay visible. After the Parti Québécois election in 1976, up to 30% of the Anglophone Quebeckers left the province, leaving the rest in a type of internal exile, forced to ‘adapt to their status as a minority within a minority, and embrace bilingualism’ (61). Writing in English has become

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the Anglophone writers’ ‘language act that stages the continuing presence of English speakers in a predominantly francophone milieu’ and their ‘desire to reach out to the francophone majority and dramatize the historical presence of ethnic others’ (61). Gale’s play speaks directly to this historical condition; it also contributes to the politically engaged project of African Canadian theatre, pioneered by Djanet Sears and George Elliott Clarke. Je me souviens presents a Black Anglophone Quebecois subject’s ‘bold attempt to counter the demonization of “other” in the context of Quebec’s strive for sovereignty and nationalism’; it seeks ‘to break free from these dangerously monolithic ways of knowing the world’ (Heble 2000, 217). At the same time, this play is ‘a love letter to Montreal and Lorena’s fierce reclamation of her right as an Anglophone Black woman to declare herself Quebecoise, and to be at home anywhere in Canada’ (Wasserman 2009, 4). A memory play, Je me souviens opens with a close-up of the protagonist sitting in Joe’s Café on Commercial Drive in Vancouver: I’d just bumped into another expatriate and like those from ‘the old country’, hungry for news from home, whenever we meet we all always reminiscence or share news of the others we have left behind. It is a ritual of love and remembrance played out on alien soil by emigres all over the world. Only we’re in Vancouver and home is Montreal. The same country. (Gale 2003, 57)

This moment is suddenly interrupted by a French-speaking intruder, who reminds Lorena that she has no right to call Montreal home. As their exchange becomes more agitated, the dialogue freely switches between English and French. At first, Gale uses English to translate French insults; then she leaves these passages untranslated, a technique that establishes the characters’ fluency in different tongues and their equal rights to express themselves in both languages. Created and enacted by an Anglophone female Black artist from Quebec, the performance achieves great thematic and political force through this linguistic duality. Je me souviens insists on the power of a theatre performance to engage with the idea of ‘reterritorialization or grounding of language’ (Reid 2009, 68). Its English is ‘vernacular, territorial, richly expressive, flexible, and creatively adapted’ (69). Because of its ‘minority status’, Gale’s idiosyncratic English is also highly reflective of the soundscapes of Montreal; it ‘underscores the difference between Quebec English and other varieties of Canadian English. It is

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marked by code-switching, joual, the morphological and grammatical influences of French, references to Quebec popular culture, and so on’ (Moss 2012, 63). French, together with the other languages, accents, and dialects that comprise the play’s linguistic canvas, creates a contrapuntal soundtrack. Gale uses the intrusions of French to illustrate peoples’ differences and to create irony, to argue and to express anger, to make jokes, to swear, and to generate moments of discomfort and intimacy, when one decides to share one’s most sacred thoughts and experiences with a stranger. A narrative of coming of age, Je me souviens takes us through the milestones of Lorena’s subjecthood. First, we meet Lorena as a little girl learning the lessons of self-defence and dignity from her mother. Then we see her as a young lover, who falls for a Francophone Quebecker and seeks his attention by switching into French, attempting to shape her linguistic identity in such a way as to satisfy his gaze and sexual fantasy. However, Lorena learns her lesson fast: it is not only language that separates them, it is the colour of their skins and the history that these colours represent. Here, Gale uses French as a vehicle of betrayal: He says he loves me […] I don’t see no colour […] I want to believe him. But I’m more than the languages I speak. Who I am is embedded in every cell of my skin. How can he love what he can’t see? What he won’t see? (Gale 2003, 70)

After this realization, we see Lorena changed. The innocence of not-­ knowing and not-seeing is forever lost: now she sees it, the punishing gaze, and the Quebecois racism, ‘tacitly agreed upon/unspoken in two official languages’ (Gale 2003, 72). As she refuses to enact the stereotype, Lorena leaves Montreal for Vancouver, thus becoming an expatriate Anglophone Montrealaise Quebecoise exiled in Canada. Artistically, Je me souviens is similar to Lepage’s work. It endorses devices of psychological and theatrical décalage. Rich and evocative in its images, sounds, and rhythms, Je me souviens ‘moves, leaps, steps back to push further, and it evokes a splendid range of immigrant voices and idiolects that constitute Canadian reality’ (Grace 2003, vi). But it differs from the Vinci project in the ways Gale locates distancing. Here, echoing and mirroring take place not within the performance space, between the characters as a distinction between separate entities, but within the performer’s own body as a deeply internalized experience of imbalance. On stage,

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Lorena’s inner décalage is expressed through ‘multimedia tour de force. […] Music, film, slides complement the ventriloquism of Lorena playing, not just Lorena, but the many others who contribute to her memories and thus to her collective sense of self. As we watch her performing her identity and listen to her telling us her story, we are watching how identity is performed’ (Grace 2003, vi). In the Vancouver of her internal exile, Lorena’s seemingly successful life is marked by homesickness, leading to her realization that her desire to find individual freedom and dignity has made her an actant of cosmopolitanism. Thus, Lorena decides to return to Montreal to experience closure. The return, however, is impossible, since both Lorena and her Montreal have drastically changed. Performing Je me souviens helps Lorena’s homecoming but also highlights its impossibility. The sense of erasure, a condition of loss, forgetting, and destruction, which begins with one’s departure from home, is often re-enforced in the processes of no-return. The idea of homecoming as no-return positions the traveller in the sense of Gertrude Stein’s continuous present (1926). It emphasizes nomadic non-belonging, with which the state of cosmopolitan wandering is often associated. This sense of non-belonging or erasure can be manifested in literal terms, when a traveller knows that there is nothing to return to, or there is an existential threat awaiting them back home. In figurative terms, erasure can be manifested as an act of repetition with difference, informed by the disappointment and emotional numbness of homecoming. In this scenario of return, memory plays its definitive role. The original, as Plato had it, is never true to its copy, so the act of remembering turns into an instrument of erasure capable of destroying not only one’s memory of the past but also the promise of return we associate with this memory. Thus, homecoming turns into the irony of reconciliation, producing humiliation, frustration, and disappointment, not closure of the encounter. Cosmopolitan consciousness capitalizes on the idea of impossibility of return: it wrestles with the notion of cyclical time as life’s chance for re-emergence and renewal and with the idea of repetition with variation inherited in the act of homecoming. Doubling, mirroring, or ghosting of the original turns into a special effect of cosmopolitan memory, for encounter with one’s past is rarely satisfactory. Often these returns bring more pain than happiness; they reinforce the irrevocable working of time, time that knows only one direction—from past to future. In Je me souviens, Lorena’s homecoming is manifested psychologically—it is acted out as the character’s recognition of her own divided self.

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In the final scene, Lorena meets her own self in the mirror of French, the language of fears, humiliation, and nightmares, the uncanny no-place of her imagination. A recurring dream sequence with Lorena trudging through the snow and wind becomes the place of Gale’s meeting with herself, when the I of the protagonist collapses into the I of the author’s self. In the last dream, as Lorena struggles through the snowstorm, she sees a Black woman, completely naked. As the woman turns towards Lorena, the performer realizes ‘she is myself. It is I!’ (Gale 2003, 83). To those who do not speak French, the passage remains empty, a gap in experience and meaning. To those who understand French, it turns into a device of empowerment: a Black Anglophone Quebecois female subject finds her strength in her second language, French. It is declared to be Lorena’s space of belonging. The play’s closing lines reinforce this discovery: When I moved to Canada I did not stop being a Quebecoise. I discovered that I had always been one. I did not forfeit my identity. I gained it. I am expatriate Anglophone, Montrealaise, Quebecoise. These are just a few of the memories of a life I lived in the land of my birth. I cannot be separated from them […] they are a part of the distinct whole that is me. Memory serves me. An exile in Canada. (Gale 2003, 84)

Gale’s sentiment of being an exile in Canada is shared by many Canadian artists, second-generation immigrants, who were either born in the country or brought to it as young children. The remaining portion of this chapter analyses the use of multilingualism in solo performances created by such artists. Their cultural and linguistic identities are marked by the simultaneities of the post-multicultural world in which they grew up, so that décalage becomes the subject of their artistic investigation too. Depending on how a second-generation immigrant perceives their hybridity, their mother tongue can be internalized, negotiated, or fully rejected. For artists with a hyphenated identity, very often the idea of one-­ language/mother tongue’s hegemonic power does not exist. For them the linguistic centre and power constantly shift. The more languages and cultural codes one masters, and the earlier one begins to experience these shifts, the more scenarios of identity negotiation they acquire. A subject of this type breaks the nation-state binary of here/elsewhere and surpasses the dichotomy of past/present that defines the life of first-generation immigrants. For multilingual children, binaries turn into simultaneities

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marked by their inner heteroglossia and by the outer heteroglossia of the different milieus that surround them. This uncertainty principle of everyday multilingualism is reflected in the rhetorical structures of a solo performance, conditioned by the presence of fictional and real-life addressees. Their voices merge with the voice of the author/narrator and with the voice of the character/performer, resulting in the phenomenon of authorial heteroglossia. This heteroglossia reflects the languages, cultures, traditions, and histories that make up the author’s divided self: ‘This separation of personae permits a dialogue […] between subjectivity and alterity’ (Stephenson 2010, 51), so that the autobiographical narration concludes with an act of ‘holding mirrors for self and other’ (Attarian 2010, 187). As ‘a means of critical engagement with autobiographical inquiry, [the act of holding mirrors] imbues the process with a sense of accountability that translates into a transformative experience’ (187). Autobiographical material organized into monologic speech claims the authority of truth, the act of public speaking presupposing the speaker’s solitary presence in front of the audience. For a multilingual performer, ‘detachment and involvement become an important dramatic and existential category’ (185). This recognition of divided subjectivity as an expression of existential loneliness is best staged in front of a multicultural and multilingual Canadian audience. * * *

Fronteras Americanas: Staging the Décalage of the Border-Crossing Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas presents a canonical example of an immigrant solo performance (Carlson 2006, 145). Written in English, Spanish, and Spanglish dialect, it articulates theatrical strategies of subverting monolingualism and calls upon the embodied, affectual, and somatic powers of communicating in one’s mother tongue. The play ‘dramatizes the difficulty for a Canadian citizen of Argentinian origin like Verdecchia himself to come to terms with the duality of his identity, the difficulty of reconciling the two cultures to which he belongs’ (Maufort 2003, 86–87). It shows ‘the concept of identity as ever-shifting and fundamentally hybrid’ (87) and illustrates how the divided self can turn into an object of cultural and theatrical performance: a movable and tangible

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substance constructed out of Verdecchia’s self and body, the personal and collective histories he has inherited, and the languages he speaks. Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, Verdecchia was brought to Canada by his parents at the age of two. He grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, and later studied theatre at Ryerson University in Toronto. The multilingual mosaic Fronteras Americanas evokes the artist’s encounter with his own self as enacted by its autobiographical protagonist Verdecchia and his counterpart, Wideload, ‘a deconstructive, abject embodiment of media imaginings of “Latino” stereotypes’ (Knowles 2006, 62). In the centre of Verdecchia’s dramatic concern is the process of constructing identity through the devices of everyday and onstage performance in an attempt to negotiate the Latino stereotype through language. As Verdecchia recollects, the work on Fronteras Americanas began with a letter to ‘an Argentinian friend to Canada as [Verdecchia] travelled through Argentina. The letter was an account of [his] wanderings but also an attempt to make sense of what [he] was seeing and feeling’ (Verdecchia 2006, 332). Increasingly autobiographical, the letter turned into a one-­ man show that was intended to ‘keep audience alert’ in a state of ‘perpetual A-effect’ and to make ‘the creators complicit’ (334). Borders, Marc Maufort argues, are the central metaphor in Verdecchia’s work: ‘from the first moments of the play, Verdecchia states his profound doubt of identity [and] alludes to the all-pervasive space of liminality […] The play ultimately demonstrates that there is no need to choose between the two sides of one’s identity; as such, it culminates in a celebration of hybridity’ (Maufort 2003, 87). To dramatize this hybridity, Fronteras Americanas (similarly to Lorena Gale’s play) uses the coming-of-age theatrical trope. It engages several narrative voices, all evoked by and collapsing into an author/actor/character figure. Verdecchia declares: ‘I’m not in Canada. I’m not in Argentina. I’m on the Border. I am Home. Mais zooot alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis Argentin-Canadien! I am a post-Porteño neo-Latino Canadian! I am the Pan-­ American highway!’ (Verdecchia 1997, 82). The play’s dramaturgy contains an inversion or double-crossing movement: as Verdecchia travels from Canada to Argentina in his personal attempt at homecoming, Wideload journeys to North America to gain a better income and to obtain a new perspective. This inversion helps Fronteras Americanas evoke the image of ‘one mother America’ (Bolívar qtd in Verdecchia 1997, 2) within the history of Hispanic migration, with a focus on banishment, exile, and refuge-seeking. Verdecchia casts North

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America as the ultimate power that fully controls the continent and uses performance to articulate the divide between truth and illusion, reality and its representation. He envisions his autobiography within ‘a three-page “Idiosyncratic History of America” that locates “Latin America” in the context of Western colonialism and nascent capitalism’ (Verdecchia 1997, 63) and pictures his divided self ‘within the realm of embodied cultural memory’ (64). Language is at the core of this fight for belonging, with Verdecchia’s English and Spanish competing for the role of his mother tongue: ‘I am something of an impostor,’ he declares; ‘I confuse my tenses in Spanish. I couldn’t dance a tango to save my life. All sides of the border have claimed and rejected me’ (48). To foreground this political point further, Verdecchia insists on the deep disconnect between the performer and the characters he impersonates. Like Lorena Gale once again, he engages with the consequences of racism manifested in language. He stages the unilingual subject’s fascination with accents and foreign languages both as a fear of otherness and as arousal, something that can lead to the exoticization and erotization of the other (Said 1979, 40–52), the obverse of racism: Whenever a Latin and a Saxon have sex [Wideload declares] it is going to be a mind-expanding and culturally enriching experience porque nosotros sabemos hacer cosas que ni se imaginaron en la Kama Sutra, porque nosotros tenemos un ritmo, un calor un sabor un tumbao de timbales de conga de candomble de kilombo. Una onda, un un dos tres, un dos. Saben …? […] De second component is the Exotica Factor. De Latin Lover Fantasy. (Verdecchia 1997, 36)

Paradoxically, this fascination with a foreign tongue can serve as the unilingual subject’s recognition of self as other and as a moment of self-­ distancing. It can catalyse the unilingual person’s uncertainty and force them to ‘experience the position of victim’ (Gomez 1995). It can also make them a target of stereotyping, ‘of how Latinos would see a stereotyped Anglo-Saxon’ (Gomez 1995). In theatre, staging linguistic and cultural difference has been a long-­ standing device of performing foreignness, with characters’ accents, grammatical mistakes, and poor and awkward linguistic choices serving as stereotypes of otherness and sources of laughter. In Fronteras Americanas, the figure of Wideload continues this comic tradition. Created through a series of improvisations between Verdecchia and his collaborator Damon

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D’Oliveira, Wideload bears traces of the artists’ personalities (Verdecchia 2006, 334). He is also deeply subversive: not only does Wideload embody ‘Western stereotypes of Hispanic Americans’, he also uses grotesque and hyperbole to laugh at his new hosts (Maufort 2003, 87). Verdecchia chooses not to translate Wideload’s Spanish into English, thereby destabilizing the assumptions about the unitary notion of linguistic identity. Staging this Hispanic stereotype enables Verdecchia to criticize the long-­ standing theatrical tradition of using a Spaniard as a comic figure: ‘This strategy works quite effectively, for at many times during the course of the performance it is not clear whether the audience is laughing at the stereotype or at themselves laughing at it’ (Gomez 1995). As a result, the appearance, the language, and the actions of Wideload help unmask polite Canadian racism and make the production’s predominantly English-­ speaking audiences become aware of it. Without the lyrical protagonist, however, the significance of Fronteras Americanas can be lost. For Verdecchia, a second-generation immigrant, the act of travelling triggers uncertainty and sickness: what begins as a journey of nostalgia and a romantic desire for homecoming and reconciliation turns into a farce. En route to Buenos Aires, Verdecchia makes a stop in Santiago and accidentally witnesses a merciless but ordinary street murder; the event leads him to the realization that neither the country he imagined nor his ties to it truly exist. This failed attempt at a homecoming stages the effects of exilic no-return and the futility of post-exilic reconciliations; on the other hand, its theatrical re-enactment provokes Verdecchia’s personal reflection or performative parallax (Aciman 2011, 189). Parallax, the state of consciousness and mimicry of no-return (189), is the traveller’s device for creative reflection. In Fronteras Americanas, it turns into a performance of Verdecchia’s past and a re-enactment of the instability of his present; it reinforces the two kinds of borders that run through the script: ‘borders within the continent and within the individual’ (Gomez 1995). A highly versatile performer, Verdecchia introduces dance and music to underline the importance of these borders. In the section ‘Border Crossings’, he enumerates things that can or cannot cross the border. Music presents an interesting paradox: although it travels easily, the tango—music for exile, ‘for the preparations, the significations of departure, for the symptoms of migration’ (Verdecchia 1997, 58)—cannot be ‘entirely domesticated’ (57). On stage, the music remains separate from the performer’s speech, and thus its presence indicates the beginnings of a

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new theatrical multilingualism. When the embodied language of the syncopated rhythms of the tango intersects with the rhythmic expressions of Verdecchia’s speech, music begins to manifest itself as an alternative to his mother tongue. Thus, using music and dance helps Verdecchia reconcile the multiple layers of his self, whereas his encounter with other languages and traditions ‘defies acculturation, as he searches for a place where two cultures interact with one another equally, creating an identity which is “not-neither”’ (51). When Verdecchia is finally able to accept his ‘border wound’, not as a ‘problem’, but as the potential to find ‘Home’, ‘he finds a third space where he is truly himself’ (Gomez 1995). The collapse of Verdecchia and Wideload into one character enacts the rehearsal and performance of ‘a divided intranational subjectivity that is communal’ (Knowles 2006, 66); it turns into an example of the creation of a ‘spontaneous communitas’ of utopian hope (66). Structured as a contrapuntal musical canon, with a leading melody repeating itself in different variations and alterations, Fronteras Americanas helps the cosmopolitan subject accept their own divided self. Today, Fronteras Americanas has become a historical precedent: Verdecchia’s monologue has inspired many young hyphenated performers who continue seeking the stage as a therapeutic and artistic tool to negotiate the multiple layers of their identity. Mani Soleymanlou’s Trois: Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou is one of such examples. * * *

Trois: On the Heteroglossia of Cultural Décalage Trois: Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou stages Mani Soleymanlou—a Montreal-based artist of Iranian origin—in the functions of Mani Soleymanlou, the creator and performer of this trilogy, who enacts through Mani Soleymanlou, a fictional narrator, the story of Mani, le personnage principal. The work comprises three parts: Un, written, directed, and performed by Mani Soleymanlou; Deux, also written and directed by Soleymanlou, but performed with Emmanuel Schwartz; and Trois, written, directed, and performed by forty-three immigrant theatre artists of Montreal. The project stages the performative heteroglossia of cultural décalage as an example of translingual practices of immigration (Canagarajah 2013, 32). Developed to communicate across constantly evolving contact zones, such as the multicultural streets of Montreal, where

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‘diverse social groups interact’ (26), translingual practices refer to the interlocutors’ ‘performative competence’ that presupposes a multilingual speaker’s vocabulary meeting and interacting in a single performative gesture (26). Mani Soleymanlou is well aware of these practices: working through the linguistic idiosyncrasy of his trilogy, he widely reflects the multilingual realities of his everyday Montreal, in which the coexistence of language variants, dialects, and citytalk is ‘a pivotal factor for communication’ (Hauptfleisch 1989, 73). This polyglot context of multilingual city life not only generates new modes of communication but is often of ‘prime importance to the playwright, whose job […] is to reflect […] issues within that society’ (73). Theatre, however, ‘has always had to deal with the discrepancy between this perceived reality (i.e. a multicultural and polyglot society) and the prescribed reality of the stage (i.e., an artificially maintained unicultural and unilingual medium of expression’ (79). The work of Mani Soleymanlou exemplifies how this theatrical image of polyglot Montreal can shake the myth of a monolingual Quebec from within. Highly autobiographical, Un presents the author/narrator Soleymanlou telling the story of the character Mani, who grew up in a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic settings in Tehran, Paris, Toronto, and Montreal. Once again, it stages ‘a coming-of-age and a coming-to-terms story where the artist seeks an answer to a question that’s been on his mind all his life: “How can you feel Canadian and still be one with where you come from?”’ (Soleymanlou 2014c). The second part, Deux, features an encounter between the Iranian-Canadian-Quebecois Mani Soleymanlou and the Quebecois Emmanuel Schwartz (Manu), whose father is an Anglophone Jew and mother a Francophone Christian. Like Un, Deux investigates the heteroglossia of difference, this time with Emmanuel Schwartz picking up Soleymanlou’s lines. The task, however, proves to be impossible. The stories Mani and Manu tell are similar but never the same, with one artist acting as a distorted double of the other. The concluding part Trois takes the project further: ‘By featuring forty-three artists of different cultural and linguistic origins, ready to share their experiences and stories, it evokes the social heteroglossia of the cultural and linguistic mosaic that marks today’s Quebec. But there’s no happy ending with everyone holding hands. […] We are alone together. What unites us is our feeling of solitude, especially in an era that makes a virtue of the ego and the self’ (Soleymanlou 2014b). Together, the forty-three characters evoke another paradox of today’s world: the chorus of immigrant solitudes creates a theatrical tableau of new globalized citizens locked up in their personal stories

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and seclusions, whether they wish to be such citizens or not. There is a definitive drive and desire for a utopian collectivity and unity of differences, but the differences remain separate from each other and divided within. The trilogy closes with a monologue spoken by Marco Collin, an Indigenous artist, who proposes his own scenario of immigration: ‘I am a plastic Indian. An Indian lost in the city. […] I am an émigré, out of the country comfort of the reserve, looking to change the world. […] A man who does not really know anymore who he is’ (Soleymanlou 2014a, 164–165). This monologue reminds us that immigration, displacement, losing one’s home, and seeking a new one condition every Canadian voice. It insists that we accept the interpersonal heteroglossia of our cultural and linguistic performances as the only way to reconcile our differences, suggesting that performative cosmopolitan practices will be one of the binding elements in Canadian theatres of the future. The performance Zéro, which translates into Farsi as sefr (‘the void’), presents the most recent chapter in Soleymanlou’s exploration of the divided self on stage. Premiered at Montreal’s  La Chapelle theatre in November 2019, it enacts the artist’s summary of a decade’s work, dedicated to questioning his identity and his place as a multicultural and multilingual subject of cosmopolitanism within the increasingly xenophobic province and on its stages. Zéro asks urgent and troublesome questions regarding the heritage, memory, and personal history of the migrant— questions that a cosmopolitan artist like Soleymanlou faces daily and something he feels responsible for transmitting across his own generation and further on. These questions have no responses, and hence they remain open and unrequited not only to Soleymanlou but also to many people with cosmopolitan experiences or consciousness, specifically the artists whose work comprises the bulk of this book. For the purposes of this chapter, however, in the next several paragraphs, I will only discuss the dramaturgical, performative, and political mechanisms of staging the divided self as manifested in the first part of the trilogy, Un, since constructing the other constitutes its dramatic and political focal point. The creation of an immigrant, Soleymanlou tells us, begins by giving the stranger a name. Mani Soleymanlou is an unusual and difficult name to grasp, as the director of the National Theatre School in Montreal points out. She proudly tells her student Mani that ‘we have received the federal government’s grant for newcomers’ (Soleymanlou 2014a, 17), suggesting that he should profit from the generosity of his new country. ‘Newcomer…’—Mani reacts—‘it has been 14  years since I moved to

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Canada… And since then, since that first day at the National Theatre School of Canada, since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never been anything else, but a guy from elsewhere, a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant’ (2014a, 18). Thus begins the story of making the play Un and the history of a young theatre artist forced by the circumstances of his origins, upbringing, and beliefs to become a professional immigrant (Gauvin 2000, 207). His career unfolds in proximity to a new language, while his linguistic choices are conditioned by displacement. At the same time, Soleymanlou rejects the paradigms of suffering as the only lens to view migration, belonging, and cosmopolitanism. The intent of his artistic project is to create new theatre spaces for the multitude of voices that make up Montreal’s social mosaic, to challenge the canons of Quebecois dramaturgy, and to question the practices of type-casting. Soleymanlou’s theatre serves as the artist’s response to the realization that his difference is an enforced identity. It reveals that migration and travelling remain highly personal endeavours which teach us lessons about our own sense of self. In the article ‘Rajoutons des souches, “Profession: Immigrant”’, Soleymanlou explains his position further: I am a part of the cultural environment that represents me badly. When I write ‘represents me badly’, I wear an immigrant’s shoes, I assume the status of the stranger. And why not, if this reminds me of my everyday life? How can I ignore the fact that my acting abilities have been reduced for some time to my capability to do accents from a fictitious, Hollywood-esque, Arab world? Why then, only because of my name or my appearance should I be more Arab than Quebecois, when I am neither one nor the other? How do I ignore people who tell me to my face that I am now a part of the 9/11 beneficiaries club, when it comes to casting? How can I deal with those people who take the names, the beliefs and the habits of others as a direct threat to them? (2014c, 12:26)

Soleymanlou concludes his article with a description of the 2012 students’ demonstrations in Quebec. This was a time and a place where he felt at home, since nobody in this crowd of differences asked him the symptomatic question: where he was from and where he belonged (29). Un takes us back to pre-2012 Montreal, to the time of Soleymanlou’s apprenticeship as a(n) (immigrant) theatre maker. In 2009, the Théâtre de Quat’Sous and its cultural initiative ‘Les lundis découvertes’ invited a group of immigrant theatre artists to create plays about their home countries. Without

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hesitation, Soleymanlou accepted this task, only to very quickly discover that he had no proper memory or knowledge of Iran. The only tale he could share was the meltdown of his ascribed linguistic identity, the story of his own displacement and his multiple selves. Disturbed by this realization, Soleymanlou decided to write a play about ‘his own uprooting and his multiple cultural identities’ (Soleymanlou 2014a, 19). As a result, he found himself even more estranged from the country of his origin (Iran)— perhaps as estranged as one can be from any place where one has never lived. To solve this dramaturgical and emotional problem, Soleymanlou decided to juxtapose the recent revolutionary upheavals in Iran with his own experiences of driving his father’s car on the streets of Toronto. He chose to open this solo performance about the disorderly heteroglossia of the cosmopolitan artist’s divided self with a comic account of his understanding of the history of Iran. He used a variety of historical and fictional voices to re-enact the events of Iranian history and to present its major players: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran (ruled 1941–1979), who was overthrown by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Revolution. Engaging with the onomatopoetic potentials of the French language, Soleymanlou turned the Shah of Iran into le chat and Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, into le chien. He mimicked their political disagreements through the symptomatic exchange of meows and woofs. The artist employed this device of linguistic distortion to present himself as an angry commentator on Iran’s recent history, joining his voice with the Iranian dissidents, some of whom, much like his own family, had had to flee the country during the early 1980s. In its multi-layered structure of meanings, in other words, the play explored the consequences of political exile, if not from the perspective of the exilic subject, then as a mediated experience. Soleymanlou’s depiction of Iran’s leaders as bickering domestic animals expressed his anger with, and disengagement from, the land of his ancestors. He closed the play with this ironic observation: the war that followed the 1979 Iranian Revolution killed so many people that 70% of today’s population is younger than thirty  years old. Those who escaped should be grateful (Soleymanlou 2014a, 32). The survivor’s guilt evoked in this sentence emerges as one more reason why Soleymanlou could not fully connect to the country of his origin. To continue working with these historical contexts would lead him to a theatricalization of the collective memory, as well as an objectification, fictionalization, and stereotyping of his own history. He refused to

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take this road and declared instead his affiliations with the past not as an Iranian national but as a Persian subject. Soleymanlou’s knowledge of the Farsi language remains the only indicator of his ethnic identity: ‘a Torontonian/Arab/Iranian who has lived in France and Ottawa’ (Soleymanlou 2014a, 18). Lise Gauvin’s notion of la surconscience linguistique defines the act of émigré writing as an ‘act of language’ (2000, 8–9), a gesture of identity reassertion in linguistic performance. Gauvin’s theory becomes indispensable for my analysis of Soleymanlou’s multilingual utterance, which he constructs as he ponders the political, social, and artistic debates in Quebec concerning the position of French in North America, surrounded by other languages and other cultural contexts. In Quebecois literature, as Gauvin explains, ‘the proximity of other languages, a diglossic situation in which a writer often finds himself immersed, the first deterritorialisation constituted by the passage from the oral to the written form, and another, a more insidious kind, created by readers close by and those far away, separated by different histories and by different linguistic and cultural baggage’ creates a particular cultural and linguistic context, which ‘forces the writer to resort to detour strategies’ (Gauvin 2000, 9). These strategies manifest themselves in the processes of translating and adapting vernacular French to the new literary idiom, ‘often referred to under the title of multilingualism and textual heterolingualism’ (9). These processes also create a situation of linguistic estrangement, a condition familiar to many writers, but very specific to the Francophone author residing in North America (11). This quest results in creating an aesthetic of diversity (Gauvin 2000, 11), rooted in what Derrida identifies as the writer’s dreaming in the language of the other (13). Similarly, Soleymanlou’s project wrestles with the phenomenon of linguistic hyperconsciousness, which in his work takes the form of a narrative of separations and simultaneities. The voices of fictional characters from the author’s past, historical figures of Iran, and the people of Montreal make this story multi-layered and multi-perspectival. In its referential simultaneity, Un suggests that the structure of the artist’s divided self is defined by the action of becoming and difference, a mediation stemming from ‘the fourfold root of identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 29). Without necessarily referencing Deleuze and Guattari, Soleymanlou refuses the geopolitical concept of the self and the nation state as the time/place of his belonging. Mani accepts his ethnicity—Persian—as the marker of his personal nation state, with the heteroglossia of his speech characterizing the idiosyncrasy of his self. As

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the show unfolds, the languages that claim Soleymanlou as ‘theirs’ make incursions into his speech. The more confused the character becomes, the more his utterance becomes heteroglossic. The audience witnesses Mani descending into linguistic chaos, an environment in which a globalized subject is created and a new catharsis is to be experienced in the form of compassion. The rows of identical black chairs that make up the stage of this solo performance visually reinforce the linguistic concept of heteroglossia; they suggest multiple meanings, one of which references absentia and evokes silence. The empty chairs indicate the many other immigrant subjects, whose offstage presence characterizes the population of today’s Quebec. These chairs become the play’s central metaphor: they demonstrate the logic of immigrant alterity and invite Soleymanlou’s audiences to join him on stage, to share their own experiences of displacement. The audience’s sympathy, therefore, is less motivated by the artist’s political project (as we all know: personal is political), but by our own experience of disembodied and questioned subjectivities, by the emotional stupor we find ourselves in, facing the paradox of today’s world stretched between the heteroglossia of transnational citizenships and mobile identities, and the monoglossia of rising nationalisms, a danger to which Soleymanlou’s project bears witness. Here, the artist’s multilingual presence produces an effect of singularity, ‘achieved by blending the actual and fictional so that they become virtually indistinguishable’ (Stephenson 2010, 50). The author-­ autobiographer-­narrator (the historical Mani) assumes the role of another (the fictional Mani). In a manner reminiscent of Bakhtin’s dialectics, we see the author Soleymanlou ‘occupying an intently maintained position outside [Mani] the hero’, observing the image by ‘supplying all those moments which are inaccessible to the hero himself from within himself’ (Bakhtin 1991, 14). Telling a story of differences, Soleymanlou (and after him his spectators) discovers that differences create unities. There is the unity of a theatrical performance, the unity of a split identity, and the unity of a performative encounter, when the artist and the audience come together to laugh, to be amused and amazed, and to feel compassion. * * *

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Sœurs: On the Décalage of Cultural and Technological Mediations ‘Language is the only tool of mediation and conflict resolution’ (Mouawad 2015a, 15)—states Geneviève Bergeron, the protagonist in Wajdi Mouawad’s one-woman show Sœurs. More than Fronteras Americanas or Trois: Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou, this play declares the power of logos to bring about the transformative experiences of a theatrical performance. Sœurs takes the form of a multilingual plateau of French, English, and Arabic, spoken interchangeably and without translation. Thematically, it continues Mouawad’s autobiographical project, which is devoted to the theme of exile. Wajdi Mouawad, who was born in Lebanon in 1968, belongs to the generation of Lebanese artists who had to flee their country in the 1970s during the civil war and seek refuge in the West. His family relocated first to Paris and then, when Mouawad was still a young adolescent, to Montreal. This early exposure to the complexity of the adult world left a discernible imprint on the language, devices, and themes in his plays. Mouawad’s work can be divided roughly into two periods: before 2012, while the playwright was in Quebec, and after 2012, when he returned to France.8 His early plays dramatize the exilic child’s disengagement from the land of his ancestors. They build on the theatricalization of collective and individual memory, as well as the objectification, fictionalization, and translation of a communal history. The cycle Le Sang des promesses—Littoral (1997), Incendies (2003), Forêts (2006), and Ciels (2009)—is Mouawad’s major work of his Quebec period. It features teenagers as eternal strangers, who wish to reconcile their experience as young Quebecois with that of refugees from a faraway country. Inspired by the author’s personal story of exile, these plays escalate the protagonists’ suffering to the tragedy of abandoned childhood. Mouawad’s characters ‘bear the heavy legacy of their parents’ fate, along with the ethical sense of responsibility and the tragic sense of belonging’ (Telmissany 2012, 54). The violent images of tortured and raped women, lost children and elders, and broken families and homes disturb and shock Mouawad’s audiences. His plays often exhibit the influence of Romantic philosophy, specifically Friedrich Hölderlin’s vision of tragedy as the characters’ experience of catastrophe (Davreu 2011, 37). Sœurs belongs to Mouawad’s second tetralogy Domestique. Currently unfinished, it includes Seuls and Sœurs, with other plays about the Father, the Mother, and the Brothers still to be written.

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Although Sœurs was devised after Mouawad left Quebec, it reveals his unresolved dilemma: a Lebanese-Quebecois artist seeking his place within the dimensions of international theatre, while at the same time meditating on his own position as a citizen of Quebec. The play depicts an improbable chance encounter between Geneviève Bergeron, a successful Montreal lawyer working on international conflicts, and Layla Bintwarda, a Lebanese-Quebecois insurance agent. The action takes place one winter night in an expensive hotel in Ottawa. It consists of two loosely connected parts: the first is a comedy of linguistic sabotage that Geneviève’s multilingual hotel room performs when it refuses to communicate with her in French; the second is a spiritual meeting between two women. Mouawad names his sister Nayla and Annick Bergeron as his close collaborators on this script: the play evokes the history of how Bergeron’s Francophone family became displaced from Manitoba to Montreal, comments on the fate of the Indigenous people of Canada (identified with Irene, Geneviève’s adopted sister), and references Nayla’s exilic journey. Both roles—Geneviève Bergeron and Layla Bintwarda—are performed by Annick Bergeron. This casting choice symbolizes the forever split self of one displaced body and the I of the narrator collapsing into the I of her characters. Not surprisingly, Sœurs appears as an example of Mouawad’s experiment in metaphysics—as to him theatre remains the only place for ‘metaphysical encounter par excellence’ (Mouawad in Turp 1997, 164–165). In order to effect the shift from realia to metaphysics, Mouawad opens Sœurs in a representational mode. First, we zoom in on Geneviève Bergeron driving from Montreal to Ottawa in a winter snowstorm. She is lip-synching Ginette Reno’s hit Je ne suis qu'une chanson, written by Diane Juster (Mouawad 2015a, 14), at the same time admitting that she, ‘the brilliant lawyer who has devoted her career to the resolution of major conflicts, she, the famous mediator, is unable to name any of her desires’, attachments, or loves (Mouawad 2015b). As Geneviève drives through the storm, she holds a telephone conversation with her ageing mother, easily switching from French to English and back. The keyword in this dialogue is ‘mediation’: it defines Bergeron’s work and is the focus of her public lecture on conflict resolution that she delivers in the following scene. Mediation—Bergeron tells her public—wrestles with ‘seven deadly sins’, such as ‘arrogance, ignorance, inflexibility, indifference, authoritarianism, contempt, and rejection’ (Mouawad 2015a, 15–16). Mediation, however, ‘is not only a negotiation, it is involvement. […] It is a state of mind. Humiliation’ (16). But since ‘humiliation is the nerve-center of any

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war’ (16), a mediator must ‘always, in spite of the doubts, the failures and the uncertainties, [rely upon] the power of language’ (17), because ‘any mediation has to end by an exchange’ (17). Ironically, everything that follows negates this statement. The interactive hotel room in which Bergeron stays through the night malfunctions: it refuses to communicate with her in French. This technical glitch tests the character’s threshold of tolerance and her skills as a specialist in conflict resolution. As the result, Bergeron trashes her interactive room, admits her emotional and professional fiasco as a mediator, and hides under the mattress. When Layla Bintwarda appears on stage to assess the damage done by the famous guest, what began as an anecdote about a Francophone lawyer harassed by the interactive communication system of her hotel room in the bilingual capital of Canada turns into a phantasmagoria. As the investigator, Layla Bintwarda, prepares ‘to wrap up her sleuthing, she hears a voice from beneath the mattress [the voice of Geneviève Bergeron] asking her to shut off a nearby cell phone. Thus begins a bizarre relationship between soul sisters’ (Donnelly 2015). Layla speaks in French and Arabic: through recollecting her past in the war-­ridden Lebanon and reminiscing on her present as a sole caregiver of her ageing and estranged father, she brings the contrast and the perspective to Bergeron’s failure in conflict resolution and mediation with her hotel room. Thus, the comedy of the situation provides Mouawad with an opportunity to better articulate his belief in the mediating power of words, whereas Annick Bergeron’s performative transformation into Layla further demonstrates the complexity of a mediator figure. ‘The fun begins as [Annick Bergeron—the performer] starts to appear, thanks to clever use of projections, in more than one place at once. She returns as a chambermaid, a police officer, and finally a FrancoLebanese insurance investigator’. (Donnelly 2015).9 In addition to its playfulness, Sœurs carries obvious political overtones: the code-switching from French to English and from English to Arabic functions as Mouawad’s commentary on the practice of bi- and multilingualism in Canada and the hypocrisy of Ottawa’s official bilingualism. The play demonstrates that, although politicians and lawyers couch their resolutions in the stilted language of officialdom, in peace-making only the everyday practices of sophisticated multilingualism can offer alternative channels of communication. For this reason, language mediation serves an important trope in the mythopoetics of migration (Cox 2014, 10). Artistically and philosophically, however, Sœurs continues Mouawad’s experimentation with polyphonic writing and his exploration of family

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constellations against the backdrop of epochal history. Multilingualism endows this political project with metaphorical significance, a feature common to the aesthetics and ethics of cosmopolitanism. Despite this production’s extensive touring history, Mouawad’s target audience remains Francophone Quebec. The opening monologue on mediation is mostly spoken in French, with the English phrases used as signposts of meaning, helping unilingual Anglophones to understand the political significance of multilingualism. When Layla enters the stage as a saviour figure, Mouawad has her speak Arabic to narrate the story of her past and French to talk about her present life. At the same time, the play’s multilingualism acquires a metaphoric meaning when the characters reach a level of incomprehension equivalent to the everyday perplexity felt by many migrants. They fall victim to the resulting vertigo and confusion. In order to convey this sensation to his audiences, Mouawad mixes the spoken word and projected multilingual phrases. This device marks Sœurs as a (syn) aesthetic playtext able to generate a (syn)aesthetic reception (Machon 2009). In (syn)aesthetic playtexts, words ‘have the potential to transmit primarily emotive and sensate experience. […] Such writing returns human communication to its primitive roots, corroborating the idea that all verbal communication originates via synaesthetic and synkinetic means’ (Machon 2009, 75). In (syn)aesthetic performance, physical and image-­ based languages ‘blend together to ensure the progressively innovative quality of the (syn)aesthetic hybrid’ (80). Watching a (syn)aesthetic performance of a (syn)aesthetic play (like Sœurs) turns into an act of cosmopolitan encounter between the stage and the audience, because switching linguistic codes on stage can create for a multilingual spectator a moment of stillness and distancing, necessary for their encounter with their own selves. Sœurs evokes ‘trouble, irritation, as well as laughter and emotion’ (Lander 2015). More than any other example cited in this chapter, in other words, it speaks to the cosmopolitan sensibilities of today’s world. At the same time, although the play supports the guiding principles of globalization, in its use of multilingualism, it also confronts the weaknesses of Western democracy—dependent on, and manipulative of, the mediating powers of language. * * *

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There is a strong tendency in today’s theatre to reject words in favour of images, movements, and sound and lighting effects. Yet cosmopolitan solo performances insist on the power of language in constructing the divided self. They investigate the emotional weight of one’s mother tongue as ‘the figure of home that never leaves us’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 89) and feature authorial voices partaking in language games and employing accented speech and dialects. Often, they employ strategies of ‘incorporation’ or being possessed by ‘the voice of another’ (Carlson 2006, 148). They also rely on a (syn)aesthetic style of writing that capitalizes on the corporeality of logos. Collectively such plays generate heteroglossic performative environments—a conflictual coexistence of distinct narrative voices within a unified dramatic utterance—and polyphony, ‘the representation of multiple voices and refusal to synthesize difference through intervening authorial commentary or presence’ (148). They stage subjectivity as being rooted in experience, trace, and alterity. Central to this work is the tension between the cosmopolitan subject’s I, as expressed in their mother tongue(s), and this subject’s recognition of their own self as other, constructed and performed in a language(s) different from their native one(s). This tension reveals the issues of comprehensibility, translation, and power experienced by individuals in their everyday multilingual encounters and on stage. In the next chapter, I examine how these issues of everyday cosmopolitanism and the tensions of the divided self are constructed and revealed through making multilingual dialogue and its practices of (non)translation.

Notes 1. Vinci was created, directed, and acted by Lepage himself. It was co-­produced by Théâtre de Quat’Sous (Montreal) and Théâtre Repère. It was first performed in Montreal in 1986  and then travelled in Canada and abroad, receiving the Best Production of the Year Award from the Association Quebecoise des Critiques de Théâtre (1986), the Best Production at the Festival de Lyon (1987), and the Prix Coup de Pouce at the ‘Off’ Festival in Avignon (1987). 2. Je me souviens (1998–2001) was a bilingual one-woman show, produced by Lorena Gale’s company, Curious Tongue Productions, at Halifax’s Eastern Front Theatre in 1998. It was later presented at Vancouver’s Firehall, Victoria’s Belfry, and CBC national radio. The play was published by Talonbooks in 2001. Gale was nominated for three Jessie Richardson Awards, including Best Actress and Best Production.

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3. Fronteras Americanas premiered in 1993 at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, ExtraSpace; it was remounted by the Soulpepper Theatre Company in Toronto in 2011. ‘Fronteras, originally performed by Verdecchia himself, was extraordinarily well received by Toronto audiences and critics alike and was an impressive box-office success. Since then it has been produced in other parts of the country, and it has won Verdecchia a 1993 Governor General’s Drama Award and a 1994 Chalmers Award for Best Canadian Play’ (Gomez 1995). 4. Trois: Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou consists of three parts: Un, written, directed, and performed by Mani Soleymanlou, was produced by Orange Noyée and co-produced by the Théâtre La Chapelle and Théâtre du Grand Jour in the Fall of 2011. Deux, also written and directed by Mani Soleymanlou, was performed in collaboration with Emmanuel Schwartz and produced by Orange Noyée and premiered in the Théâtre La Chapelle, Montreal, in the Fall of 2013. Trois, written, directed, and performed by Mani Soleymanlou with the contribution of forty-three performers, all immigrant theatre artists of Montreal, was produced by Orange Noyée and co-produced by Festival TransAmériques and the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in June 2014. 5. Sœurs, written and directed by Wajdi Mouawad in 2014, constitutes the second part of the cycle Domestique that opened in 2008 with his solo performance Seuls. The third part—Mère—will open at Theatre La Colline in 2021. Sœurs was produced by Au Carré de l’Hypoténuse-France and Abé Carré Cé Carré-Québec, in co-production with Le Grand T—théâtre de Loire-Atlantique, the Théâtre national de Chaillot Paris, the Théâtre de l’Archipel, scène nationale de Perpignan, and Le Quartz, scène nationale de Brest. It has been touring extensively in Europe and North America. 6. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French to English are mine. 7. Lorena Gale (May 9, 1958–June 21, 2009) ‘was the first Black woman to be accepted to the National Theatre School of Canada; was Artistic Director of Black Theatre Workshop (1984–1985); was the Creator and Director of the Program for the Artistic Development of Artists of Colour in Theatre, Vancouver (1992–1994); and was Artistic Director of Curious Tongue Productions’. Black In Canada, http://www.blackincanada. com/2011/04/01/lorena-gale/. 8. After a prolific career in Montreal, Mouawad acted as an artistic director of the French Theatre, National Arts Centre, Ottawa (2007–2012). Since 2011, he has served as an associate artist of Grand T, the Théâtre de Loire-­ ­ Atlantique de Nantes. In April 2016, François Hollande named Mouawad artistic director of the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris.

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9. This sense of irony and theatrical phantasmagoria that mark the comic situation and the encounter between the characters is reflected in the spatial layout of Sœurs. The main element of its set is a light wooden structure, which serves both as a divide between Bergeron’s public appearances and the privacy of her hotel room and as a screen for multiple projections.

Bibliography Aciman, André. 2011. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Albacan, Aristita I. 2016. Intermediality and Spectatorship in the Theatre Work of Robert Lepage: The Solo Shows. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Attarian, Hourig. 2010. Locating the ‘We’ in Autobiographical Performance. In Solo Performance, ed. Jenn Stephenson, 183–190. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1991. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, 5–249. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Balme, Christopher B. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bissoondath, Neil. 1994. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin Books. Bovet, Jeanne. 2000. Identity and Universality: Multilingualism in Robert Lepage’s Theater. In Theater sans frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I.  Donohoe and Jane M.  Koustas, 3–21. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Bunzli, James. 2000. Autobiography in the House of Mirrors: The Paradox of Identity Reflected in the Solo Shows of Robert Lepage. In Theater sans frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I. Donohoe and Jane M. Koustas, 21–43. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Butler, Judith. 2007. An Account of Oneself. In Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Text and the Talk of Everyday Life, ed. Bronwyn Davies, 19–39. New York and London: Routledge. Canadian Multiculturalism Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. 24 (4th Supp.)). https://lawslois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-18.7/index.html. Canagarajah, Suresh. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin. 2006. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carson, Christie. 2000. From Dragons’ Trilogy to The Seven Streams of the River Ota: The Intercultural Experiments of Robert Lepage. In Theater sans fron-

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tières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I. Donohoe and Jane M. Koustas, 43–79. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Cox, Emma. 2014. Theatre & Migration. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Davreu, Robert. 2011. Traduire Sophocle? In Traduire Sophocle, ed. Wajdi Mouawad and Robert Davreau, 21–41. Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dib, Kamal, Ian Donaldson, and Brittany Turcotte. 2008. Integration and Identity in Canada: The Importance of Multicultural Common Spaces. Canadian Ethnic Studies 40 (1): 161–187. Dolan, Jill. 2001. Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative’. Theatre Journal 53: 455–479. Donnelly, Pat. 2015. Soeurs, the One-Woman Show by Wajdi Mouawad, Is Surreal. Montreal Gazette. January 21: 2015. http://montrealgazette.com/ enter tainment/local-ar ts/soeurs-the-one-woman-show-by-wajdimouawad-is-surreal. Dundjerovic, Aleksandar. 2007. The Theatricality of Robert Lepage. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Fatona, Andrea Monike. 2011. Where Outreach Meets Outrage: Racial Equity at The Canada Council for the Arts (1989–1999). PhD diss., University of Toronto, Toronto. Gale, Lorena. 2003. Je me souviens. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Gauvin, Lise. 2000. Langagement: L’écrivain et la langue au Québec. Montreal: Boréal. Geis, Deborah R. 1993. Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Gomez, Mate. 1995. Healing the Border Wound: Fronteras Americanas and the Future of Canadian Multiculturalism. Theatre Research in Canada 16 (1–2). https://journals-lib-unb-ca.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/index.php/TRIC/article/ view/7169/8228. Grace, Sherrill. 2003. Voicing Women’s Experiences. In Voice of Her Own, ed. Sherrill Grace et al., III–VIII. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Hauptfleisch, Temple. 1989. Citytalk, Theatretalk: Dialect, Dialogue and Multilingual Theatre in South Africa. English in Africa 16 (1): 71–91. Heble, Ajay. 2000. You Break no Laws by Dreaming: George Elliott Clarke’s Québécité. In Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, ed. Janet Sears, 217–221. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Howe, Elizabeth A. 1996. The Dramatic Monologue. New  York: Twayne Publishers.

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Ignatieff, Michael. 1994. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. Toronto: Penguin Canada. Innes, Christopher. 2009. Robert Lepage. In Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre, ed. Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova, 120–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karpinski, Eva C. 2017. Can Multilingualism Be a Radical Force in Contemporary Canadian Theatre? Exploring the Option of Non-Translation. Theatre Research in Canada 38 (2): 153–167. Knowles, Ric. 2006. Documemory, Autobiology, and the Utopian Performative in Canadian Autobiographical Solo Performance. In Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, ed. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman, 49–72. Vancouver: Talon Books. Lander, Selim. 2015. Soeurs de Wajdi Mouawad: Apocalypse dans une chambre d’hôtel. Critical Stages 12. http://www.critical-stages.org/12/ soeurs-de-wajdi-mouawad-apocalypse-dans-une-chambre-dhotel/. Lepage. Robert. 1987. Vinci (DVD). Quebec: Ex-Machina. ———. 1998. Connecting Flights: In Conversation with Rémy Charest. Translated by Wanda Romer Taylor with a Foreword by John Ralston Saul. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada. Levesque, Robert. 1986. Le Vinci de Robert Lepage. Le Devoir (Montreal), March 6. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)Aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mackey, Eva. 1999. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London and New York: Routledge. Makarenko, Jay. 2007. Official Bilingualism in Canada: History and Debates, July 1. http://www.mapleleafweb.com/features/official-bilingualism-canada-history-and-debates.html. Marlatt, Daphne. 1984. Entering in: The Immigrant Imagination. Canadian Literature 100: 219–223. Maufort, Marc. 2003. Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism. Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang. Moss, Jane. 2012. ‘Je me souviens’: Staging Memory in Anglo-Québécois Theatre. Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes 46 (3): 61–80. Mouawad, Wajdi. 2015a. Soeurs. Montreal: Leméac/Actes Sud-Papiers. ———. 2015b. Mot de l’auteur. Collision. Le Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui. Reid, Gregory J. 2009. Is there an Anglo-Québécois Literature? Essays on Canadian Literature 84: 58–86. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Soleymanlou, Mani. 2014a. Trois: Un spectacle de Mani Soleymanlou. Montréal: L’instant même. ———. 2014b. Interview with Mani Soleymanlou. Festival TransAmériques 2014, March 25.

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———. 2014c. Rajoutons des souches ‘Profession: immigrant’. Cahier Quatre: Les Cahiers du Théâtre français 12 (4): 24–29. Stein, Gertrude. 1926. Composition as Explanation. The Dial; a Semi - monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information (1880–1929) (October 1): 0_015. http://search.proquest.com/docview/89687990/. Stephenson, Jenn. 2010. Portrait of the Artist as Artist: The Celebration of Autobiography. Canadian Theatre Review. 141: 49–53. Taylor, Charles. 1994. The Politics of Recognition. In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman, 25–75. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Telmissany, May. 2012. Wajdi Mouawad in Cinema: Origins, Wars and Fate. CineAction 88: 48–57. Tompkins, Joanne. 2006. Remember the Nation: Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens. Canadian Theatre Review 125: 56–61. Turp, Gilbert. 1997. Écrire pour le corps. L’Annuaire théâtral 21 (printemps): 161–172. Verdecchia, Guillermo. 1997. Fronteras Americanas. Vancouver: Talonbooks. ———. 2006. Blahblahblahblah Mememememe Theatreschmeatre. In Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice, ed. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman, 332–336. Vancouver: Talon Books. Wasserman, Jerry. 2009. Lorena Gale, 1958–2009. Canadian Theatre Review 140: 3–4. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

CHAPTER 3

‘Speaking in Tongues’: Staging Hospitality of (Non)Translation1

Many contemporary theatre practices and scholarly studies have recently come to focus on theatrical multilingualism, which they identify as a speech act that links onstage and stage/audience communication to the realities of global movements. Migration enhances the political visibility of theatrical multilingualism. It ‘highlight[s] the interplay of linguistic choices which are variously permitted, frowned upon, singled out for praise, or simply barred’ (Polezzi 2012, 346). However, in any analysis of theatrical multilingualism and its practices of (non)translation on stage, the focus must remain with the actants of movement: ‘If we take into account people rather than […] texts, then the implications of “translating” them necessarily foreground ethical questions: there is, after all, a crucial difference between “manipulating”, “domesticating” or even “betraying” a literary work and doing the same with a human being’ (347). Accordingly, the translation practices of multilingualism imply responsibility and hospitality. Yet hospitality can be ambivalent, specifically if migrants must express themselves in the language of the host. Such hospitality places the seeker of protection in a vulnerable position, but it also encourages self-translation, which can ensure the agency and the voice of the migrant. Theatre is one of the primary public venues where the voice of a migrant can be heard and the potential and deficiencies of multilingual expression can be interrogated. To reflect the relational and fluid nature of today’s transcultural encounters, theatrical multilingualism employs various tactics of self-translation, translation for others, and ­(non) © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_3

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translation on stage. When the artist refuses to translate the speech of one character for the benefit of others or for the benefit of the target audience that is the point where multilingual performances begin to investigate the possibilities of cross-cultural communication. Dramaturgically, they imitate ‘the language practices of migration [which] inscribe translation within the space of the receiving community as much as in the lives of the migrants themselves’ (Polezzi 2012, 348). Artistically, such productions function as aesthetic experiments and stage multilingualism both as a marker of alterity and as an ‘instrument of control’ (347). Seeking the most ethical strategies for putting migrants on stage and building on such functions of political theatre as truth seeking and performing justice, multilingual performances are often motivated by the pursuit of theatrical verisimilitude. They frequently rely on what I call the dramaturgy of authenticity, when migrant characters speak in the language of the actors who perform them. These experiments range from hyper-realistic to highly stylized, when the multilingual performance text turns into a synesthetic expression with its words standing in for music. Defamiliarizing audience reception can be one of the dominant artistic devices in such a performance. The act of estrangement puts a monolingual audience member ‘into a critical stance or puzzlement’ and comments on the ‘prevailing spirit of neo-colonialism’ with the domineering power of English as the language of global communications (Phipps 2019, 13). The accessibility of a multilingual dialogue and its invariants, as well as simultaneity, multiplicity, and linguistic dynamics, determines the scale of openness and comprehensibility of a multilingual theatrical performance. To monolingual spectators, a multilingual production might remain mostly closed, as Marvin Carlson points out (2006, 180–215), but if its audiences are themselves multilingual cosmopolitans, it can be partially open, that is, the work may convey different meanings to different sections of the audience simultaneously. Which moments of this multilingual encounter will be accessible and to whom varies from one encounter to the next. This ambiguity, I believe, presents the most challenging and exciting work of theatrical multilingualism. In this chapter, therefore, I will examine the scale of comprehensibility of a multilingual dialogue. A fully translated multilingual dialogue with surtitles, a type of meta-text generated by the production team for the sake of the production’s accessibility, is however outside the scope of this chapter. Partly translated and non-translated multilingual dialogues are the primary focus of my analysis. I identify a partly translated multilingual dialogue as a type of verbal exchange on stage that relies

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on different in-textual (dramatic) and onstage (performative) inter-­ character translations to convey the information necessary to ensure the play’s meaningfulness for the target audience. This type constitutes the primary focus of my analysis. A non-translated multilingual dialogue refers to situations where the actors speak in the languages of their choice without providing any translations either for their immediate interlocutors, that is, other actors, or members of the audience. Canadian multilingual theatre offers good examples of such practices, the official policies of multiculturalism and bilingualism being a catalyst to their growth. This chapter begins with my discussion of David Fennario’s Balconville (1979),2 debatably the first play in Canadian theatre history that conceives of its audiences as being fully bilingual and thus capable of following a bilingual dialogue without translation. It exemplifies dramaturgical authenticity in a representational key, in which the multilingual dialogue serves as an iconic marker attesting to the truth of the characters’ linguistic background and the theatrical verisimilitude of the fictional encounter between them. Here, the characters’ mother tongues function as emotional links to their true selves, which have been lost in the multiplicity of identities that the situation of migration has imposed. My argument progresses through a series of case studies, including La Trilogie des dragons (1985–1992)3 developed by Théâtre Repère and directed by Robert Lepage and Mother Tongue (1995)4 written by Betty Quan. In these works a multilingual dialogue serves to illustrate complex interpersonal relationships between first-generation immigrants and their hosts (La Trilogie des dragons) and between members of a diasporic family, with the second-generation immigrants, the children of these families, being torn between their home and adopted cultures (Mother Tongue). The chapter advances with my analysis of Olivier Choinière’s Polyglotte (2015),5 in which a partly translated multilingual dialogue mobilizes the author’s socio-political commentary on the power of the state over its subjects. My close reading of the polylingual project In Sundry Languages (2015–2019)6 created by Toronto Laboratory Theatre and directed by Art Babayants concludes this brief overview of multilingualism in Canadian theatre. It offers a new perspective on the cultural and linguistic conditions of the Canadian theatrical multiculturalism. In In Sundry Languages, I demonstrate, the hegemony of the country’s official languages (English and French) is shaken by the presence of multilingual performers on stage and by their linguistically diverse audiences, who might be familiar with many languages used in the performance. In Sundry Languages, in other

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words, exemplifies what Alison Phipps calls the decolonizing practices of theatrical multilingualism (2019, 29). As my theoretical lens, I adopt Eva Karpinski’s proposal to treat theatrical (non)translation both as a device of staging ‘multilingual hospitality’ and as a gesture of ‘radical co-habitation’ (2017, 154). The term linguistic (non)hospitality, which I introduce, takes its inspiration from Karpinski’s work but also from Paul Ricoeur’s theory of literary translation as an act of negotiation of meaning between the original text and its new linguistic and cultural addressee, as well as his view of linguistic hospitality, which he describes as ‘the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language […] balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house’ (Ricoeur 2006, 10). In this chapter, I speak of the linguistic (non)hospitality of theatrical multilingualism, referring to those multilingual productions that envision their target audiences as multilingual speakers and hence do not aim to make every moment of their onstage action accessible to all members of such a diverse audience. These multilingual experiments open the space for staging the divided subjectivity of cosmopolitanism within the mirror of one’s multiple linguistic and cultural encounters. * * *

On Theatrical Multilingualism and the Practices of Linguistic (Non)Hospitality Marvin Carlson traces the history of theatrical multilingualism back to Renaissance Europe and what he calls the macaronic stage, when passages in Latin and the vernacular intermingled without any translation (2006, 62–100). This practice did not present a problem of comprehensibility because, before the appearance of the nation states, ‘audiences were themselves macaronic’, so that when ‘the creators of vernacular texts in the late Middle ages and early Renaissance included Latin passages they could obviously assume that they would be accessible at least to the learned among their audiences’ (41). Thereafter the historical avant-garde and twentieth-century intercultural theatre paved the way to present-day theatrical multilingualism. This is practised mostly in the context of international theatre festivals, co-productions, and touring shows, which echo and appeal to the strategies of communication in multicultural urban

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centres, when individuals freely switch from one language to another. It is also slowly becoming a prominent element of productions created by and featuring migrant artists, or being about migration, with one of its primary examples being the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. Unlike the multilingualism of the intercultural theatre of the 1970s, which was often marked by ‘mismatches of intention’ and ‘the risk of decontextualisation, appropriation and commodification’ (Cox 2014, 12), the multilingualism of cosmopolitan theatre frequently references the polyglot diversity of the metropolitan offstage and is generally used to enhance the authenticity of its performative representation. Because of its ability to merge and absorb elements of two or more languages, it resembles theatrical syncretism (Balme 1999), which is based on the ‘conscious, programmatic strategy [of representation] to fashion a new form of theatre in the light of colonial or post-colonial experience’ (Balme 1999, 3). Syncretic dialogue is usually ‘written and performed in a europhone language, but almost always manifests varying degrees of bi- or multilingualism’ (3). Theatrically, it relies on forms of performance native to both European and Indigenous cultures; methodologically, it employs ‘a creative recombination of their respective elements’ (3). In cosmopolitan theatre, a multilingual performance relies on these syncretic tactics but also on the encoding and decoding strategies of cultural semiotics. Politically, it provokes and intervenes, giving voice to the marginalized. As an act of resistance, it subverts the dominant cultures and paradigms. To better reflect what Homi Bhabha identifies as the global pathways of the post-nation world (2014, 275–277), theatrical multilingualism conjures up a performative version of a utopian brotherhood comprising diverse subjects. Unlike a multilingual solo performance, a theatre dialogue spoken in several languages is less focused on constructing the divided self of today’s individual. Rather, it demonstrates how this subjectivity can be reflected in, and revealed through, the speech of others and how this sense of multiple belongings can be reinforced through code-switching and code-mixing in language. In its socio-cultural or referential functions, therefore, theatrical multilingualism reflects the diversity of today’s auditorium. In its aesthetic functions, it can suspend perception by immersing spectators in a state of not-understanding or not-knowing. To access such dialogue, the audience may resort to compensatory strategies of comprehension (Canagarajah 2013, 173), as it begins to pay attention to the physical work of the actor and the materiality of the stage signs, as well as the rhythms, the atmospheres, and the energy flows engendered by the performance. In this way multilingual

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theatre approximates non-verbal performance, evoking an image of the world as a global marketplace. At the same time, theatrical multilingualism can be used to reveal the ultimate (non)translatability of the self to the other. This may be achieved using strategies of cultural translation (Spivak 2000), based on the assumption that no original text can be transposed into a new language, so that the audience is obliged to continuously negotiate meaning. Language, however, is never neutral; we are therefore permanently involved in the practices of cultural translation, trying to translate ourselves to the other, whether the medium is our mother tongue or a newly acquired language. Translating from one’s native tongue into the language of the other is ‘a peculiar act of reparation’, for in this scenario translation takes place ‘toward the language of the inside’ (Spivak 2000, 15). Cultural translation goes beyond purely linguistic re- or transcoding: it imagines interlocutors sharing the cultural environment in which languages originate. However, as we cannot really translate ourselves to the other, we can only use the language of this other to help them make their own translations of us for themselves (Spivak 2000, 17–18). Translation, in this case, is driven not by the efforts of a translator but by the addressee. The work of cultural translation becomes specifically intriguing in multilingual productions that rely on the tactics of (non)translation, that is, being performed without surtitles. Multilingual dialogue, like a monolingual one, can provide some minimal information related to the action and its cultural and social environments. However, when important information is withheld from the audience, spectators tend to experience gaps of meaning or suspension of perception. As a consequence, multilingual dialogue can create pockets of not-knowing that can lead to the audience’s ‘frustration at having paid for a performance that one cannot understand; bewilderment at not being able to follow the action on stage; alienation as a result of feeling excluded from exchanges between actors or between the actors and other spectators who appear to understand’ (Byczynski 2000, 33–34). Artistically, a non-translated multilingual dialogue can turn a spoken text into a detail of the soundscape of performance, in which the emotive or the affectual function of communication dominates. Approaching theatre translation as linguistic (non)hospitality, a multilingual artist can either ‘focus on “closed” situations and ignore the existence of anyone outside the given culture’ or ‘transliterate all dialogue into the base language of the given culture’ (Hauptfleisch 1989, 79). This practice relies on the four functions of communication: representational, comic, metaphoric, and poetic (75–80). The representational function ‘relates directly

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to a commitment to theatrical “realism”, a specific theoretical position deriving from a concept of the play as a mirror of life’ (73). A cosmopolitan playwright might resort to multilingualism in hopes that ‘the more realistic a particular version of a [language] variant appears to an audience, the more likely they are to see the characters as real, and the more likely they are to accept the implied frame of reference’ (74). Now they can investigate how ‘citytalk becomes a theatretalk’ and how ‘the languages, dialects and sociolects of the country find themselves reflected and utilized on stage’ (82). The comic function follows the representational, as it often capitalizes on the awkwardness of transcultural encounter and exploits its characters’ poor knowledge of each other’s language and customs. In theatrical multilingualism, comedic dialogue can include dialects, accents, and other language variants. It ‘relies heavily on such standard comic techniques as stereotyping […], exaggeration and caricature, and leads to the use of extremely artificial language forms which are intended to capitalize on the “non-standard” aspects of the particular variant’ (75). Many cosmopolitan artists use comedic devices, including barbaric speech—the speech of the other marked by stylistic, grammatical, and pronunciation errors (Carlson 2006, 11–12)—to emphasize cultural mix-­ups and confusions in the migrants’ and travellers’ encounters with unfamiliar worlds. The use of barbarophone elements, including dialect, minority speech, or accent, emphasizes the fact that language is a social construct. Its primary role is therefore to denote the characters’ identities as citizens, as members of a cultural group and/or ethnicity, and as a class (10). The third function of onstage multilingualism has to do with creating a theatrical metaphor to reflect and evoke the historical, social, and economic settings of cosmopolitan realities. Although poetry rarely comes through on a multilingual stage, multilingual dialogue can encourage a (syn)aesthetic type of writing (Machon 2009), which in turn can reach the level of onstage poeticity. It can provide space for the cosmopolitan subject to experience the meeting between the I and the self. A multilingual theatretalk imagines its addressee to be either a unilingual or plurilingual spectator; it might ‘contain meaning’ as intended by the artist but ‘without necessarily conveying meaning to an audience’ (Cox 2014, 14). This effect can lead to a failure of communication that in its own turn can cause a ‘problem of comprehension and semantics’ and reflect complex ideological issues, ‘almost always linked to questions of power’ (Balme 1999, 111). It can also make spectators experience linguistic discomfort similar to that faced by barbarophone characters in what is to them a new cultural situation or to

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what we feel when we enter international zones of contact. Theatrical multilingualism, in other words, borrows and builds upon communication strategies of vernacular multilingualism. It relies on our ability to uncover meaning not only through understanding of the spoken words but also through engaging with paralinguistic signs of communication, paying special attention to the changes in rhythm and intonation of the interlocutors’ dialogue, their use of pauses and tone, speed of delivery, gestures, body postures, and facial expressions. This tactic refers to the interlocutors’ creative approach to speaking—when one chooses the how of the communication over the what of the message (Canagarajah 2013, 173). Alignment—a multilingual subject’s ability to adapt quickly to a new contact situation (174)—helps them creatively manage the linguistic overload and information chaos, in which they are immersed. Consequently, multilingual speakers begin to ‘align diverse semiotic resources to create meaning and achieve communicative success when words in isolation are inadequate and homogeneous norms are not available in contact zones’ (174). Many cosmopolitan and migratory artists use translingual practices of communication to construct their multilingual performance texts. They often imagine their audiences as increasingly multilingual, more exposed to international theatre practices, and tolerant of enduring gaps in meaning or fragmentary perception (Barton 2014, 184). As such, these artists rely on the audience’s (syn)aesthetic reception, our visceral attention to the act of enunciation on stage (Machon 2009, 69). Listening to multilingual dialogue involves ‘perpetual negotiation between intention and affect—a dense field of explicit signification and implicit experience that practitioners and spectators navigate consciously, intuitively, and instinctually’ (Barton 2014, 184). Canadian bilingual and multilingual theatre presents an interesting example of how theatrical multilingualism can employ different types of (non)translation on stage and thus can stimulate the working of performance competence in its unilingual and/or multilingual spectators. * * *

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On Vernacular Bilingualism and Theatrical Transcription David Fennario’s Balconville exemplifies how vernacular bilingualism can be theatrically constructed. Written by an Anglophone playwright who grew up in Verdun-Pointe Saint Charles working-class district of Montreal in Quebec, the play acknowledges the heterogeneous nature of the French spoken by its people. This language reflects the vernacular French of Quebec, marked by class, ethnicity, culture, and the province’s different geographical registers. The play points at the moment ‘when bilingualism has found a voice’ (Blazer 1979). Focussing upon several uneventful weeks in the life of three Montreal families and set in the context of the city’s political upheaval, with the Liberal party and its leader Gaétan Bolduc running for re-election, Balconville harks back to Quebec’s long history of multilingual production, from the early seventeenth century on (Guay 2012, 45). Facing the rise of nationalist rhetoric and the tendency towards globalization, today Quebec theatre uses different modes of inclusion and negotiation between French, English, and the other languages spoken by its population. For example, l’autochtonaire (Indigenous speech) appears in plays by Quebec’s Indigenous writers, whereas le migrataire (migrant speech) emerges as the language of immigrant theatre (Guay 2012, 48). English, however, has remained the lingua franca of Quebec’s urban culture, specifically Montreal’s cosmopolitanism, and is a true reflection of its multicultural scene (47). Balconville belongs to the beginnings of these linguistic and cultural shifts: in its bilingualism it reflects the complexity of Quebec’s multiple identities. The three family balconies make up the setting of Balconville—the space that in turn serves as a symbolic place for the political, cultural, and linguistic negotiation of the play’s meanings. A general sense of boredom and hopelessness defines this almost Chekhovian universe. The members of the younger generation dream of leaving their neighbourhood, whereas the older one sees themselves as victims of despair, financial and family troubles, and alcohol. Paradoxically, disappointment turns the characters into a community: the play closes with a fire that ‘rages out of control, offstage, while the Balconville community unites in order to salvage the goods and chattels which have arranged themselves in the few private corners of their disappointed lives’ (Huebert 1981, 61). Bilingual dialogue shapes the play’s atmosphere and action. The text is constructed on the

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principles of vernacular bilingualism and linguistic hospitality, defined by Paul Ricoeur as the translator’s attempt to meet the idiosyncrasies of both the original expression and its invariant in translation (2006, 10–12). The play speaks in the language of its assumed audience, who are fluent in the idiom of the state (French) and in the language of Quebec’s minority (English). Fennario’s working assumption is that on stage and in the audience everybody can ‘get by’, so that the characters use French and English interchangeably, often starting their sentences in one language and finishing them in the other. Thibault—the neighbourhood fool, a half-drunk, half-mad homeless character—serves as the literal and metaphorical bridge between the French and English realities of Montreal. He switches from one language to the other, assuming the linguistic and cultural identity of his immediate interlocutor. This way Fennario’s bilingualism becomes a dynamic force of theatrical representation much like Michel Tremblay’s joual in his famous play Les Belles-soeurs (1965). Tremblay, the ‘Shakespeare’ of Montreal’s neighbourhoods, brought the language of the working class Quebec  onto the province’s major stages, a language ‘contaminated by both English vocabulary and translations of English expressions that were not part of the French idiom and sacrilegious oaths’ (Reid 2001–2002, 294). Much like Tremblay’s dialogue, Fennario’s bilingualism has social and political significance. Politically, Balconville reminds its audiences that ‘francophones were not the only group oppressed by economic and political elites, a fact often ignored by the ideologically charged new Quebec drama of the 1970s, which rejected foreign models, legitimized vernacular language, and affirmed Quebec identity’ (Moss 2012, 64). Theatrically, French and English voices echo each other, so that the play’s dialogue resembles a chorus—the speech of many articulated in one communal voice. Fennario’s vernacular bilingualism, in other words, stages community as a single body, an image evoked by a multiplicity of bodies and voices sharing one complex linguistic environment. One might be tempted to recognize the beginnings of a postdramatic or cosmopolitan script in Balconville’s vernacular bilingualism, for, as in a postdramatic script, the identity of the character is often removed from their speech, with dialogue remaining un-assigned to any particular body, thus creating an effect of narrated rather than dramatic expression. Fennario’s universe is, however, firmly rooted in its context. Here, bilingual dialogue relies upon code-switching and code-mixing not only to indicate the characters’ identities but also to ‘develop the plot through

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means of language’ (Jonsson 2010, 1309). Like the bilingualism in Chicano theatre, in Balconville code-switching ‘fulfills creative, artistic, literary and stylistic functions of dialogue making’ (1309). Fennario’s text resembles Chicano plays in the way it uses quotations, interjections, reiterations, ‘gaps’, and word play. Similarly, it aims ‘to add emphasis to a certain word or passage, to add another level of meaning, to deepen/ intensify a meaning, to clarify and to evoke richer images, to instruct the audience about a particular concept, to attempt a more faithful representation of the voice of someone else, to mark closeness, familiarity, to emphasize bonds, and to include or, on the contrary, to mark distance, break bonds and exclude’ (Jonsson 2010, 1309). In the middle of Balconville’s action, Claude Paquette, a ‘beer-drinking Québécois de souche’ (Reid 2001–2002, 295), and Johnny Regan, an Anglophone Montrealer, find themselves in a feud. Claude pretends to be unable to function in English, while Johnny refuses to communicate in French. The feud reflects the frustration and disappointment shared by all the characters of the play. It also takes on anti-separatist and anti-English undertones. The feud ends unexpectedly as it began with everybody rushing to fight the neighbourhood fire, forgetting their cultural and linguistic differences in the face of a communal danger. This time they win, but nobody knows what will happen next. In its final tableau, Balconville reinforces this sense of communal belonging and shared sense of being lost: the open ending features all characters facing the audience, standing united in their powerlessness to fight a corrupt government. The final lines exemplify the use of the bilingual vernacular onstage: JOHNNY, IRENE, MURIEL AND TOM turning to the audience What are we going to do? PAQUETTE, CÉCILE, DIANE AND THIBAULT turning to the audience Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire? (Fennario 1980, 118)

In its focus on a bilingual vernacular, Balconville features a representational theatretalk intended to mimetically evoke bilingual Montreal. It acknowledges the presence of immigrants, who also contribute to the city’s linguistic mosaic, but only in passing.

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In 2005 Fennario’s characters experienced a major comeback. The Centaur Theatre of Montreal produced a sequel to the play titled Condoville which ‘feature[d] comical scenes in which established residents of a co-op attempt to come to terms with their new, cosmopolitan, yuppie neighbours’ (Mills 2006). Condoville reflected the new realities of cosmopolitan Montreal, depicting the Pointe’s residents from Balconville being ‘slowly pushed out of their own neighbourhood by gentrification and rising rents’ (Mills 2006). * * * As a linguistic experiment, Balconville laid the groundwork for many practices adopted by immigrant theatre, specifically that of Marco Micone, an Italian-Quebecois playwright of Fennario’s generation, who was the first to bring the multilingual and accented voices of immigrants onto the province’s mainstream stages. Micone’s immigration trilogy—Gens du silence (1982), Addolorata (1983, 1996), and Déjà l’agonie (1986)7—put forward the concept of language as ‘an instrument and a manifestation of authority’ (Simon 1985, 58). Written in a kind of hybrid French marked by the English and the Italian voices who speak it, Micone’s dialogue exemplifies theatrical transcription as hospitality (Balme 1999, 129–132). It resembles the theatre of Tomson Highway, a Canadian Cree writer, who uses his native Cree language as the inner rhythmical structure for his plays written and performed in English. This technique would allow Highway to preserve Cree’s tonality within his English dialogue and to resist the dominance of the English cadence and structures in his work (132). Likewise, Micone writes his plays in French, targeting the French-speaking mainstream audiences of Quebec but also utilizes occasional phrases in Italian, the author’s and his characters’ mother tongue, as intermediary expressions to be re-translated or re-transcribed into the language of the state. At the same time, as Sherry Simon suggests, Micone’s ‘fabricated “translations” of immigrant speech into French were projections’ (2006, 182). As a result of the implementation in 1977 of the Charter of the French Language, also known as Bill 101, which defined French as the official language of Quebec, its provincial government, and the majority of its population, all immigrant children were expected to study French at school. Thus, by the time Micone started writing his plays, ‘much of the Italian community actually spoke French’, and his work of cultural

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translation became ‘a way of hastening this integration, of signing up Italian immigrants as full cultural citizens of Quebec’ (Simon 2006, 182). Micone’s invented immigrant sociolect consisted of Montreal English and French, Italian, and joual. It helped the playwright to differentiate his characters from the Québécois de souche and at the same time turned the stranger into a neighbour, someone familiar and convivial. Micone’s theatrical multilingualism provided the aesthetic underpinnings for his political position of immigrant resistance: his tactics resembled those of speakers of Yiddish, the minority literature of Eastern Europe, in that his immigrant characters spoke fluent French and could thus to be seen and heard on Quebec’s mainstream stages. He treated his characters’ Italian the way Jewish writers treated Yiddish: the language of their homes and thus ineligible for highbrow artistic expression. Micone’s theatrical English was the result of a trade-off between his characters and their North American environment, whereas his French appeared as the language of the Quebecois people, ‘whose relationship to the outsider has yet to be defined’ (Simon 1985, 60). Recognizing the symbolic and the real power of French in the politics of official Quebec, Micone had his immigrant characters communicating in the language of the host. Simon calls this strategy an act of ‘cultural militancy’ (2006, 182), as it revealed Micone’s desire to destroy the monolingual paradigm of Quebec from within, using the norms of literary expression of the time. His 1989 poem-manifesto Speak What, modelled upon Michèle Lalonde’s Speak White, articulated this position further. It referenced the nation-building power of the monolingual paradigm but recognized multilingual dialogue as ‘a step towards denaturalizing monolingualism as an unquestioned norm and standard according to which other linguistic configurations and practices are measured’ (Yildiz 2012, 206–207). In Speak What Micone responded to Lalonde’s criticism of English Canada’s prejudice, still rampant in the 1970s, against the Francophone language and culture, by staging in his poem the bias and prejudices against non-French-speaking immigrants in Quebec. In the play Gens du silence, he made one of his characters similarly declare: ‘We must replace the culture of silence by immigrant culture so that the peasant within us stands tall, so that the immigrant within us remembers, and so that the Québécois within us comes to life…. You can write what you wish, but only if you write in French will we have a chance of being understood and respected for what we are. It’s now or never’ (Micone 1984, 94–96). At the time, in other words, Micone’s linguistic project of theatrical multilingualism served as a wake-up call to discuss pressing issues

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regarding the crisis of communication and identity, sense of displacement, fear of being misunderstood, or impossibility of expressing oneself properly in any language felt by immigrants in the Quebec of the 1980s. However, neither Fennario’s nor Micone’s work was dedicated to investigating the dramatic technologies of theatrical multilingualism. It was Robert Lepage who brought the project of multilingual hospitality and (non)translation to the forefront of theatrical experiment at the time. * * *

La Trilogie des dragons: On Dramaturgies of Encounter and Relexification La Trilogie des dragons, written by Marie Brassard, Jean Casault, Lorraine Côté, Marie Gignac, Robert Lepage, and Marie Michaud and directed by Robert Lepage, has encounter, translation, and linguistic (non)hospitality as its central themes. This play constitutes a type of theatrical experiment that employs strategies of (non)translation in the struggle against Canadian linguistic solitudes and expresses a cosmopolitan worldview. Lepage considers La Trilogie des dragons foundational to his research in theatrical multilingualism (Innes 2009, 136–137), since in this work, that is ‘translational in [its] very structure’, he sought to ‘challenge the idea of translation as transmission, to replace it with a concept of “translational culture”’ (Simon 2000, 215). In Lepage’s theatre, words are often polylingual, so often in his plays, ‘there cannot be a total transfer of meaning from one idiom to another’; here ‘translation (the use of surtitles, or other strategies incorporated within the performances) is always partial, selective’ (216). In fact, on Lepage’s stage, the artistic expressions of multilingualism are more important than its politics. Indeed, slippages into cultural illustration, stereotyping, and even appropriation are frequent outcomes of this approach. Still, the artist’s recognition of theatrical multilingualism as a possible foundation for transnational collaboration and cosmopolitan dialogue remains invaluable as a model for resisting nationalist paradigms and linguistic and cultural xenophobia. La Trilogie des dragons presents a historical example of such practice: its plot develops over seventy-five years, from the mid-1930s Chinatown of Quebec City, through Toronto during WWII, and the Vancouver of 1985. It tells the story of two close friends Jeanne and Françoise from Quebec City, as narrated by Mr Crawford, a shoe salesman from the UK, who also

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spent some of his childhood in China. La Trilogie des dragons is a memory play. It speaks of life as a series of defeats: Jeanne commits a suicide, her daughter Stella dies, and Crawford vanishes ‘in an airplane crash en route from Vancouver to Hong Kong’ (Rewa 1990). Another of the play’s central characters and Lepage’s alter-ego Pierre Lamontagne leaves Canada for China. In Le Dragon bleu, the trilogy’s sequel, we see Pierre settled in Shanghai’s Moganshan 50, a vibrant scene of contemporary Chinese art. The play promises to return Pierre to his home and so to close the loop of cosmopolitan encounters that it set out to investigate. Structurally, each part of the trilogy corresponds to the colour of a tile in the popular Chinese game Mahjong. Part one—The Green Dragon—signifies the action of commencing; part two, The Red Dragon, signifies the middle and the actions of success or achievement; the last part, The White Dragon, represents the future. The symbolism of these colours is reinforced in the themes of the trilogy and through one of its central images: at the end of the third part, Yukali, a young Japanese artist, shares her own La Trilogie des dragons with Pierre. Yukali’s drawings represent her inner space, the light from within, whereas Pierre works with the space around us (Lepage and Charest 1998, 157–158). In this juxtaposition of two artistic approaches—a universe projected from within and a universe tamed for a performative installation—Lepage stages the meeting point between East and West, his own production acting as a heterotopic no-space of history, a place for encounter between the characters’ past experiences and their often unfulfilled dreams. This approach informs the setting of the work and its use of languages: Lepage wittily sets La Trilogie des Dragons on a quasi-archaeological site. The stage area is a sand-covered rectangle outlined by a wooden walkway. A small booth, a telephone pole and a billboard identify it as a parking lot. This highly flexible ‘stage’ affords the audience a point of entry into the exploration of ethnicity from three temporal perspectives, almost simultaneously: the historical and ancestral view is presented as artifacts dug from the sand; the ephemeral and contemporary are registered as imprints in the sand; and the future with its intangible sensibilities of multiculturalism, is a perspective from the air. (Rewa 1990)

Spoken in French, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese, La Trilogie des dragons emphasizes the work of translation as a primary condition of cosmopolitanism and as the play’s dramaturgical design.

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Dramaturgical authenticity is achieved through inter-character translation, using French as the dominant language of the dialogue and the major device of stage/audience communication. To construct the figure of a foreigner, Lepage uses barbaric speech (Carlson 2006). Wong, the ageing owner of a laundry business and an opium dealer, communicates poorly in the host language. In the scene ‘Le British et Le Chinois’, Wong and Crawford speak English, with Crawford’s lines serving as devices of in-­ textual and onstage inter-character translation: Chinois: The store is burn. [Le magasin est brulé.] Crawford: Did you say a star is born? [Avez-vous dit qu’une étoile est née?] Chinois: The store is burn. [Le magasin est brulé.] […] Il prend le bout de papier que Crawford tient dans sa main et y met le feu à l’aide de sa bougie Crawford:—Oh! I see, you mean it burned down… Well, I suppose my last chance of selling shoes in Quebec City just went up in smoke. (Lepage 2005, 24)

The scene makes the dialogue accessible to Lepage’s target audience, French-speaking Quebecois who also know English. It capitalizes on the idea that ‘in public contexts, the migrant is often perceived as someone who necessitates translation, whether as a form of support or as a means of control’ (Polezzi 2012, 349). Through the work of translation, this migrant appears to be ‘pulled to and from, between one culture and another’ (349). Lepage mobilizes the political use of onstage translation. He opts for the dramaturgical authenticity of Wong’s barbaric speech in order to subvert the habitual power structures in Quebec. Here, translation ‘carries both protective and aggressive connotations’ but can be interpreted as ‘an offensive and a defensive strategy’, the tactic of stereotyping, and an expression of the belief in the ‘threat of invasion’ (349). The scene exoticizes Wong’s minority position; by focusing the audience’s attention on the structure of otherness, it also serves as a device of estrangement. However, while staging multilingualism in the trilogy, Lepage limits the acts of inter-character translation to those moments that ‘relate to fundamental elements of the culture; otherwise the three languages are spoken

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quite naturally by their native speakers’ (Rewa 1990).8 These moments set up the spectators’ critical responses to the workings of linguistic (non) translation and theatrical multilingualism, since they invite ‘audience members to recognize individually the gap between the representation they witness and their own position’ (Carson 2000, 43). The scene ‘Le Rêve’ serves as an example of this strategy. It utilizes Chinese and French, music, projections, and a shadow play to evoke the land of the past as imagined by Wong. The sentences spoken by the old man in Chinese are translated into French by Françoise and Jeanne, revealing the devices of relexification, in which European vocabulary and syntax are used ‘in combination with indigenous structures and rhythms’ (Balme 1999, 128), with Chinese here functioning as an Indigenous language. Using mechanisms of inter-character translation, relexification makes the host language, French or English, sound intact, while it also challenges its rhythmical patterns and grammatical structures from within. When the passages spoken in English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese are not translated into French, they are nevertheless made accessible to the play’s target Francophone audiences. To make them more accessible, Lepage employs another aspect of relexification: he translates the non-French sentences into the languages of the stage (Pavis 1982), that is, he ‘includes rendering not just linguistic signs from a source to a target language, but also the encoding of paralinguistic and non-verbal signs and conventions, including gesture and movement’ (Balme 1999, 129). Watching these nontranslated passages, the spectator observes ‘a living demonstration of cultural pluralism’ (138) and witnesses the act of visualization of strangeness and otherness in performance. Interestingly, a similar practice can be observed in the works of English-Canadian immigrant authors of the same period. These will be the focus of the next section. * * *

Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue: On the Dramaturgies of Immigrant-Speak Canadian immigrant theatre is a powerful institution of social change, reaching out to the country’s diverse spectatorship. It engages the discursive practices of multilingualism to discuss and criticize official Canadian multiculturalism and its approach of ‘segregating, rather than integrating

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diverse racial, ethnic, and religious groups’ (Garcea et  al. 2008, 2). Fostering cultural diversity and the cohesion of Canada, multilingual immigrant theatre offers a practical illustration of the idea of post-­ multiculturalism as a common identity of difference (Garcea et al. 2008, 1–3). Betty Quan’s play Mother Tongue interrogates the concept and the validity of mother tongue. In the play, ‘the weight of the argument falls on the element of “mother” [which] stands for a unique, irreplaceable, unchangeable biological origin [and] situates the individual automatically in a kinship network and by extension in the nation’ (Yildiz 2012, 10). Quan questions the singularity of the mother tongue as one’s only native language, specifically when it comes to staging the divided subjectivity of a second-generation immigrant, forever split between the sound and the images of their native culture and those of the adopted land. Written in English, Cantonese, and American Sign Language (ASL), Mother Tongue stages a conflict of generations typical of plays about immigration, with a rebellious youth in its centre. As its title implies, the play’s major battle is revealed through the linguistic rifts between its three characters: Mother, her son Steve, and her daughter Mimi. Being strangers to Canada, all three of them ‘have to struggle not only with their individual fears and inadequacies—those of growing up, losing a husband, pursuing a career— but also with ethnocultural differences that add another layer of complication’ (Ty 2010, 47). Mother, like many first-generation immigrants, associates mastering the host language with the dream of economic, social, and cultural prosperity in the new land. She measures her own success by her children’s ability to function fluently in their adopted tongue, but she also relies on Mimi’s translation skills in her communication with the world outside the family. Although Mother came to Canada at the age of 18, she has never mastered English properly (Quan 2009, 176). Now her husband is dead and Mother is left to be her family’s sole provider. In her parenting, Mother is firmly embedded within the traditional customs of Chinese culture and relies heavily on her native Cantonese when it comes to communicating with her children. Hence, she uses the affective power of Cantonese, the mother tongue of her children, to manipulate and control them emotionally. On stage Mother speaks Cantonese and heavily accented English, whereas in the published text, her monologues appear in English in order to provide the performer of her role with a choice of ‘how much Chinese she wants, or is able, to use’ (Quan 2009, 168). Twenty-two-year-old Mimi speaks fluent English and Cantonese, whereas

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Steve, her sixteen-year-old brother, who spoke English with no accent but lost his hearing at eleven, communicates in American Sign Language. Mimi serves as an interpreter between Mother and Steve, as she has access to each of their worlds and languages. In her speech she ‘mixes in signed words’ (168). Mimi is the most versed of the three in Canadian ways of life; she is therefore trapped in the process of dissonant acculturation, when the immigrant parents’ communication with the world completely depends on their children serving as their personal translators, helping adults ‘to fill in government forms, answer phone calls, talk to doctors, and pay bills’ (Ty 2010, 48). In this play, however, the audience is in a similar position to that of Mother. We also must rely on Mimi’s bilingualism and willingness to provide translations to better understand what is going on in the scene and between the characters. Mimi’s dialogue serves as our channel of accessibility; it helps us follow the action. Yet there is nothing innocent or apolitical in this kind of cultural mediation. The play makes the subjectivity of the interpreter fully visible; it recognizes Mimi’s position as grounding but ambiguous at the same time. Mimi’s own place in her family and in Canada at large is shown to be that of an in-between, a second-generation immigrant subject trapped between the values and traditions of her home and school culture. Mother Tongue uses multilingual dialogue to emphasize ‘the political nature of mediation, its impact and its ethical implications’ (Polezzi 2012, 350). The untranslated Cantonese phrases that we hear next to the speeches in English foreground the inherited realism of English Canadian theatre; they challenge its aesthetics of verisimilitude from within. ‘English, like most western languages, tends to function mostly descriptively—that is, representationally—in its everyday use, and to use as its foundation grammar subjects doing things to objects, treating them as otherwise value-free raw material for its meanings. It tends, as a structure, both to objectify the world and immediately to relegate it to completeness, to history’ (Knowles 2016, 77). A dialogue spoken in Cantonese without translation enables Quan to articulate European models of self-expression and imposes modes of representation alternative to realism. In her confessional monologue, Mimi speaks English and ASL as she recollects the events of the day when, because of her neglect, Steve lost his hearing. This monologue ‘has a ritualistic and mesmerizing effect on stage. It is a kind of repetition and, like the repetition of certain dialogues in Cantonese and then in English, adds an element of the spiritual and the dramatic. Words accompanied by gestures […] produce a chantlike rhythmic effect, an

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otherworldliness that reminds us of other ways of communicating and speaking’ (Ty 2010, 50). At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the untranslated Cantonese suggests a stereotype, because it can lead to further exoticization, objectification, and even fetishism of the language of the other. To avoid astonishment, puzzlement, pleasure, and even fear of the Orient, Mother Tongue uses strategies of onstage self-translation. It avoids the implementation of surtitles, a technique that ‘involves not only linguistic transfer but often also the adaptation of dramatic and theatrical conventions’ (Balme 1999, 107). Instead it casts an immigrant character in the function of self-interpreter. Scene Two is a case in point. It features Steve, who uses ASL, his Cantonese-speaking Mother, and his sister Mimi, fluent in all three languages. This example of the dramaturgy of authenticity in a representational key stages theatrical translation that is geared towards both the fictional characters and their spectators: ‘Mimi translates Steve’s speech for the audience by “clarifying” the meaning of his words for herself; sometimes she also translates for the Mother […] understood by her children but not the audience’ (Samuels 2013, 19). As the result, Quan’s dialogue allows the rhythms and syntax of Cantonese to manifest themselves freely in Canadian English. This way Mother Tongue shakes the Canadian French/English solitudes from within and creates a special venue for a plurality of voices to act together. In its performative style, it opts for mythic realism (Maufort 2003, 106–107) and juxtaposes scenes created in realistic mode, mostly those that take place in Mimi’s and Steve’s house in the present time of the action, with memory and fantasy sequences that serve as spaces of refuge in which all three characters periodically disappear. In those moments the characters speak with their inner voices or in their respected mother tongues: Scene One presents a ‘voice-over montage like a sea of voices ebbing and flowing, reverberating, cutting and inter-cutting, [while] the stage remains dark’ (Quan 2009, 169); in Scene Three, we hear Steve speaking in his ‘inner voice’, ‘not heard by the others’ (172), while Mother stands in the light of the ‘smoking red incense’ and delivers her lines in Cantonese, translated later into English (176–177). When Father’s ghost joins the family, the dialogue reaches one of its most complex moments. It turns into a contrapuntal canon with Mother speaking Cantonese, Mimi English, Steve contributing his part in ASL and Father as a voice-over. In this context the figure of Father acquires a special significance. A symbolic character, he is neither a living entity nor a ghost, but appears on

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stage only as a construct of Mimi’s memory and imagination. He speaks English with a Chinese accent and is revealed either through his ‘physical presence’ but ‘always in the shadow’ or through dialogue ‘done as voice-­ over’ (168). Father’s mythological status is re-enforced through the Chinese legend of the Jingwei bird that he began to tell Mimi when she was a little girl. In the legend the bird dies, while in the father’s version she is transformed—hence giving Mimi hope and strength to become her own, independent person. In all these examples, Quan suggests a separation of the character’s voice from their body. She insists on the temporal simultaneity of all scripts and languages heard within the acoustic space of performance. This simultaneity is intended to evoke the sensation of a globalized market place. It leads spectators to encounter pockets of not-knowing and to experience intellectual and emotional estrangement. Mother Tongue ‘offer(s) us a chance to look at the way positions of otherness and marginality, such as those created by displacement, race, ethnicity, economic inequities, disability, and gender, intersect and constitute the formation of subjectivities in our contemporary globalized world. [It reveals] how discourses of race, otherness, disability, and gender are mapped onto racialized bodies simultaneously’ (Ty 2010, 45). Steve’s presence and speech acquire additional symbolic meaning in this play. Being a subject of immigrant experiences, but also deaf, Steve belongs to many spaces and cultures at once. On stage he speaks more than one language; and unlike Mimi, he recognizes ASL as his mother tongue. Steve speaks in gestures, but his monologues are also filled with sounds, so that his ‘thought becomes articulation, the movement of the throat, the exhalation of air as it forms into sounds as it forms into words’ (Quan 2009, 171). Plot-wise, Steve’s manner of communication creates an added layer of distancing as his speech patterns complicate his relationships with Mother. Although Steve can understand Mother when she uses English, he cannot communicate back, because she has refused to learn ASL. After Mimi leaves the house, however, it falls on Mother to bridge the rift between her and Steve. The epilogue brings them together in the symbolic gesture of Mother entering Steve’s light, a theatrical signifier of his inner world and a protective circle. Theatrically, Steve’s monologues present ‘a special connection of body and playtext’ (Machon 2009, 69) and thus exemplify a (syn)aesthetic script that ‘crystallizes and concentrates the intensity of personal, lived experience and themes, revealing the

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intangible (political ideas, psychological states, taboo concepts) through tangible speech and imagery’ (70). Watching and hearing Steve speak, the audience witnesses the drama of language: unless we speak Cantonese or ASL, we can only experience Steve’s monologues as dance and music. By making the audience’s reception difficult or suspending it, Quan’s multilingual Mother Tongue takes the spectators out of their comfort zones and invites them to rethink the symbolism of ‘voiceless’ people, not only through the paradigm of migration but also through the discourse of disability studies. It links the issue of otherness to the provisions of the Multiculturalism Act which recognize deaf people as a separate ethnic minority (Samuels 2013, 20). Mother Tongue equates the ‘voicelessness’ of an immigrant subject to that of a deaf person, who by omission or exclusion can become an alien in his/her native country. It uses the devices of theatrical multilingualism in order to turn its monolingual Anglophone spectators into strangers both in the world of the play and by extension to see the strangeness in themselves. Produced twice, in Vancouver in 1995 and in Toronto in 2001, Mother Tongue incited a somewhat controversial reception. Some critics resisted the complexity of the script, suggesting that the play can be seen as innovative only in its printed form (Maufort 2003, 117). They called the text’s multilingualism ‘unperformable’ and incomprehensible, except to ‘a uniquely trilingual audience’ (Samuels 2013, 19). Quan’s experiment, however, was instrumental in introducing the political weight of theatrical multilingualism. Not only did it render visible the separation of the character’s I from their self, but it also invited its audiences to embrace devices of (syn)aesthetic reception as their personal skills of translation in order to navigate this example of vernacular cosmopolitanism. Olivier Choinière’s Polyglotte and Art Babayants in his play In Sundry Languages created by the Toronto Laboratory Theatre continue this quest. By criticizing the official image of multicultural Canada, these works offer two different scenarios of Canadian cosmopolitanism, a desirable but utopian construct. * * *

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Polyglotte: On the Dramaturgy of Canada-Speak Polyglotte was created by Olivier Choinière and Alexia Bürger, two of Quebec’s leading non-immigrant theatre artists, and a group of non-­ professional immigrant actors from Haiti, Colombia, Mexico, Iran, Guyana, and France and premiered in 2015 at the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal. Intended to make the festival public confront their ‘fantastic vision of Canada and Quebec’ (Larochelle 2015), the play dramatized multilingualism from above, rendering its practices absurd. By enacting the linguistic routines of Canadian immigration policies—or what I will further call Canada-speak—Polyglotte criticized the exported image of Canada. It provided a ‘contemporary look at the country as it is’, aiming ‘to overturn the way we imagine ourselves, particularly in theatre, as a society still all-white, often unilingual and terribly homogenous’ (Choinière 2015b). In this semi-interactive show, the audience was invited to follow the steps of an immigrant’s journey from his/her arrival in Canada until the citizenship ceremony, when one swears an oath to the Queen. The idea of Polyglotte was born out of a gift: a friend of Choinière’s presented him with a collection of 1960s LPs, the Polyglot Method of French Conversation/Méthode polyglotte de conversation anglaise intended for the new immigrants learning their second language. Recorded by Henri Bergeron, this collection belonged to an immigrant family from Greece, who learned French listening to these LPs when they came to Canada. Choinière designed Polyglotte’s dialogue to mimic the conversations in these LPs and thus to stage the rigidity of this top-down educational practice, which envisions second-language learning as ‘habit formation, so audio-lingual activities primarily use repetition and drill to teach students correct forms in the new tongue’ (Farnen  2019). The Polyglot Method of French Conversation relies upon teacher substitution drills, asking students to follow ‘mechanical exercises that reinforce structural patterns and practice vocabulary’ (Farnen 2019). The multilingual text of Polyglotte consists of questions and instructions borrowed from these LPs and the immigrants’ personal responses to them, which they collected and edited during the rehearsal period. The dialogue creates the effect of ‘a Big Brother touch’ concealed in ‘the disembodied language of the disks’ (Choinière 2015a). Recruiting residents of the multicultural neighbourhood in Montreal where his company is located, Choinière recognized Polyglotte as ‘his most complicated and demanding project’: not only did his ensemble have ‘atypical schedules, precarious

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jobs, dependent children and more responsibilities than they could sometimes assume’, but also ‘they [were] new to this country, and they would not want to make angry waves or hurt the sensibilities of the host society’ (Petrowski 2015). The dominant language of the exchange was English, which made the work of Choinière, a Francophone theatre director, more a matter of soliciting participation. Although many immigrants were anxious about their critical views of Canada being disclosed to the public, working on this project provided them with a venue to express their true feelings. Their video testimonies, in which immigrants state their concerns about the conservatism of the Canadian government of Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party, can still be found on the site of Théâtre Aux Écuries. Created in the style of documentary theatre, Polyglotte emphasizes the political power of personal testimony. Eight performers, armed with lines they created themselves, ‘play the role of locals who guide the spectators toward Canadian citizenship’ (Choinière 2015b), so that the audience of Quebec would realize that ‘to see ourselves collectively in 2015 through the gaze of the immigrant, of that Other who is part of us, is necessary. It is through him or her [a new immigrant] that I [Olivier Choinière; non-­ immigrant, white, male, Quebecois citizen] can get beyond my own clichés’ (Choinière 2015b). Scene 4 is an example of this political practice: following the structure of the book Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship produced by the government of Canada for immigrants to prepare for their citizenship test and ceremony, Polyglotte instructs its performers/participants to respond to random questions about the weather, business, and the state of Canadian roads, grouped under the heading ‘useful sentences on various Canadian subjects of conversation’ (Choinière 2015a, 12). The comic effect produced by this scene resembles the aesthetics of the theatre of the absurd, in which ‘the dialogue tends to get out of hand’ (Esslin 1960, 3). In its mechanically repeated statements recorded in two languages, Polyglotte presents the immigrants’ world as ‘an incomprehensible place. The spectators see the happenings on the stage entirely from the outside, without ever understanding the full meaning of these strange patterns of events, as newly arrived visitors might watch life in a country of which they have not yet mastered the language’ (5). Thus, by subverting the logic of language, Polyglotte portrays immigrants as powerless when confronted by the official lingo of Canadian bureaucracy. It stages the citizenship ceremony as an example of the ‘meaningless clichés and the mechanical, circular

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repetition of stereotyped phrases’ of Canada-speak (5). In Scene 9, when Henri, the pre-recorded voice of an invisible interrogator, demands ‘Raconte-­nous une histoire/au sujet/de la misère’ (Choinière 2015a, 17), Safia says the following: It was the need that forced me to be in front of the church door. […] I did not like the situation at all. I started crying because I’m not used to asking anyone for help. At noon they opened the doors. We entered. But they changed the rules. […] He gave me nothing, just things that were almost out of date. […] If you are among the first, you are lucky to have milk. But the first day was really difficult. Those were really difficult times for me. (Choinière 2015a, 17–18)

This monologue creates the image of a melancholic foreigner (Ahmed 2010, 141–144) whose strength lies in their misery, as it gives the state a chance to be kind and generous or to only project the image of its generosity. Julia Kristeva traces the history of this figure back to the Danaids, the first foreigners of the Western civilization (1991, 42). In Aeschylus’s tragedy The Suppliants, the Danaids flee to Argos to seek refuge on Greek shores. As supplicants, they are guaranteed the state’s protection, but to receive it, they are expected to act needy, obedient, and grateful (47). Safia’s monologue builds on this image and is also deeply performative, as it relies on the power of a speech act to plead in the language of her protectors. The refugees must exhibit signs of defeat, submission, and destitution (Jeffers 2013, 13).9 In Scene 21 of Polyglotte, this practice receives a new twist. Participants are instructed to tell happy immigrant stories. The immigrant must portray themselves as a grateful foreigner, someone who accepts their fate joyfully and so cannot possibly present a threat to the host country. This image of the grateful foreigner emerges in typical language such as that of Ahmed, the happy migrant, whose duty is to avoid the melancholia of homesickness and ‘to attach to a different happier object, one that can bring good fortune’ (Ahmed 2010, 144). Having attempted and failed to construct this image of happiness, Polyglotte’s performers revert to speaking in their mother tongues. This is their way of insisting that the immigrant be recognized as a person, not a citizen. The production demands that the state recognize migrants as equals, stop using Canada-speak, and grant them the respect of an audible translation, whereby the second-language speaker’s accent is transformed into a tool of empowerment and agency (Cronin 2006, 76). In Polyglotte, the

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performers’ accents serve as markers of their dignity: on stage they ‘act against the dialogue rather than with it, [so that] the fervor of the delivery must stand in a dialectical contrast to the pointlessness of the meaning of the lines’ (Esslin 1960, 11). To involve the Montreal audience in this ongoing dilemma of immigration, Polyglotte has the spectators stand and repeat the words of the recording: AFC (invitant le public à se lever.) Please stand up! / S’il vous plaît levez-vous! HENRI Could you repeat/these/words without faltering? Pourrais-tu répéter ces/mots sans te tromper? HENRI I am sorry. Je suis peiné. PUBLIC I am sorry. Je suis peiné. HENRI I beg your pardon. Je vous demande pardon. PUBLIC I beg your pardon. Je vous demande pardon. HENRI I/apologize. Je vous/présente/mes/excuses. PUBLIC I/apologize. Je vous/présente/mes/excuses. HENRI Have a seat. Assieds-toi. PUBLIC Please sit. Vous pouvez vous asseoir. HENRI Our nation should stick to its ways and customs. Notre nation devrait conserver ses us et coutumes. N’est-ce pas la pure vérité? (Choinière 2015a, 18)

Henri’s instructions force the audience to face Canada-speak in action. As in the theatre of the absurd, in this scene the spectators’ ‘emotional identification with the characters is replaced by a puzzled, critical attention’, and ‘eventually the spectators are brought face to face with the irrational side of their existence’ (Esslin 5). The show closes with the re-enactment of a ritual: the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II is brought to life through voice-over as the Queen asks the questions of the citizenship exam. As the immigrants swear their allegiance to the Queen, the audience is instructed to leave the theatre by taking a walk backstage. As they do so, they pass through a charismatic tableau vivant—Jacques Cartier rencontre les Amérindiens (1535)—made by the performers.10 As we encounter this stereotypical image of a welcoming Canada, which at the same time alludes to the history of colonization and the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the country, we experience feelings of astonishment, intimidation, and embarrassment similar to what the new immigrants might feel when they step on Canadian soil for the first time. The ending remains open; its intention is to create a ‘detached audience’, who will have to ‘think for

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themselves’ (Esslin 1960, 14). The onstage presence of immigrant performers who mock the clichés and meaning of official Canada-speak moves the theme of immigration out of the realm of identity theatre politics created by the cultural and economic practices of multiculturalism. It reflects the rapidly changing social, cultural, and economic tendencies in Canadian society and points at the increasing influx of immigrant artists working on Canadian and Quebecois stages. It also deflects the question of multilingualism back onto its audiences. * * *

In Sundry Languages: On the Canadian Multilingualism of a Common Space My closing case study of (non)translation practices and linguistic (non) hospitality in theatrical multilingualism is an experimental project titled In Sundry Languages created and produced by the Toronto Laboratory Theatre and directed by its artistic leader, Art Babayants. An example of multilingualism from below, In Sundry Languages offers a view of today’s Canada as a common space emerging within the complex movements of travelling and social, cultural, and linguistic encounters. With 80% of its dialogue spoken in languages other than English and French, it depicts (im)probable encounters between Canadian multicultural and multilingual subjects. In its technique of theatrical (non)translation, it aims to challenge the assumption that, although theatrical multilingualism includes experiments with the formal patterns of theatre speech, it remains closed to poetic utterances and metaphors (Hauptfleisch 1989, 75). An experiment in non-verisimilitude, it relies on somatic and affective aspects of verbal communication and our experience of language as a sensory, embodied, and auditory construct close to music (Baldwin 2012, 60). A non-translated multilingual dialogue emphasizes the role of the spectator as a self-translator of the complex auditory environment, someone simultaneously involved in the bottom-up and top-down work of reception (31).11 Because it involves both these processes of auditory perception, In Sundry Languages can be compared to the situation experienced by its mono- and plurilingual spectators outside the theatrical action. They are like travellers (whether migrants or cosmopolitan tourists) who, in the process of travelling, find themselves excluded from the normative language(s) of the

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state, to which they travel. In its attention to the physical aspects of verbal communication, this project stages a separation between the I and the self—the gap between the performer’s body and their linguistic performance—and suggests that the same gap exists between the I of the spectator and their self. The word ‘sundry’ in the title In Sundry Languages refers to the old English word syndrig or distinct and separate and signifies unity made up of differences, an idea reflected both in the project’s performative style (since it contains comic and realistic scenes, dance, and physical theatre sequences) and its politics. In its somewhat eclectic style, the project seeks to ‘give multilingualism centre stage without resorting to the techniques that emerged within the monolingual paradigm, i.e., temporary defamiliarization or immediate direct translation and its typical corollary: sub- or surtitling’ (Babayants 2017, 58). The project searches for the ways ‘to approach language by “queering” the hierarchy implied by monolingualism as well as by including body in the process of understanding language’ (58). It challenges the erroneous assumption that translation can give access to the true meaning of the original. But in translation ‘meaning is always skewed, it’s never the same as it is in the original language or culture’, Babayants argues. So, the questions this project asks are: ‘what happens when we don’t hide the fact that things are not really translatable? What strategies would the audience develop to still understand what is happening on stage? […] Is there a way to create a dramaturgy complex enough so that the absence of translation doesn’t induce immediate boredom?’ (Babayants in He 2017). To generate responses and to devise a multilingual script, Babayants auditioned thirty-five multilingual actors of diverse cultural backgrounds; for its subsequent versions, speakers of other ‘foreign’ languages were added. As a result, In Sundry Languages, which developed as a chain of dramatic and comic vignettes from the lives of Canadian multicultural and multilingual urbanites, presents a floating script that can expand, contract, and modify based on the new linguistic environments introduced into its dramaturgy and the new linguistic groups it targets. For its 2019 staging in  Ottawa, for example, the company targeted Ukrainian- and Berber-­ speaking diasporas specific to the city, an artistic choice that privileged the local cultural encounter and reflected the fluidity of its conceptual design. In their published versions (In Sundry Languages 2017, 2019), the texts significantly differ both in the layout of the scenes and the languages they feature, to reflect the inner dynamics of the project.

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Reflecting upon the consequences of utilizing (non)translation as a type of linguistic (non)hospitality onstage, Babayants’s assumption is that there are enough spectators in a Canadian multilingual auditorium, who would understand more than 20% of this non-translated text, since they would have other languages upon which to rely. Politically, he envisions In Sundry Languages as taking away the ‘power from the Anglophone majority’ (Babayants in He 2017). By providing multilingual Canadian speakers ‘more access to meaning than those who speak English only’, the project reinforces the idea of theatre as a space of utopian encounter, in which ‘the power of an official language [can be] subverted’ (Babayants in He 2017). Dramaturgically, In Sundry Languages, like Polyglotte, uses techniques of personal testimony and devised performance. During the script-­making, the project’s participants were given the chance ‘to become multilingual dramaturges’ and were encouraged to pay ‘specific attention to physical experimentation’ (Babayants 2017, 60). As its point of departure, In Sundry Languages engaged with Debra Caplan’s four-step toolkit of multilingual dramaturgy (2014). It implemented translation both as ‘interlingual (from one language to another) and intralingual (retranslating already translated terms and references to enhance comprehension)’ strategies (Caplan 2014, 143). It also relied upon strategizing foreignness, the process of negotiation of the audience’s levels of (non)comprehension of the given context and dialogue; cultivating awareness, a balancing act of educating the company about the play’s cultural idiosyncrasies and leaving space for interpretation; and embracing challenge, the multitude of ways to represent a foreign language on stage (143–144). These strategies helped Babayants to ‘shap[e] the performers’ perception of the play’ and made him act as an ‘interlingual and intercultural’ mediator (142). As his theoretical framework, Babayants employed Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer object, which ‘determines the “direction” of one’s desire’ and makes ‘others available as object to be desired’ (Ahmed 2006, 70). As a result, one’s sexual, cultural, or linguistic identity becomes an orientation, an active process of becoming, not a function. Acceptance of one’s identity as queer begins with the recognition of oneself as other; it includes disorientation as estrangement of the self. The multilingual subject, who is assumed to be a problem within the monolingual context, adopts the position of re-orientation (Babayants 2017, 20–35). The movement away from a monolingual paradigm becomes a device in the centripetal performance: queering monolingualism through multilingual play allows both expansion of the realistic mode and recognition of I as other. To fully

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participate in watching and thus co-creating In Sundry Languages, a spectator must make themselves available for the ambiguity of not-knowing— be ready to give in to the confusion, fear, excitement, fatigue, and bewilderment evoked by the experiment. The spectators’ emotional generosity becomes their leading perception strategy. The opening scene—‘Zanoza v zadnitse’/‘Pain in ahse’ (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 415–419)—serves as an example of this strategy. It enacts a situation symptomatic of the world of cosmopolitan and post-­ migratory Canadian encounters: a Russian-Canadian actor, Yuri, is auditioning for the role of a Russian Mafioso. His English sounds slightly accented but not the way the producer, played by Babayants himself, expects. As Yuri tries to improve his performance, to make his Russian accent sound more authentic or rather stereotypical to the producer’s ear, Babayants grows more impatient. He decides to teach the actor the ‘correct’ Russian accent and joins him on stage. At this point, the scene acquires a surrealist dimension as the producer turns into the actor himself. Now he is auditioning for the same role but in Russian, without being able to speak it properly. The scene finishes in Russian with Yuri, now in the role of the producer, teaching Babayants, now in the role of the actor, the correct way to speak the part. The scene provokes a sense of the Freudian uncanny as it generates the effect of an hourglass collapsing onto itself and even a state of vertigo. Being a speaker of both languages, I find myself in a privileged position. I enjoy both the symbolism of the action and the dialogue’s game with stereotypes. At the same time, I remain curious about other people, who don’t speak Russian. What do they take away from it? Dramaturgically, however, the scene creates an opportunity for a theatrical play with mixed realities; it eases the audience into an action in which English is used merely as the base line. In the Ottawa version of the scene, the actor was played by Ahmed Moneka, an Arabic-speaking performer from Baghdad, who came to Canada without speaking English. The scene did not change in its structure but acquired a very different political meaning: it brought to the surface prejudice and ethnic hatred and additionally reflected the grim reality of the professional world of Canadian theatre and film, in which actors of colour and those with accents are still limited to mostly playing their ethnic stereotypes. The transition into the next sequence ‘Turn Off Your Cellphones!’ (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 420–421) is significant. It is spoken by a

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chorus of many voices in many languages, and it prepares the audience for the different forms of estrangement used in the play: It is pitch black. The audience is unaware of the actors seated in various locations in the house. Suddenly, one of the performers begins the following announcement in Hebrew (or any other language): ‘Dear friends, we’re about to begin. Please, turn your cellphones off. And please, enjoy the show!’ Another actor joins her by saying the same announcement in another language, then more actors join speaking all the other languages of the production with the exception of English. Some are speaking their first language, some their second/third, but all make an effort to transform the familiar sounds of the language into pseudo-­ ritualistic howling, which makes the words very difficult, almost impossible, to decipher. Eventually, the overlapping languages create a sort of terrifying Artaudian soundscape, which wraps around the audience and to which the pianist seated stage left starts adding a cacophony of high and low notes. (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 420)

The next scene ‘Arrival—Taxi’ (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 424–428) builds on this Artaudian beginning. Two characters, Arfina and Ahmed, share four languages but barely understand each other. Arfina speaks Swahili and French, whereas Ahmed’s native tongue is Arabic with his English being at the beginner level. As the characters realize that they cannot understand each other, they begin using illustrative gestures to express their needs and objectives. To the audience, the scene remains open. To those who understand English and French or any other two languages spoken on stage, the scene’s verbal and physical choreography becomes slightly redundant as the dialogue and the physical actions that accompany it often duplicate each other. For those who can follow only one language, the physical score of the verbal exchange turns into a useful form of translation, an element of theatrical hospitality. Depending on what languages a single spectator recognizes and follows and how fast they can tune into the action, the audience will experience the different degrees of trust or intimacy that the strategies of performance competence create for, and expect from, its interlocutors. At the same time, In Sundry Languages does not shy away from capitalizing on the discrepancy between the audial stereotypes we associate with different languages and the actual meaning the phrases spoken in those languages convey.

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Scene Ten: ‘Work—Phone Sex’ (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 435–436) presents an improvised dialogue between a Spanish performer, who plays a sex worker, and the Russian-/English-speaking actor, who plays her customer. In the darkness, we hear a phone dial and a pleasant female voice offering her services in different languages. The male performer chooses Spanish as his language of pleasure. As the scene unfolds, the audience realizes that the man does not know Spanish but uses it as his sexual fetish, with the female voice guiding him through different sensations. For most members of the audience, the scene has a comic effect, whereas for Spanish speakers, it becomes a political statement, since the monologue the female performer delivers has nothing to do with arousing her customer: instead, she enumerates the hardships of her immigration. Here, Babayants, much like Verdecchia before him, subjects to harsh criticism the power of the cultural stereotype, specifically those stereotypes that we associate with language. Following Lacan, he makes the play into a commentary on how the voice can turn into an object of desire. In In Sundry Languages, the voice becomes ‘the object of exposition, of an erotic perception’ (Lehmann 2006, 148). As the action unfolds, the number of languages deployed in it increases, and the situations of theatrical (non)hospitality become more frequent. The performance grows more and more surrealistic, with its dialogue ‘los[ing] its immanent teleological temporality and orientation towards meaning’ and becoming a found or an ‘exhibited object’ (147), whereas word montage turns into the defining feature of (non)translation. It ‘asserts a polyglossia on several levels, playfully showing gaps, abruptions and unsolved conflicts, even clumsiness and loss of control’ (147). Often it reveals language as foreign to the body of an actor, so that the audience is made aware of ‘the physical, motoric act of speaking or reading of text itself as an unnatural, not self-evident process’ (147). Scene Fifteen, ‘Letter Home’ (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 440–442), serves as an example of this tendency. ‘Lavinia is on the floor, looking up at the camera’ (440). She delivers a monologue—the letter home—in Spanish. While she is speaking, ‘Ahmed, in a separate light, is moving in response to the sonic quality of her speech without understanding the actual Spanish words’ (440). Ahmed enacts or rather dances the rhythmical patterns and the emotive intonations that Lavinia’s voice conveys, using her words as music. With every line Lavinia speaks, this separation between the voice and the body, the sonic image and its physical reflection, intensifies. The scene creates estrangement of the eye through the

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distancing of the ear, producing another vertigo-like effect. It is also reminiscent of the effects of distortion and fragmentation that we experience at any border-crossing. In the Ottawa version of the scene, a Ukrainian-­ speaking performer, Moriana Kachmarsky, recited her letter home in Ukrainian, whereas Ludmylla Reis, a Brazilian performer, danced to it. As a native speaker of Russian, I found myself ‘at home’ with the sound of the Ukrainian language. I connected its sonic designs and verbal images to the movements Ludmylla produced. To me, this scene’s fascination with distortion, mirror structures, and reflections exemplified the aesthetics of cosmopolitan theatre which, like postdramatic theatre, is able to capitalize on the concept of chora-graphy as ‘a perpetual conflict between text and scene’ (Lehmann 2006, 145). As I watched the action of In Sundry Languages becoming more abstract and metaphoric, the devices of chora as the theatrical deconstruction of language took over its dramaturgy, turning this project of multilingualism into a ‘sonoric space of performance’ (145). Without this privilege of understanding Ukrainian, many of the Ottawabased spectators found themselves in the position of Bakhtin’s outsider, expected to become self-translators and to interpret visual information generated by the stage according to the matrix of pre-­conceived meanings we assign to the images we see. In this situation, the non-Ukrainian-speaking audience resembled a migrant who experiences limitations of communication in the new-to-them language and so faces the advantages and the disadvantages of translation as outsidedness (Polezzi 2012, 353). Outsidedness can ‘provide vital spaces within any group or society for the elaboration of difference and the work devoted to its understanding. It can also become, therefore, a core component of political action and of political justice’ (Polezzi 2012, 354). Making outsidedness the necessary marker of its aesthetics, In Sundry Languages, in other words, stages the vernacular of Canadian cosmopolitan urbanism, not as a state-sponsored myth, but as the reality of a common space. In Sundry Languages closes with a semi-improvised participatory sequence titled ‘How do you Say “Kiss Me”?’ (In Sundry Languages [TLT] 2019, 443–445). Yuri, a Russian-speaking actor, invites a non-Russian spectator, who speaks English as second language, to briefly improvise a hello scene between strangers. A series of exchanges, mostly in English, about love, beauty, and loneliness takes place. Using jokes and poems, the performer builds an atmosphere of intimacy and trust into which the audience falls. For a moment, and only a moment, the humility and the tenderness we associate with love create the cosmopolitan utopia of equality and brotherhood.

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Philosophically and politically, therefore, In Sundry Languages follows on from the experiments of those Canadian theatre artists who came to Canada as young children or were born to immigrant parents. For them the questions of belonging, the issues of class and representation, and the father/son conflicts have become rather secondary. Their work often focuses on questions of the divided self, personal and linguistic hybridity, and the meta-theatrical potential of a theatre performance. What interests them are the fundamental issues of migration: reconstructing self through language, questioning hospitality, and carving out for themselves a personal space of engagement. This shift is indicative of two tendencies: first, it demonstrates that in today’s Canada the conditions of immigration have radically changed; second, it suggests that the culture of globalization, to which the immigrant project belongs, relies heavily on investigating and staging the phenomenon of mobile or cosmopolitan subjectivity. Such theatre is made by artists who are often mobile subjects themselves and thus carry within themselves multi-layered performative contexts. In their work, moving across cultures appears to be a lonely process, conditioned by the circumstances of their departure and arrival, the artists’ cosmopolitan worldview, and their willingness to constantly experiment with the intercultural and relational potentials of theatre language. Their work is also marked by an insistence upon the uniqueness of its makers’ personal history, by the assertion of the artists’ need to tell the individual stories of each hyphenated identity and each hyphenated group. They use these individual stories to connect the universal questions of humanity with the primary characters of cosmopolitanism. * * * To conclude, as this chapter demonstrates, non-translated theatrical multilingualism subscribes to the idea that in a world characterized by global movement, ‘the linear notion of translation as something that happens to an original (usually a written document which already exists as such in a specified language) as it moves across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries becomes largely insufficient. Translation takes place not just when words move on their own, but also, and mostly, when people move into new social and linguistic settings’ (Polezzi 2012, 348). Theatrical multilingualism provides its characters with new agency: by presenting migrants as interlocutors of their own stories endowed with their own will, that is, as self-translators, it envisions them as engaged in the active shift

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‘from objects of translation to [its] active subjects, to agents in the process’ (348). It reminds its audiences that one must re-imagine today’s linguistic norm as plurilingual (348). The work of translation emerges not simply at the border-crossing but from within the newly established multicultural space of strangers and neighbours. Theatrical multilingualism invites its audiences to practise skills of communication and (self-)translation developed in situations of everyday transcultural encounter. It employs a variety of onstage and inter-character translations that can help spectators follow the action. It can also incite new theatrical choreographies of words as sound pictures. Finally, multilingual dialogue can encourage new modes of sound perception. If ‘understood on a sensual level, the aural, physical and intellectual powers of language, as a fusion of sound, emotion and signification’, can convey meaning somatically (Machon 2009, 79). Interpretation of multilingual texts rests with the corporeal imagination of the spectators. Because it defines the author/audience interconnection anew and creates communities of hope, it also helps one to encounter oneself as I and as someone else.

Notes 1. The title of this chapter refers to the title of Marvin Carlson’s book Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2006 2. Balconville was commissioned by, and premiered at, the Centaur Theatre in Montreal in 1979. Directed by Guy Spring, it became the winner of the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award. Marvin Carlson names Balconville the first experiment in theatrical bilingualism (2006, 49), whereas Jane Moss argues that Rick Salutin’s Les Canadiens (1977) was the first bilingual play in Canada (2012, 64). 3. La Trilogie des dragons was developed by Théâtre Repère and directed by Robert Lepage. It was performed for the first time in November 1985 at the Implanthéâtre in Quebec City. Its official premiere took place on June 16, 1987, at Hangar 9 of the Vieux-Port de Montréal, at the Festival de théâtre des Amériques. It toured worldwide until 1992, with many prestigious awards to its name. Le Dragon bleu (2011)—a concluding sequel to La Trilogie des dragons—was produced by Ex Machina and co-written by Marie Michaud and Robert Lepage. It was directed by Lepage, with Lepage, Michaud, Henri Chassé, and Tai Wei Foo as its cast (Lepage and Charest 1998, 180–181).

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4. Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue opened in 1995 at Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre. It was nominated for a Jessie Award for the best new play, as well as the Governor General’s Literary Award for English Drama. 5. Polyglotte was co-produced by L’Activité and the Festival TransAmériques in 2015, with financial help from the Fondation Cole and Québecor and the Programme montréalais d’action culturelle de la Ville de Montréal. 6. Designed by a group of mono- and multilingual performers working in their dominant, non-dominant, and unfamiliar languages, In Sundry Languages performed to multilingual Canadian audiences in May 2015 and March 2016 at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto. The play was further developed in 2017 for the Toronto Fringe Festival with Shelley Liebembuk as its dramaturge. I joined the project in April 2019 and worked as its dramaturge for In Sundry Languages’s Ottawa premier. As a printed script, it has been published twice: by Canadian Theatre Review (Vol. 177, Winter 2019) and by Toronto’s Playwrights Canada Press in 2019, in the book Scripting (Im) migration: New Canadian Plays, of which I was the editor. In this section, I refer both to the book publication of the script and to the scenes I helped to devise in Ottawa. 7. Gens du silence, ‘first produced as a reading at the Bibliothèque nationale in 1982’, had its first stage productions at La Licorne and Le Théâtre de la Manufacture in 1984. ‘The first version of Addolorata was produced at Le Théâtre de la Manufacture in 1983; its second version also played at the same theatre in 1996. Déjà l’agonie received its first production at Le Théâtre de la Manufacture in 1986, under the title Bilico’ (Hurley 2004, 15). 8. In the published version of the script, however, all passages spoken in English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese, including songs, are translated into French (Lepage 2005, 11–12; 58–63; 100–101; 114–115). 9. I will return to Aeschylus’s tragedy in Chap. 5, in my discussion of Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen. 10. The official title of this lithograph is Jacques Cartier rencontre les Iroquois à Hochelaga en 1535/Jacques Cartier, His First Interview with the Indians at Hochelaga in 1535, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 11. Listening to multilingual dialogue involves ‘hearing (a sensory process) and its interpretation (a perceptual-cognitive process). These processes can be closely tied to the concepts of bottom-up and top-down […] auditory processing’ (Baldwin 2012, 31). The top-down process implies imposing the pre-existing meaning schemes on the information transmitted from the stage; in the bottom-up process, the ‘auditory pattern perception [begins] with the intake of the sound stimulus, the physical energy from the environment’ (31).

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Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Babayants, Art. 2017. ‘In Unknown Languages’: Investigating the Phenomenon of Multilingual Acting. PhD diss., University of Toronto. Baldwin, Carryl L. 2012. Auditory Cognition and Human Performance: Research and Applications. Boca Raton: CRC Press. Balme, Christopher B. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barton, Bruce. 2014. Interactual Dramaturgy: Intention and Affect in Interdisciplinary Performance. In The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska, 179–185. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 2014. Epilogue: Global Pathways. In The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures, Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, 259–277. London and New York: Routledge. Blazer, F. 1979. Bilingual Drama is Universal. The Globe and Mail, February 10. Byczynski, Julie. 2000. ‘A Word in a Foreign Language’: On Not Translating in the Theatre. Canadian Theatre Review 102 (Spring): 33–37. Canagarajah, Suresh. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London: Routledge. Caplan, Debra. 2014. The Dramaturgical Bridge. Contextualizing Foreignness in Multilingual Theatre. In The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska, 141–144. New York: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin. 2006. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carson, Christie. 2000. From Dragons’ Trilogy to The Seven Streams of the River Ota: The Intercultural Experiments of Robert Lepage. In Theater sans frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I. Donohoe and Jane M. Koustas, 43–79. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Choinière, Olivier. 2015a. Polyglotte. Unpublished Manuscript. ———. 2015b. Polyglotte, dans la peau d’un immigrant. La médiation culturelle, May 19. http://montreal.mediationculturelle.org/polyglotte/. Cox, Emma. 2014. Theatre & Migration. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New  York: Routledge. Esslin, Martin. 1960. The Theatre of the Absurd. The Tulane Drama Review 4, no. 4 (May): 3–15. Farnen, Karen. 2019. Activities Using the Audio-Lingual Method. Accessed 14 November 2019. http://classroom.synonym.com/activities-using-audiolingual-method-8621297.html.

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Fennario, David. 1980. Balconville. Vancouver: Talon Books. Garcea, Joseph, Anna Kirova, and Lloyd Wong. 2008. Introduction: Multiculturalism Discourses in Canada. Canadian Ethnic Studies 40 (1): 1–10. Guay, Herve. 2012. Bref historique du multilinguisme dans le theatre Québécois. Jeu 145 (4): 44–50. Hauptfleisch, Temple. 1989. Citytalk, Theatretalk: Dialect, Dialogue and Multilingual Theatre in South Africa. English in Africa 16 (1): 71–91. He, Shuyue. 2017. Review: ‘In Sundry Languages,’ and Multilingualism. RicePaper Managize, July 27. https://ricepapermagazine.ca/2017/07/ review-in-sundry-languages-and-multilingualism/. Huebert, Ronald. 1981. Drama. University of Toronto Quarterly 50 (4): 55–67. Hurley, Erin. 2004. Devenir autre: Languages of Marco Micone’s ‘Culture Immigree’. Theatre Research in Canada. 25 (1/2): 1–23. Innes, Christopher. 2009. Robert Lepage. In Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre, ed. Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova, 120–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeffers, Alison. 2013. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Jonsson, Carla. 2010. Functions of Code-Switching in Bilingual Theater: An Analysis of Three Chicano Plays. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1296–1310. Karpinski, Eva C. 2017. Can Multilingualism Be a Radical Force in Contemporary Canadian Theatre? Exploring the Option of Non-Translation. Theatre Research in Canada 38 (2): 153–167. Knowles, Ric. 2016. Devising and Dramaturgy: Decolonizing Praxis. Horizons/ Theatre 6: 68–82. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Larochelle, Samuel. 2015. FTA 2015—Olivier Choinière vous convie à un examen de citoyenneté Canadienne dans ‘Polyglotte’. Le Huffington Post Québec, May 27. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-­ Munby. London and New York: Routledge. Lepage, Robert. 2005. La trilogie des dragons. Quebec: Les editions de l’instant meme. Lepage, Robert, and Rémy Charest. 1998. Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)Aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Maufort, Marc. 2003. Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism. Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang. Micone, Marco. 1984. Gens du Silence. Translated by Maurizia Binda. Montreal: Guernica.

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Mills, Sean. 2006. Condo War Takes the Stage. Canadian Dimension, Vol. 40, no. 1. Moss, Jane. 2012. ‘Je me souviens’: Staging Memory in Anglo-Québécois Theatre. Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes 46 (3): 61–80. Pavis, Patrice. 1982. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Petrowski, Nathalie. 2015. Olivier Choinière: le pays étranger dont vous êtes les héros. La Presse, June 2: 2015. Phipps, Alison. 2019. Decolonizing Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Polezzi, Loredana. 2012. Translation and Migration. Translation Studies 5 (3): 345–356. Quan, Betty. 2009. Mother Tongue. In Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian Canadian Drama, ed. Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles, 163–189. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Reid, Gregory J. 2001–2002. Mapping ‘Jouissance’: Insights from a Case Study in the Schizophrenia of Canadian Drama. Comparative Drama 35 (3–4): 291–318. Rewa, Natalie. 1990. Cliches of Ethnicity Subverted: Robert Lepage’s La Trilogie Des Dragons. Theatre History in Canada 11 (2): 148–161. [Online]. http:// search.proquest.com/docview/217429965/. Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. On Translation. Translated by Eileen Brennan. London and New York: Routledge. Samuels, Ellen. 2013. “Speaking as a Deaf Person Would:” Translating Unperformability in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue. Amerasia Journal 39 (1): 19–32. Simon, Sherry. 1985. Speaking with Authority: The Theatre of Marco Micone. Année Canadienne: 57–64. ———. 2000. Robert Lepage and the Languages of Spectacle. In Theater sans frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I.  Donohoe and Jane M.  Koustas, 215–231. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. ———. 2006. Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill University Press. Spivak, Gayathri Chakravorty. 2000. Translation as Culture. Parallax 6 (1): 13–24. Toronto Laboratory Theatre (TLT). 2019. In Sundry Languages. In Scripting (Im)Migration: New Canadian Plays, ed. Yana Meerzon, 411–445. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Ty, Eleanor Rose. 2010. Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press.

PART II

Encounters in Body

CHAPTER 4

Dramaturgies of the Body: Staging Stranger-­ Fetishism in a Cosmopolitan Solo Performance

In an autobiographical solo performance, the actor’s personal history is revealed through the (in)visible gap between their body and that of the character they are enacting. The newly created body/character dependence renders the actor/character tension visible, with the body of the performer and the body of the character collapsing into each other. An autobiographical solo performance created by a cosmopolitan artist often borrows from the traditions of testimonial and documentary theatre, in which ‘the absent, unavailable, dead, and disappeared make an appearance by means of surrogation’ (Martin 2006, 10). It translates Bakhtin’s literary heteroglossia (1991) into a multiplicity of meanings expressed through the layered singularity of the performer’s self, marked by the artist’s own experiences of displacement and crossing borders. In cosmopolitan theatre, in other words, the body of the performer/traveller emerges as ‘a repertory of infinite possibilities, including those of the refutation (or incorporation) of cultures and history’ (Tercio 2010, 90). It can also appear as a receptacle of the collective memories of the multiple groups to which this artist belongs. Metaphorically speaking, this artist’s body—its materiality, semiotics, and theatrical simulacra, such as objects or video projections—can become a special theatrical canvas onto which the divided self of hypermodernity is projected. Being displayed for the audience’s consumption, such body often highlights the conflict between the autobiographical and the fictional, between the real and the representational.

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But what political and philosophical impact can an encounter with such a performance and such a performing body produce on its cosmopolitan spectator? A theatrical encounter in the actor’s body is a theoretical concept that refers to the practice of theatrical performance (the work of the performer) and communication (the work of the performer and their audience during the unfolding of a show), in which the continuous loop of cultural, logical, ethical, and aesthetic recognitions and adjustments takes place. This encounter in body offers cosmopolitan performers a chance to better express their worldview and their personal experiences with travelling; it provides cosmopolitan spectators with a chance to deeper understand, if not intellectually then emotionally, how the consciousness and practices of the divided self function. It also enables these spectators to question their own cultural affiliations, biases, and loyalties, as well as their assumptions regarding the other. For a deeper look into these practices, I will examine three solo autobiographical performances that investigate the tension between the cosmopolitan performer’s self and their character. I will situate these practices on a scale from real ‘read through representation’ to representational ‘read through the real’ (Phelan 1992, 148). The work of the Croatian-born performance artist, Natasha Davis, who resides in London, UK, is my first example. Davis stages the displaced body of an exile as a paradigm of suffering but also of renewal. In her theatre of extreme autobiography (Kuburovic 2013, 10), she follows Marina Abramović’s research into presence and uses performative re-enactment of herself as other. In her 2013 performance Internal Terrains,1 like Abramović, Davis employs the act of re-enactment to ‘testif[y] to our desire to know the past in order to secure ourselves in the present and the paradox of that knowledge always taking place through repetition’ in our present (Jones 2011, 19). My second example is The Fish Eyes Trilogy (2005–2015)2 created by Canadian performer Anita Majumdar, the daughter of Bengali Hindu immigrants from India. Mixing the highly codified language of Indian dance with Western techniques of storytelling, Majumdar explores the artistic and ideological possibilities of the performer’s understanding and experiences of intraculturalism (Bharucha 1996), when both the collective history of the diaspora and the artist’s own personal story of intercultural encounters are evoked through their theatrical body. On stage, Majumdar’s characters often emerge as theatrical constructs of embodied interculturalism (Mitra 2015). Although Rustom Bharucha’s concept of

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intraculturalism describes the interaction of different cultural contexts within a single nation (1996, 128) and is strictly territorial and geopolitical, it can also be applied to the discussion of the cosmopolitan self as a temporal and psychophysical venue, where multiple, unmarked discourses and experiences intersect. I have argued this idea previously, when analysing autobiographical performances created by second-generation immigrant artists (Meerzon 2009). Royona Mitra names this phenomenon new interculturalism (2015), whereas Ric Knowles calls it ‘performing intercultural memory in the diasporic present’ (2017, 44). He attributes the staging of memory to the fact of diasporic subjects growing up in intercultural or global cities (48). This kind of intraculturalism indicates ‘the increasing detachment of [these artists’ personal] memory from national histories’ and contributes to ‘the performative formation of newly complex intercultural and intracultural subjectivities’ (45). Anita Majumdar’s work exemplifies this new aesthetic: in The Fish Eyes Trilogy, the hand gestures and footwork specific to Bharatanatyam dance function as the dramaturgical syntax and punctuation of a logos-driven theatrical event. The trilogy, an interdisciplinary performance, stages the conflict between the I of the performer (Majumdar’s body, marked as a South Asian female performer) and a re-enactment of the self as the construction of a ‘prosthetic memory’, through which the creation of ‘new forms of community’ is proposed (47). The concluding case study in this chapter concerns the dramaturgy of encounter between self and self as other in a technologically mediated performance. Using the concept of digital double (Dixon 2007), I examine the strategies of staging the divided self in Wajdi Mouawad’s Inflammation du verbe vivre (2015).3 In this solo performance, Mouawad presents travelling as a cure for a crisis of identity. Here a reconciliation takes place between the I of the cosmopolitan artist and his divided self, which is mediated and multiplied. It disappears within its own technologically created reflection. This work exemplifies one more characteristic of cosmopolitan theatre, which is often positioned at the crossroads of performance arts, dance, and text-based theatre. Inflammation du verbe vivre elucidates how these tensions come alive in the autobiographical body of the cosmopolitan performer, when this body’s materiality appears already marked by the colour of the performer’s skin, the sound of their speech, and the techniques of performance. As all three case studies demonstrate, to stage the layered singularity of the divided self, cosmopolitan theatre resorts to the devices of mirroring,

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uncanny, vertigo, and estrangement. This theatre presents cosmopolitan body in a state of imbalance, vacillation, and confusion, and by doing so, it offers its audiences a glimpse into how divided subjectivity is made. It also invites its spectators to confront the stranger within themselves. In addition, an autobiographical cosmopolitan performance tackles the uncomfortable question of how a performer’s body can turn into a commodity and become an object of stranger-fetishism (Ahmed 2000), even when in the age of hypermodernity and cross-cultural encounter, all bodies appear different and thus over-semioticized. * * *

The Body: A Synecdoche of Cosmopolitanism Milan Kundera’s novel Ignorance (2000) tells a story of exile as a condition of no-return. It portrays Irena, a Czech emigrant living in Paris, who decides to take a trip home after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. A scene in a Prague boutique with Irena trying on a new dress reveals the shattered sense of self experienced by the exilic subject: the person Irena observes in the mirror ‘was not she, it was somebody else or, when she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague’ (Kundera 2003, 31). This moment presents the quintessence of cosmopolitan experience: it turns the exile into an eternal stranger. Irena’s misrecognition of herself in the estranging mirror of a new dress functions as a performative gesture of the uncanny, the character’s realization of temporal simultaneities that the state of non-belonging creates. Irena’s acknowledgement of her own self as other unleashes her subconscious fears of being a fraud, of taking on the life of another. The new Irena sees the unrealized potential of the old one looking at her out of the mirror—the possibilities and choices that have been erased by those she has already made. Kundera’s character senses the sadness of such lost narrative promise: often the life story we tell to ourselves is conditioned not by what we do but by what we want to see ourselves doing. Disoriented by the humiliation of exile, Irena doubts herself and longs for another story. Recognizing herself as other, she apprehends the promise of a past that never happened and of a future that will never take place. Here, the gaze of oneself as other acts as a ‘threshold of the visible world’ (Lacan 2006, 78); it establishes the I of the figure of exile as the other of her own self. This new historical self, however, never appears

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unified: a fragmented body produces fragmented time and fragmented space. This multiplicity of the divided self lies at the core of the autobiographical solo performances produced by cosmopolitan theatre. As Deirdre Heddon points out, ‘the majority of artists who use autobiography in their work are marginalized subjects’ (2008, 2); they ‘capitalise on theatre’s unique temporality, its here and nowness, and on its ability to respond to and engage with the present, while always keeping an eye on the future’ (2). Most importantly, these works ‘engage with the pressing matters of the present which relate to equality, to justice, to citizenship, [and] to human rights’ (2). In its testimonial power, autobiographical performance provides marginalized subjects with agency and visibility, serving as their tool for resistance, intervention, and reinvention of self. A performer’s body appears in this work as a ‘revised subject’, which accentuates ‘the relationship between a lived life and its representation’ (Heddon 2008, 4). In the autobiographical solo work, the performer’s body serves both as an object of their performative testimony and as a space for multiple projections, for the gaze of the other, as well as a place for re-enactment of the performer’s traumatic past and for evocation of their present. This process of temporal multiplications is firmly positioned in the subject/object dialectics of the divided self. As Kundera’s example demonstrates, an exile turned cosmopolitan re-lives their trauma of displacement on a daily basis, often within the distorted mirror image of the self produced by the gaze of this subject onto their own self and by the gaze of others. This experience of daily re-enactment of past trauma often becomes a cosmopolitan artist’s personal source of inspiration and place of artistic experiment. Such a re-enactment must be performed in the public space of encounter between the performer and their audience, in a ‘space apart’, in order to inspire its spectators ‘to feel, at least momentarily, part of a community’ (6). These performative encounters can also open doors into a complex web of crosspollinations between the spectator’s I and their self as other. Located between theatre and performance art, cosmopolitan performance stresses the corporeality of somatic experiences and turns the audience into its witness. It challenges the concept of theatricality as a gap between the performer’s self and that of the character and by doing so foregrounds the physis of the body (Lehmann 2006, 163). It suggests the dialectics of the materiality of the body as a living sculpture and its image. To this extent, it prompts the phenomenon of stranger-fetishism

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(Ahmed 2000), and it also capitalizes on the notion of presence (Phelan 1992). To Ahmed, the stranger-fetishism begins with our recognition of the other as an alien, who ‘recuperates all that is beyond the human into the singularity of a given form’ (2000, 2). A product of the culture of fear and imagined ‘through being related to, and separated from, particular bodily others’ (42), stranger-fetishism takes many forms, but it always comes back to our perception of the skin of the other as ‘a visual signifier of difference’ (44). The skin is a ‘scene of the play of differences’ and a boundary that contains the other within it (45). This differently marked body reinforces the complexity of the body-at-home/body-at-place paradigm (46), since in the encounter of the everyday, the difference between the I and the other is ‘established as a relation between bodies’ (44). The duality of this relationship ‘suggests that the particular body carries traces of the differences that are registered in the bodies of others’ (44), but it can be also found in the singular body of a stranger produced through the gaze of the idle I. In its secondary function, stranger-fetishism creates an alliance between the figure of a stranger and one’s own self. Much like Freudian uncanny, the body of a stranger foregrounds the sense of deep disintegration that we carry within our own selves, in order for us to accept this strangeness of the other as our own. To better understand how this body of the I as other serves as a manifestation of difference, Ahmed evokes the Lacanian model of image-making in the mirror stage (2000, 40). She references Lacan’s suggestion to study identification with the other as an act of ‘transformation that takes place in the subject when he[she] assumes an image’ (Lacan 2006, 76). This process begins prior to the social formation of the self, since it unfolds ‘in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual’ (76). Recognizing myself as other through the lens of an actual mirror or through someone’s gaze implies making the I symbolic: this practice locates the ego outside the I, in an image separate from one’s self. Known as Gestalt, it ‘symbolizes the mental permanence of the I’ and simultaneously ‘prefigures its alienating destination’ (76). The ego takes on the material characteristics of a statue, onto which we project images of our ideal selves. The mirror stage consists in the working of the imago, whose purpose is ‘to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality’ (78). A ‘threshold of visible worlds’, the imago of one’s own body can appear ‘in hallucinations and dreams’ and ‘in the appearance of doubles, in which psychical realities manifest

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themselves’ (77). It can be also manifested as a fragmented body, ‘in the form of disconnected limbs or of organs exoscopically represented’ (78). In cosmopolitan theatre, this projected image of the ideal self appears as exteriority, so that the mirror image of one’s self prompts the subject to recognize their own I outside this self, not as the figure of one’s experience but as its representation. This newly created body/character interdependence foregrounds the materiality of a performative re-enactment and thus becomes a special focal point in an autobiographical solo work. As a result, it re-enforces the performer’s presence, which stages ‘the Other as the Same’ (Phelan 1992, 3). The performer’s presence calls ‘witnesses to the singularity of the individual’s death and asks the spectator to do the impossible—to share that death by rehearsing for it’ (152). This technique leads to an affectual loop of recognitions and identifications, so that the audience is able to project the sense of their own selves onto the body of the performer. Based on the work of repetition, doubling, and trace, the performance seeks self-transformation, the performer’s refusal to be a ‘doubl[e] of a character’ and their wish to accentuate the ‘production of presence’ (Lehmann 2006, 134). An autobiographical solo performer emerges on stage as an ‘“epic” playe[r] who “demonstrate[s]”’ à la Brecht and as the theatrical maker of their own self, who capitalizes on ‘their own presence as their primary aesthetic material’ (139). For this reason, autobiographical performers become the ultimate examples of theatre bodies: they ‘cannot be captured by any video, because they are only “there” in the “between-the bodies” of live performance. In this insecurity and forlornness, they store memory: they actualize (and appeal to) corporeal experience. And they store future, for what they remind us of is desire as something unfulfilled and unfulfillable’ (171). Theatre bodies engage with temporality, proximity, trace, and re-enactment of authenticity. They ‘implicat[e] the real through the presence of living bodies’ (Phelan 1992, 148). By using a digitally mediated body, as Wajdi Mouawad does in Inflammation du verbe vivre, the cosmopolitan performance further engages with the ontological issues related to the questions of real vs representational. Because of the semiotic materiality of the live body, its mediated image on stage appears empty, pure representation: ‘the electronic image lures through emptiness. Emptiness offers no resistance’, whereas the sense of ‘disappointment always surrounds the presence of real bodies’ (Lehmann 2006, 170). In this context, the performer’s projected body

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functions as a continuum of their live body, becoming its empty double and prompting the following questions: Why is it the image that fascinates us more? What constitutes the magic attraction that seduces the gaze to follow the image when given the choice between devouring something real or something imaginary? […] How can the disposition of the viewing subject as it experiences itself everywhere in media technology become visible itself? (Lehmann 2006, 170)

This fluid nature of the mediated image finds its echo in the aesthetics of cosmopolitan theatre, where instead of a finished product the audience is often presented with a work of processual, experiential, and durational performance, so that it turns from ‘an unaffected witness’ into ‘a participating partner’, someone who can influence and determine the performance’s communicative process (Lehmann 2006, 136). This leads to the concept of co-presence as a performer/spectator’s ‘mutual challenge’ (141). The spectacle of a performer in the act of making self as other onstage provokes self-reflective gaze in the audience. Recognizing ‘the Other’s absence’ leads to our ‘acknowledgment of the Other’s presence’ (Phelan 1992, 149). This process suggests that the body functions as a living sculpture, vulnerable to the gaze of the public (Lehmann 2006, 163). Looking onto the stage from the darkness of the auditorium, fantasizing about, fetishizing, and desiring the performer’s body identify the audience’s position of power. The gaze of the spectator reveals the darkest mechanisms of our psyche; it turns the performer’s body into the site of projection, (de)construction, (re)presentation, (re)enactment, (re)articulation, and archive of this spectator’s own self. The autobiographical solo performances chosen for this chapter exemplify these processes. Imagistic and metaphorical, they are often driven by larger philosophical questions related to experiences of migration, history, and humanity’s ever-growing dependence on technology. They frequently operate with doubles, phantoms, and distortions of characters that collapse into the I of the performer. * * *

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Natasha Davis: Staging an Extreme Autobiography of the Divided Self Born in the former Yugoslavia of mixed Serbian and Croatian extraction, Natasha Davis emigrated to the West in 1992 at the age of twenty-six. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, for six years neither Croatia nor Serbia would recognize Davis as their citizen. This experience of being a stateless person widely informs Davis’s artistic and scholarly work. With over forty solo and collaborative projects to her name, presented in the UK, Australia, India, Canada, South Africa, Europe, and China, Davis is always on the road, acting as her own promoter, looking for collaborations, sponsorships, and inspirations. Though a citizen of the UK, Davis’s life and work style is typical of a cosmopolitan nomad with no stable infrastructure or system of support upon which to rely. Thematically, her performances often capitalize on the act of encounter as a leading characteristic of migration and cosmopolitanism. Encounter also characterizes the style of Davis’s artistic expression, as she balances on the edge between performance arts and theatre. In her solo work, the performer’s body emerges as a resource of potentiality (Phelan 1992, 163), in which the artist ‘organizes, executes and exhibits actions that affect and even seize her own body’ (Lehmann 2006, 137). Because her work focuses on exile, ageing, and how technology impacts the world, Davis stages the divided self of cosmopolitanism as presence. Consequently, on stage she ‘manages to hold together alienation, estrangement, and displacement, with participation, relationality and connectedness’ (Pfoser and de Jong 2017). Davis speaks with the voice of a refugee—someone who has experienced displacement as suffering but also as liberation and even as an inducement for artistic experimentation. Her interdisciplinary performance is comprised of textual excerpts, choreography of space, interactive elements, video fragments, and original sound patterns. Often, she opts for ‘experimenting with the physical defragmentation of the performance material and transforming it into something else, which resembles the process of bodily integration into a new environment, when displacement gradually gives life to a new form of existence for a migrant’ (Davis 2016a). The performer’s body—a spatial-­ temporal object of non-belonging, border-crossing, and displacement and a metaphor for her native land—is at the centre of this work. Using devices of autobiographical performance, Davis re-enacts her personal encounters with the unknown and aspires to reconstruct her personal history on stage. She reasserts her complex identity as a cosmopolitan subject and states: ‘my

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artwork is based on research but grounded in autobiographical experiences’ (Davis 2016a). As she explains further: ‘When these experiences are disturbing to remember I need to develop strategies how to approach that material and ensure that I am in a relative place of strength when working with those memories’ (2016a). Thus, Davis acknowledges her kinship with the work of Marina Abramović, who treats her body as an empty physical object and as the essence of the real. Through exploration of pain and fear, Abramović channels her energy towards the audience. She uses the aesthetics of ‘emptying out and erasing the self’ to create the sense of ‘extraordinary abundance’, something that provides the performer and her audience with ‘a glimpse of the threshold between form and formlessness, between knowing and unknowing, between life and death’ (Phelan 2004, 572). Abramović’s emptied body, in other words, serves as a mirror in which spectators can confront their own fears and anxieties. Similarly, Davis uses the therapeutic gesture of performance to empty her own and her spectator’s self, so that the audience may touch upon the darkest sides of their own psyche. She also problematizes Abramović’s political response to the question of what home is. Abramović ‘would answer that her body was her home’, Davis states, but what happens ‘when the body starts disintegrating [and] you realize that there is nothing that is balanced all the time, so where do you find that space of stability?’ (Davis qtd in Marchevska 2017, 39). Using her own body as a performance object, Davis creates her own answer to this question of home. When she became a UK resident in the mid-2000s, Davis began working on her autobiographical trilogy of exile: Rupture (2009), Asphyxia (2010), and Suspended (2011). This trilogy looked at the notion of decay as bodily decline and as deterioration of the land, connecting Davis’s personal story of displacement to the political and social turbulence in her native land. For example, to make Rupture, Davis researched the uncanny connection between migration and cancer, with which she was diagnosed at the time, whereas the topic of Asphyxia was her difficulty in breathing as a result of migration. The third part of the trilogy, Suspended, investigated the state of imbalance between audience and performer sharing the performance space. However, Davis’s work is never simply self-directed therapy, being always driven by larger philosophical questions related to migration, history, and illness. In preparing Rupture, Davis used meticulous documentation of the different medical procedures that she underwent and which were required for her body to heal. In performance this documentary

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material is re-enacted next to images of the fall of Milošević’s Serbia, thus questioning the notion of authenticity and theatrical verisimilitude as the basis of the autobiographical solo work. Mixing documentary footage with her work on stage, Davis turns this autobiographical piece into an interdisciplinary intervention about the decay of the body and the deterioration of the land: ‘For several reasons cancer brought back the war in me. A connection emerged between what was happening to my body and what happened in the land I came from’ (Davis qtd in Marchevska 2017, 40). Positioned on Michael Kirby’s acting/not-acting continuum (1972), in which the not-acting pole presents zero relationships—an empty sign— between a signifier (the actor’s body, the object, the space) and a signified (the dramatic character, the fictional local, the place of action), Davis’s performing body emphasizes the materiality of the acting sign. In Kirby’s model, the actor’s presence as not-acting challenges the process of representation. It envisions the actor’s body as ‘an auto-sufficient physicality, which is exhibited in its intensity, gestic potential, auratic “presence” and internally, as well as externally, transmitted tensions’ (Lehmann 2006, 95). In rejecting the processes of signification, not-acting juxtaposes the audience’s reality with the performer’s reality, bypassing the reality of a dramatic character. It raises the audience’s awareness of the actor’s individual presence and her biography, which becomes the content of this theatrical reaction. Stranger-fetishism is a permanent feature of the practices of not-­ acting, as the audience is constantly made aware that, on stage, ‘there is often the presence of the deviant body, which through illness, disability or deformation deviates from the norm and causes [the audience’s] “amoral” fascination, unease or fear’ (95). Natasha Davis’s 2015 Teeth Show further exemplifies these tendencies in the autobiographical solo work. In this production, the performer focuses on the ‘complexities around democratic rights of the displaced body in transit and in a constant flux between breaking and repairing’ it (Davis 2016a). To illustrate this idea, Davis references her own dental procedures that marked her journey of exile and statelessness: loosened and damaged teeth, bleeding gums, and numerous visits to the dentist’s office with the implied danger of uninsured procedures. In the Teeth Show, these procedures and references become a metaphor for losing one’s roots and constitute the core of Davis’s dramaturgy of travelling, in which she uses the devices of rupture and repetition as no-return to question ‘how crossing

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borders and living in exile impact on the rights of the body regarding its identity, citizenship and medical status’ (Davis 2016a). In her theoretical framework, Davis references Cathy Caruth’s concept of a double wound (1996). Intrigued by the relationship between the act of repetition and the truth that emerges from repeating the wound, Caruth reflects on Freud’s description of suffering as ‘the repeated infliction of a wound’ (1996, 3). She recognizes it as an act of illuminating something previously unknown or only subconsciously known. Repetition as trace and as encounter with one’s true self—self as other—becomes the essence of suffering. Davis’s autobiographical practice reveals the double wound as both an act of ‘making a performance and as an act of sharing it with the audience’ (Davis and Meerzon 2015, 63). In her rehearsal process, ‘repetition turns into the device of artistic construction: not only it can evoke the original state of pain, it can also function as a mechanism of soothing. The choice of performance and rehearsal spaces, objects, sounds, images, and movements is determined by the performer’s need to repeat the state of imbalance, whereas the repetition itself creates the sense of in-between-­ ness and the time of history’ (67). However, in the act of performing the divided self, repetition can be as dangerous as it is necessary, for it can build on the artist’s ‘compulsive need to expand on her past traumas. It can also serve as a device of truth-seeking’ informed by Davis’s assumption that through the act of performative repetition, the truth of the past can emerge (64). Catharine McLean-Hopkins defines this action as autologue (2006). A function of an autobiographical solo performance that refers to the performer’s identity in flux, autologue requires embodiment. It capitalizes on the performer’s need to return to their past trauma, one’s subconscious desire to re-enact one’s past in the space of a public gathering (McLean-­ Hopkins 2006, 203–204). Autologue is also a mechanism of the performer’s memory and agency; it allows an artist to reclaim their dignity and gives them control over the representation of self. The question that drives Davis’s work forward is: ‘how do you share your autobiography with another person?’ (Davis qtd in Marchevska 2017, 41). How do you make it ‘theirs’, for before the performance there was a story that really happened, then there was a memory of the story, which was followed by an act of recording and processing it, and then there was the process of rehearsal and turning the old story into new artistic material. The result of this process is the performance itself, which unfolds in the present time of the performer’s work and in the audience’s act of listening and watching

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it, their ‘discursive process of reflection’ (McLean-Hopkins 2006, 207). Davis’s solo performance Internal Terrains illustrates the dynamics of this process. Being interested in shared spaces and memories, ‘significant pasts, presents that are out of balance, desired or feared futures’ (Davis 2018), Davis begins her research for Internal Terrains by exploring migration via personal and found objects and space. The production evokes the Yugoslav civil war and Davis’s memories of it, in the form of her personal roadmap of ‘geographical locations, […] train journeys, addresses of temporary homes, rooms in a house’ (Davis 2016a), which inform the dramaturgy of movement inherent in this work. The layered treatment of the poetic text, consisting of movement, film, original soundscape, objects, and installations, allows the performer to engage with multiple modes of repetition and imbalance, so that the performance itself turns into an act of return. Davis’s approach to making this show is highly visceral, including physically removing herself from the comfort zones of a familiar studio, a well-­ known promoter, and the city where she now lives. It also includes experimenting with physical (im)balance and staging challenges to the body, a gesture marked by the artist’s need to re-experience her own displacement. Preparing Internal Terrains: [Davis] drew architectural plans of the homes [she] occupied and thought about shapes, doors, windows and objects [she] remembered from those spaces. When [she] paid attention to time, [she] wasn’t interested in ‘when’ but in ‘how long’. That’s why [she] didn’t use clocks or specific time references, but metronomes, salt dripping from a bag, repetitive and cacophonic sounds produced on a violin, and similar devices […]. [She] was interested in what else can function as home when [we are] in transit, when in-between and in migratory situations and locations. (Davis 2016a)

These sought-for conditions of labour induce a sense of psychological and physical discomfort that makes Davis feel unwell and experience vertigo. These sensations inform the inner dynamic and choreography of Internal Terrains. They re-enforce the feeling of (im)balance within the performer’s body, the objects, and the space of action. Internal Terrains opens with Davis walking across an intimate, black-­ box theatre space holding a black crow. The crow—a symbol of death and mourning traditional in her home culture (Kuburovic 2013, 13)— becomes Davis’s theatrical alter-ego, an extension of her selfhood, the

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wounded female body. Internal Terrains—like many other autobiographical works produced by women—claims agency for the female subject. It ‘displays, reveals and performs’ the process of identity construction (McLean-Hopkins 2006, 191), it interrogates the history from which these women have been absent or erased, and it critically comments on the procedures of gender construction both in the public sphere of a social performance and on stage. Thus, the title of Davis’s work, Internal Terrains, refers to the terrains of social geography and personal memory that make up her identity. It also suggests an act of lamentation: in Internal Terrains, the country of Davis’s childhood turns into a ‘geography of unbelonging’ (Kuburovic 2013, 13). This solo performance thus evokes the Yugoslav civil war once again, for it refers to the artist’s personal itinerary of exile and brings up images of the destroyed country. When watching Internal Terrains, the audience ‘will learn but very little of that “exotic” Serbian land despite the many references made and stories recounted to us by the artist. Its secret, dark and crow-like, will remain. What the artist will have enacted instead will be a child-like and consciously childish play at taking control of this history’ (Kuburovic 2013, 13). The set itself evokes a sense of displacement and a sense of play. It turns into a chronotope of liminality, ‘an installation, consisting of twenty cables spreading out of a dimmer, with a light bulb at the end of each cable, demarcating an imaginary home on stage’ (Davis 2016b). The way the objects are placed and the way Davis interacts with them evoke uneasiness and a sense of danger. This sensation is enhanced by the theatrical technologies Davis uses: the metronome’s cover is made of glass, the crow is a piece of taxidermy, and the electric shock instrument is a sensitive mechanical device. Since all these objects are fragile and difficult to operate, they evoke associations of vulnerability and insinuate a sense of exposure and risk-taking, feelings suggestive of what happened to the artist in the past and of what is happening to her in the present, in front of the audience. By using affect as a means to implicate the audience in the act of performance, Davis repeatedly constructs a sensation of dislocation in her own body and thus, by extension, in the bodies of the spectators. Like the British performer Bobby Baker, who uses sites that represent memories important to her (McLean-Hopkins 2006, 200), Davis brings personal objects on stage. These objects, better than any other archival documents, carry the artist’s past experiences and memories about them. In Internal Terrains, ‘the objects hanging from chains reside in their own shadows, like our memories do, until [Davis] start[s] interacting with them. If we

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also think of the objects as imaginary rooms in a home, they provide access to architectures of memory, in this case common to people who have had to cross borders and move between homes a lot in their lives’ (Davis 2016b). Regarding the way she treats bodies and objects on stage, Davis acknowledges the influence of the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum. Making Internal Terrains—she writes—unfolded in a dialogue with this visual artist: ‘the lighting installation that is central in demarcating the performance space and the idea of home in Internal Terrains, consisting of twenty cables with a light bulb at the end of each, comes from Hatoum’s Undercurrent (Red) (2008), the difference being that I walk on the cables throughout the performance, however uncomfortable or unbalancing that may be, and interact with the bulbs’ (Davis 2016b). Internal Terrains interweaves images of the many geographical spaces that Davis has navigated. It reflects rooms in transitory homes where she stayed, the people she met, and the decades of the performer’s life that were filled with the sense of loss. ‘Considering we [Mona Hatoum and Natasha Davis] both experienced exile with all the pain and pleasure associated with it, […] it is not strange that a lot of the imagery we use can appear dangerous or threatening and beautiful or poetic at the same time, drawing attention to the loss and liberation in equal measure’ (Davis 2016b). In this fashion Internal Terrains becomes simultaneously therapeutic, educational, and political. It resonates with the artist’s personal biography and current historical events—a connection Davis expects her spectators to recognize and appreciate: Any work that I have made […] in reference to the fall of Yugoslavia relates easily to any other military conflict around the world. Bombed buildings in cities around former Yugoslavia bring to mind bombed and ruined buildings in other parts of the world, such as Iraq and Syria. Any personal stories around crossing borders and being a stateless citizen correspond directly to what Syrian refugees are currently experiencing, without me specifically making a direct reference to it. (Davis 2018)

This intersection between the concrete and the universal, between the Yugoslav War and the pain any war brings, is what makes Davis’s performance practice cosmopolitan: ‘at any time or place in the history, the stories of being unwanted, as if one carries a contagious disease, are repeated whenever there is a large influx of migrants from a country in war’, artist states (Davis 2018). It is never essentialist, as each of her productions

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remains deeply ingrained in the personal wounds the performer herself bears. Engaging with the vulnerability of the injured body, Davis repeatedly displaces her own body on stage; she positions it at the mercy of the audience. These strategies can be useful to the topics she explores and can ‘enhance intimacy, help erase “the border” between the performer and audience’ (Davis 2016b). Personal experience of exile might not be the necessary condition of reception for Davis’s spectators, if and when her material ‘moves and provokes’ them (Davis 2016b). Davis invites her audiences to see differently their own collective and personal histories. Her work is intended to remind them that if we ‘can attach ourselves to personal, individual accounts of lost homes, vulnerability, pain, we can identify with these experiences on an emotional level’ (Davis 2018). Davis believes that by telling personal stories of displacement, she can help ‘eliminat[e] the notion of victimhood and brin[g] about the strength needed to survive’. Moreover, ‘sharing autobiographical experience becomes on one hand a tool to draw attention to specific events or crises, and on the other a celebration of life and our ability to not just survive, but also thrive in precarious situations’ (2018). In her analysis of site-specific, autobiographical performance as an act of autotopography or ‘the interrelation of place and identity’, Deirdre Heddon defines identity as the ‘cartography of self’ (2008, 88–89), embodied through the spaces we inhabited in the past, the space we live in in the present, and the places we remember. This type of autobiographical performance ‘intends to foreground subjectivity involved in plotting space’—both as an act of ‘writing place through self’ and as an act of ‘writing self through space’ (90–91). Staging the audience’s encounter with the performer’s past, with their space of endurance, involves spectators in ‘a creative act of seeing, interpretation and invention’ (91). Internal Terrains engages with the technologies of autotopography as well, although it does not take place in the space of Davis’s home country. Rather, it recognizes the performer’s body as a site of memory, thus enabling the practice of ‘writing place through self’ (Heddon 2008, 91) to take place. Central to this idea is the sequence titled ‘This is me here… This me there’, which presents a collage of Davis’s personal photographs and video excerpts documenting her exilic journey. This mediated image is accompanied by a bilingual soundtrack spoken in Serbo-­Croatian and English which actualizes the foreignness of the actor’s bodily presence on stage. This soundtrack is underlined by the tapping of a metronome. As

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the images flicker in front of our eyes, they also float over Davis’s body. Dressed in a white gown, suggestive of bridal attire, the performer’s body turns into the canvas of this narration and the container of her memories, the photographs being only uncanny extensions of the self. This image suggests that ‘memory is what provides continuity to who we are, and where we belong and memory itself is usually conceived of, theorized and practiced as inextricably linked to place’ (Kuburovic 2013, 15). Internal Terrains closes with one more enigmatic image: the performer groups the light bulbs into several constellations, whereupon the music picks up in pace and intensity and the lights slowly dim, leaving the audience with the memory of Davis’s exilic journey and our own travelling through the piece. This ending is an act of promise, ‘an act of giving time, giving shape, and giving body to shared stories and shared desires, while the artist’s own history continues to resonate’ (20). Thus, by using ruptures, repetitions, jumps, and loops as her dramaturgy, Davis seeks to construct anew the communality of the performance, in which ‘temporal and geographical, fragmented and associative journeys, as well as experiences of losses and transformations can be shared’ (Davis 2016b). The communal space of performance, Davis believes, can turn into a signifier of ‘writing self through space’, a process of creating the self through experience and sharing memories. Internal Terrains demonstrates how a work in extreme autobiography can use the performer’s body as a place of re-­enactment of her story, as well as an object of reference and a conjoining space between the world of the performance and that of the audience. Anita Majumdar’s theatrical choreography exemplifies similar tendencies: here the drama of misrecognition and displacement is enacted through the doubling and mirroring of the speaking and dancing self. * * *

On the Embodied Interculturalism of Anita Majumdar’s The Fish Eyes Trilogy Anita Majumdar’s The Fish Eyes Trilogy is an example of an autobiographical solo performance that stems from and reflects the artist’s personal history of cultural imbalances between her Indian heritage and English Canadian culture of Port Moody, British Columbia, where Majumdar grew up. The work comprises three short plays, each told from a different

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girl’s perspective in their final year of the same high school in Port Moody. This multi-character solo piece manifests embodied migrant hybridity, which corresponds to Sara Ahmed’s theory of a racialized subject formed in the psyche of a white person as not-I, when this white body recognizes the Black body as different to itself (Ahmed 2000, 43). This recognition implies that the ‘self-other dynamic cannot be abstracted, as it is contingent on bodily differences that are themselves inflected by histories of particular body others’ (44). In the cosmopolitan encounter of the everyday, every (single) body comes as differently marked; thus, in this context, Majumdar’s racialized body appears both as a trigger to the stranger-­ fetishism phenomenon and as a signifier of new interculturalism—‘a processual and embodied aesthetic that is generated from [the artist’s] own lived, othered realities with multiple affiliations to cultures, people, nations, performance traditions and histories’ (Mitra 2015, 27). The concept new interculturalism emerged in response to the artistic practice of Akram Khan, a British dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent, who captivated the world of contemporary dance in the early 2000s. It refers to the multitude of artistic discourses and practices intersecting within the body of a single performer, whose everyday and professional identities are already hybridized.4 The new interculturalism can be manifested thematically in the stories the performers tell, and it can be enacted artistically in the lived technologies of performance making practised by these artists. Being a type of interculturalism from within, it presents an alternative to the traditional forms of 1970s/1980s intercultural performance, which often explored cultural encounter using a top-down, borrowing approach. Anita Majumdar’s The Fish Eyes Trilogy exemplifies this tendency. Fish Eyes, the first part of the trilogy and the focus of analysis in this chapter, tells the story of seventeen-year-old Meena (short for Meenakshi or ‘fish eyes’) from Port Moody, who is desperately in love with a white boy named Buddy. She struggles to reconcile her desire to belong to Buddy’s culture and her love for Indian dance. Boys with Cars—the second part of the trilogy—focuses on another teenage girl of Indian descent, Naz, ‘who attracts the attention of the cool kids when she performs Indian classical dance at the Golden Spike Festival. One of them, Lucky, is a handsome British-Punjabi immigrant and the two start dating’ (Emmerton 2017). The closing part, Let Me Borrow That Top, depicts Majumdar in the role of a white girl, Candice, who appeared as Meena’s and Naz’s nemesis in the previous plays. Candice is a sassy teenager who ‘exemplifies the pretty,

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skinny, villainous blonde’ (Shah 2016, xviii) of the typical American TV show. Majumdar enacts Candice as someone who must face ‘significant challenges of her own’ (xviii). The empathy evoked in the audience by this new version of Candice complicates their previous negative feelings towards the character. In sum, the play reminds us that ‘it is rarely ever a privilege to be a girl, regardless of race. Candice is one of the many desirable fish from Kalyani Aunty’s parable at the end of Fish Eyes—perfect and edible, never thrown back, and always consumed’ (xviii). To bring this uncomfortable and demanding topic closer to her Canadian spectators, Majumdar opts for the hybrid theatrical language of new interculturalism. She freely mixes the highly codified language of classical dance, which functions as a dramaturgical and performative syntax in this logosdriven story, and traditions of Western theatre storytelling. The Fish Eyes Trilogy employs ‘elements of the south Indian Bharatanatyam,5 the northern Kathak, and the north-eastern Odissi dances, sometimes combined within a single movement sequence. It also includes one parodic, cross-dressed Punjabi dance and a comic toothbrush dance’ (Knowles 2017, 49). All these re-imaginings, citations, and adaptations of the vocabulary of classical dance participate in the composition of this translingual performance and demonstrate how a South Asian Canadian theatre may be constructed, a theatre that is itself ‘an embodiment of a new diasporic identity’ (49). From a political perspective, the trilogy toys with the tradition of cultural orientalism to imagine and depict the body of a South Asian female as an object of a fetishist gaze (Said 1979, 255–284). It is thus a further contribution to the development of Canadian feminist theatre as a public space to reclaim the voices of diasporic female subjects and to showcase their complex, divided selves (Tahririha 2017, 40–41). The first part of this trilogy—Fish Eyes—is specifically interesting in that it presents this system of cross-cultural and cross-performative borrowings as Majumdar’s personal story of theatrical acculturation. The play portrays the journey of an artist—a theatre performer—who through her professional theatre schooling has been forced to rethink the values and the traditions of performance making as she learned them in her childhood. Although the story of Meena is not strictly an autobiographical account of Majumdar’s childhood in British Columbia—the performer started learning Indian dance only at the age of eighteen (Knowles 2017, 48–50)—it remains tightly connected to the experiences of cultural liminality, to which many immigrant children are exposed as they spend their

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childhood and teenage years amid the contradictory expectations of their diasporic parents and Canadian friends. Majumdar ‘grew up watching Bollywood movies on the weekends with her parents and wanting to be like 1994 Miss World-turned-Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai’ (Gandhi 2005). In her childhood re-enactments of these films, Majumdar would often ‘wear chiffon and run through the hills’ (Gandhi 2005). In her adulthood, however, she would constantly question these feelings and experiences, finally realizing that her personal cultural encounters and problems are far ‘too complicated for Bollywood’ (Gandhi 2005). As a student at the National Theatre School of Canada (Montreal), Majumdar recalls experiencing cultural prejudice on a daily basis. Her teachers would exploit her skills as an Indian dancer, suggesting at the same time that Majumdar’s creative talents could only shine through movement. They would use the argument of ethnic authenticity as their justification to cast the young performer in the classical repertoire. Once, Majumdar was asked to perform Shakespeare’s Cleopatra using her exotic dance techniques (Majumdar 2015). This pigeonholing of a diasporic artist exemplifies Judith Butler’s point that the ‘I’ begins an account of itself only under the pressure of a punishing gaze (2007, 21). This gaze reinforces the story of a young theatre maker forced to become a professional immigrant, a story of humiliation and pride, of fashioning self as other. In this context, therefore, Majumdar’s artistic journey is not that different from those of Guillermo Verdecchia or Mani Soleymanlou, whose work I discussed in Chap. 2. Immigrant artists, even if they are second-generation, often capitalize on the sensibilities of their home cultures and thus find themselves constantly negotiating between the artistic language and preferences they learned during their formative years and the expectations of their new audiences. Because of their appearance, tastes, and lifestyles, these diasporic subjects, despite being born in Canada, are often exposed to the humiliation of stranger-­ fetishism. Anita Majumdar is one of such subjects; so the artist’s embodied knowledge of one’s difference informs the choice of subject matter and its performative reiteration in The Fish Eyes Trilogy. Here, the body of the dancer/actor Anita Majumdar functions both as a container of her past experiences and as a tool to fight prejudice. Through the artistic choices Majumdar makes, her performance teaches diasporic subjects how to empower themselves. Artistically, Majumdar’s work, like Natasha Davis’s, adopts what Michael Kirby defines as simple acting, when the performer enacts their

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character but yet remains as themselves on stage (1972, 6–7). In Fish Eyes, Majumdar’s body emerges as a canvas for interdisciplinary storytelling: she plays the multitude of characters that make up her story, including Meena, her dance instructor Kalyani Aunty, and her love interest Buddy Cain. The impeccable skill with which Majumdar switches between these characters invites a comparison with cubist painting, in which the distorted geometrical shapes come together to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object, at the same time referencing the two-dimensionality of the canvas itself. When Majumdar dances, the audience sees Meena as ‘a richly realized portrait of a young woman who hungers to fit into Western, white society but doesn’t while simultaneously disparaging and honouring her heritage’ (Langston 2014). Hence, in Fish Eyes the mixed media of the performance serves as a mirror for Majumdar’s personal story of cross-­ cultural encounters. It demonstrates how the multiplicity of physical languages of dance paired with her fragmented technique of storytelling can be used to construct and realize the divided subjectivity of the cosmopolitan self. This inner rupture of not belonging informs the other elements of this performance as well. The setting of Fish Eyes, a blend of a high-school gym and a temple of the Hindu god Shiva, with a statue of Natraj at the back, depicts Shiva as a powerful cosmic dancer whose aim is to destroy our universe. The floor is marked by a large circle, in the middle of which there is a small red stool. When Majumdar comes on stage to assume the first position, she begins her performance with the image of Kalyani Aunty silently narrating the Fisherperson Story. The mythological and ethical frameworks of this performance merge: Kalyani Aunty is sitting on her stool with a tray of flowers in her lap. She performs a bharatanatyam hand-gesture series, silently narrating the Fisherperson Story. She ends with the gesture for ‘one with eyes like a fish.’ Kalyani Aunty lifts the tray from her lap, performs a short prayer towards the Natraj statue behind her, and then turns to the audience. (Majumdar 2016, 6)

Aunty is proud of her student Meenakshi Kumari, whom she is now training for the annual dance festival in India. With a quick change of a hand gesture, Majumdar turns into Meena performing the Lemon-Lime Lover Dance Nimboda to a Bollywood-like soundtrack: ‘The classical Indian dancer, [Meena] represents everything. She’s got a sun and moon [in her hair], she dances as male and female, she’s hero and villain’ (Gandhi

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2005). The objective of this dramaturgical tactic is to make sure Fish Eyes appeals to as many spectators of the multicultural Canadian theatre audience as possible. The character’s gestures are therefore punctuated by references recognizable to this audience, borrowed from popular Western culture. Thanks to the aesthetics of fusion, the language of dance and the language of words create a complex system of significations, one more manifestation of the new interculturalism. As Ric Knowles argues, however, to Majumdar Fish Eyes is ‘autobiographical in form, not content’ (2017, 49). ‘While Majumdar chose at the age of eighteen to take dance and language classes as performative entrées into the South Asian side of her culture, Meena grows up under the wing of Kalyani Aunty […], an exuberant if lovelorn woman who […] readies Meena for the Lord Ganesh Festival and the All-India Dance Competition […], and accompanies her in her pink Volvo to Toronto’s “Little India” (3), where they purchase Indian foods, Thumbs Up, henna, and other trappings of the homeland’ (49). Kalyani Aunty widely criticizes all pan-­ Canadian things and articulates ‘the immigrant community’s compensatory nostalgia for all things Indian’ (49). Still, her most important dramatic function is to serve as ‘the agent for the transmission of embodied, if transformed, cultural memory through dance’ (49). Thanks to Aunty’s teachings, Meena can express herself in the language of dance, so that the hybridization of her performative language takes place within the space of her dancing body, which is already marked by dual if not multiple socio-­ cultural affiliations and a broken sense of self. Fish Eyes testifies to the hard work that a second-generation Canadian must do to cope with the trauma of displacement. It portrays Meena investigating the potential of self-­ distancing on stage. In its dramaturgy, Fish Eyes reflects Majumdar’s distrust of the realistic narratives and her desire to find her own dramatic and performative vocabulary. Self-distancing and ironic detachment from Majumdar’s personal experiences as a South Asian Canadian clearly mark the tone of this narration and the opening sequence of the play: I love how Indian dance gets into everything I do! For example, brushing my teeth! Meena pulls out a toothbrush and dances a short but impressive classical Indian phrase in front of the bathroom mirror. She ends by spitting out the toothpaste into the bathroom sink in front of her. It’s a great quality to have when you’re seventeen! She breaks out of her ‘dance happy’ expression. (Majumdar 2016, 8)

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Here the English words are in dialogue, or in the process of interweaving (Fischer-Lichte 2009), with Majumdar’s hand gestures and footwork. ‘Majumdar uses the bhramara mudra (traditionally signifying a bee) to denote Candice Paskis, the sikhara mudra (traditionally signifying a hero or heroism) to represent Buddy Cain, and the trishula mudra (traditionally signifying a trident) to play Candice Paskis’s friends’ (Tahririha 2017, 57). Although to many audience members the connotations of these mudras remain indecipherable, the production uses the intricate working of the intercultural dramaturgy to create new meaning. It constantly re-­ introduces and re-enforces the patterns of signification, re-assigning the original meaning of these mudras to other dramatic points in Meena’s story. Neither dialogue nor gestures predominate: it is the rhythmical patterns of the classical dance that determine this performance’s inner dynamics. The performer’s breathing (a bit faster when she finishes the dance sequence), her rapid and clear switching between Hindi, Hindi-accented English, and standard Canadian English, her balanced postures—from quick and precise moves in dance sequences to slower and less defined choreography in the speaking parts—all these signifiers of the embodied intercultural experience become the strokes, the touches, and the nuances of this multidimensional and densely populated performance. Majumdar’s storytelling mimics the mixed codes of communication that immigrant and cosmopolitan subjects routinely use to connect with each other, within their communities, and with the populations of the host country, as they freely mix the vocabulary and the syntax of the many languages they speak. Fish Eyes makes this communicative idiosyncrasy its own dramatic focal point. Its onstage diglossia of dance and words reflects the translingual practices of immigration, based, not necessarily, as Canagarajah argues, on the interlocutors’ grammatical (in)ability, but rather on their ‘performative competence’, which helps these interlocutors ‘achieve meaning and success in communication’ (2013, 32).6 This translingual practice occurs in spontaneously created or specially designated contact zones of communication, such as an encounter in an airport or the audience at an international festival. In these zones of contact the verbal and the gestural languages that make up the interlocutors’ tools of communication meet and interact in the performative lacunae of the newly constructed space of their transcultural exchange. This type of translingualism ‘transcends individual languages’ and implies that languages are never at war with each other but are in a productive dialogue; hence, ‘the meaning does not arise

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from a common grammatical system or norm, but through negotiation practices in local situations’ (Canagarajah 2013, 7). It also relies on the interlocutors’ agreement that ‘communication involves diverse semiotic resources’ (7).  They work in unison to create meaning. These resources are often embedded in ‘a social and physical environment’ from which they stem and to which they refer (7). Thus, Majumdar’s Fish Eyes challenges our assumption that in the theatre of storytelling everything depends on the clarity of verbal expression, since she often regards her hand gestures and footwork as her characters’ mother tongue. In this hybrid theatrical code, English is assigned a secondary communicative function. The verbal and non-verbal narratives thus complement one another in harmony. Majumdar takes the story of coming of age out of its realist premises, placing it in the highly metaphorical texture of Indian dance. This hybridization of theatre language is manifested in the meta-space of the published version of the script. Such stage directions as ‘MEENA dances a short phrase to emphasize her point’ (Majumdar 2016, 9) and ‘KALYANI AUNTY hangs up the phone and dances a short footwork phrase for her students before exiting’ (17) serve to evoke the authorial voice and indicate the radical temporal and spatial changes in the storyline. To mark Meena’s shift from the reality of her daily life to the fantasy world inspired by Bollywood films, Majumdar writes: ‘Meena puts away her backpack and performs a classical Indian dance phrase’ (12); ‘Meena’s footwork moves her into a fantasy dreamscape’ (14). By focusing on the how of this multimodal storytelling, Majumdar not only expresses her personal sense of difference but also concretizes the sense of otherness of her audience. She employs the vocabulary of Indian dance to provide critical commentary on the consequences of her character’s cultural upbringing and to comment on the difficulties she experiences in her daily communications. Majumdar also uses the over-the-top performative language of Bollywood romance, the type of popular culture with which Meena identifies, to express Meena’s unrequited love for her classmate Buddy. In Meena’s imagination, Buddy belongs to the aesthetics of Bollywood. His body, blown out of proportion, appears as the backdrop of the Bollywood setting imagined by the young protagonist: [Buddy is] ‘wearing these flashy gold harem chaps and he has this lasso and he sees me and he realizes he’s in love with me, even though we come from such different, different worlds’ (Majumdar 2016, 15). The performative set of Meena’s fantasy is also borrowed from the Bollywood aesthetics: ‘a sunny Rajasthani

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desert appears and the song “Man Mohini” underscores the scene, replicating the opening of the Aishwarya Rai film Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. MEENA dances through the desert using Aishwarya Rai dance movements from the film’ (15). ‘At first I act like I don’t even notice him’—Meena narrates, ‘but that just gets him more passionate and he grabs me, but I push him away, so then he has to prove himself to me through song and dance!’ (16). Brought up on Indian popular culture, Meena imagines her romantic life unfolding in this performative aesthetic, much the way her (English) Canadian classmates would imagine their own romantic encounters in the style of Hollywood films. But she is not a stranger to North American culture either. To underscore Meena’s difference, her internal and deeply embodied interculturalism, Majumdar mixes these cultural references on stage: ‘A Bollywood version of ‘Pretty Woman’ plays. Suddenly we are transported to a high-school graduation dance and Buddy appears dancing to “Pretty Woman” like a Bollywood hero’ (Majumdar 2016, 16). Likewise, Majumdar’s hybrid performance style helps her audiences better understand this precarious, liminal position of a diasporic subject, who lives between the cultures of her home and adopted countries and who emerges from this liminality as a typical representative of the new cosmopolitanism. ‘By interweaving cultures without erasing their differences’, Fish Eyes proposes a scenario for ‘new realities—realities of the future, where the state of being in-between describes the ‘normal’ state of the citizens of this world’ (Fischer-Lichte 2009, 401). It creates a no-space of global interconnectivity and reinforces ‘the state of in-betweenness into which the performance transfers its participants and allows them to anticipate and experience a future’ (400). Recognition and appreciation of her roots and the sense of inner dignity and pride come to Meena through dance itself. It is not by chance that the statue of Natraj occupies centre stage in this performance and is the only symbolic object on stage, for Meena will turn into this image at the end of her spiritual and artistic journey. The meaning of Meena’s name—fish eyes—is revealed at the end of the story. Aunty is back. She repeats her monologue from the opening sequence, now accompanied by the English text. The show makes a full circle—much like Indian cosmology, worldview, and the dance of Nataraja itself—it ends where it begins. The fish finds her happiness in her own element—water. Aunty has always known this truth and has spoken about it before. Now she translates it into English: for us—the curious and the blind, the tourists and the seekers, the multicultural audiences of Canada.

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Wajdi Mouawad’s Inflammation du verbe vivre, an adaptation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, continues this tendency, this time in the realms of digitally mediated performance. * * *

On the Mediated Self of Cosmopolitanism: Wajdi Mouawad’s Inflammation du verbe vivre Wajdi Mouawad’s Inflammation du verbe vivre forms a part of his project Le Dernier jour de sa vie (2011–2016), dedicated to re-staging Sophocles’s seven tragedies. The cycle comprises Des Femmes (2011); Des Héros (2014), consisting of Ajax un cabaret and Œdipe Roi; and Des Mourants (2015–2016), composed of Inflammation du verbe vivre and Les Larmes d’Oedipe. Inflammation du verbe vivre interrogates the uncanny interdependence between the live object and its technologically mediated double and thus foregrounds its own title which, translated into English, literally means ‘the inflammation of the [French] verb to live’. Inflammation du verbe vivre features a theatre artist named Wahid— Mouawad’s dramatic alter-ego and performative avatar—in search of a new theatre language with which to stage the story of Philoctetes, the protagonist of Sophocles’s tragedy of the same name. The project is intimately linked to death of Mouawad’s close friend, the poet and the translator Robert Davreu (du Vignal 2016), who started collaborating with Mouawad on his Sophocles’s cycle but passed away before he had a chance to translate Philoctetes into French. Davreu’s death left Mouawad grief-­ stricken and without a clear vision of how to bring Philoctetes to life. To seek inspiration, Mouawad and his team visited Greece between October 2014 and April 2015, during the country’s economic crisis (Mouawad in du Vignal 2016). This journey became Mouawad’s point of departure to construct Wahid’s dramatic and philosophical voyage. Similarly to real Wajdi, in Inflammation du verbe vivre, a heart-broken Wahid leaves his family and theatre company to seek hope and inspiration elsewhere. He travels to the Greek island of Lemnos, where mythological Philoctetes remained alone for ten years, after he was left there by the Greeks. In Sophocles’s tragedy, Philoctetes suffers from a wounded foot and is left to his own means until Odysseus and Neoptolemus return to Lemnos to bring him to Troy. Designing Inflammation du verbe vivre,

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Mouawad discovered many parallels between Philoctetes’s story and the political realities of the geographical and temporal setting in which he located his play. Thus, Mouawad turned Philoctetes’s mythological story into ‘a parable about Syrian migrants who wash up on the shores of the Greek islands’ (du Vignal 2016). In Mouawad’s work, however, the political always coincides with the metaphysical. As Wahid agonizes over his nightmares, he realizes the futility of his search and presumably suffers a heart attack. Charon, who transports souls of newly deceased over the River Styx to the underworld, takes Wahid into his boat. As he reaches ‘the international airport of Hades’ (Mouawad 2016, 29), Wahid starts to experience sense of déjà vu and vertigo. However, unlike Dante whose guide through the underworld was Virgil, Wahid is greeted by a Greek taxi driver, Lefteris. As they drive from the airport, Wahid realizes that his personalized space of hell resembles contemporary Athens. ‘Yes, it is almost Hell,’ Lefteris offers (30); it is ‘the place, where you chose to die’ (31). Accordingly, hanging between life and death, now Wahid will need to decide whether he wants to come back to the world of the living. In its dramatic construction, Inflammation du verbe vivre presents a complex philosophical narrative of echoing, doubling, and replications. The play oscillates between the events that make up Sophocles’s tragedy, Wajdi Mouawad’s own artistic and existential crisis, and Wahid’s search for a better performative form to narrate his story. What Wahid’s spectators witness is a dramatization of this character’s meta-theatrical journey between the truth of his experience and that of myth, a device typical of Mouawad’s theatre. At the same time, the mentioning of the name and the work of Robert Davreu reinforces the search for the real that drives this highly mediated work forward. Wahid’s immediate addressee is both today’s spectators and the ‘audience of dead people who are not supposed to know the twenty-first century’ (Dumesny 2019). This combination of dramaturgical and performative strategies allows Mouawad to deliver his personal reflection on the state of doom in which he finds the world today, and on the state of forever split self, characteristic to Mouawad’s personal experience and that of many of his contemporaries. To reinforce the power of the double and multitudinous selves that constitute the body and identity of the cosmopolitan performer, Inflammation du verbe vivre capitalizes on the simultaneity of live and mediated images. The projections illustrate the onstage actions in this solo

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performance, expand and contract its fictional spaces, and create dramatic and emotional points of empathy. Conceptualizing this solo piece as a play on doubles, Mouawad ‘questions the alienation of the human being in the circumstances of the vast influence of technology and new media in society; and the notion of split identity. On the level of form, […] [he] dissolves the theatrical mechanism and indirectly questions the relationship between the live and the mediated play’ (Tasic 2011, 119). Most importantly, he mobilizes the ambivalence of the digital double (Dixon 2007). Steve Dixon theorizes the digital double as the tension between the performer’s live body and its technologically mediated image: ‘The idea of the body and its double pervades digital performance, and relates to the shadow figure of the doppelgänger, Freudian notions of the uncanny and the subconscious Id, and Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage and the corps morcelé (the body in pieces)’ (Dixon 2007, 242). He goes on to write: ‘The digital double relates to the ancient notions of magic not only by virtue of the “conjuring” of an alternate and simultaneous second body for the performing subject, but also in relation to the ancient laws of imitative and homeopathic magic’ (244). This figure of the double evokes Brechtian estrangement as the basis of its construction and reception. Playing with the digital double as a ‘manipulable mannequin’ or ‘conceptual template’, which acts as a simulacrum and a replacement of the actor’s body (269), is at the core of the artistic project Inflammation du verbe vivre. Viewed from a political perspective, the use of the digital double allows Mouawad to critique Western neoliberal practices of mediation, in which ‘the human body [is] praised as a value in itself, however manipulated, trained, gendered and over-sexed’ it may be (Lehmann and Primavesi 2009, 5). Aesthetically, the digital double helps Mouawad to ‘conceptualize spectating, viewing, witnessing, [and] participating beyond the simple dichotomy of subject and object’ (4). Finally, the digital double serves Mouawad as a bridging device between the norms of contemporary performance making and artistic and philosophical preoccupations of Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy has been Mouawad’s ideal for many years. Storytelling devices, monologic tendencies in dialogue, descriptive passages appealing to a literary rather than theatrical imagination, and repetitions in themes and images characterize his theatrical writing. Re-translating and re-­ staging Sophocles’s tragedies provided Mouawad with a chance to enter a personal dialogue with the classics and to engage with the idea of actor’s presence. To bring the imagery of the Greek world closer to his

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cosmopolitan audiences, Mouawad invited Robert Davreu to translate Sophocles’s tragedies anew. Inspired by Davreu’s translations, which are marked by the violent energies of both the ancient and modern times and their explosive rhythms, Mouawad sought to make the poetic text as multidimensional as music. Before his sudden death, however, Davreu had translated only those tragedies that make up Mouawad’s cycles Des Femmes and Des Héros. Thus, mourning the artist, and hence the loss of future productions based on his translations, became the dramatic focus of Inflammation du verbe vivre. The production opens with a Prologue, in which Wahid laments the loss of his friend and of his inspiration. He crosses in front of a screen only to re-appear on it in his own projected image. This rapport between two worlds—the worlds of the living and of the dead, physically present on stage and mediated on screen—defines the play’s temporality and registers the mutual interdependence between the figure of the onstage Wahid and his digital alter-ego, the on-screen Wahid. Together the two Wahids construct the cosmopolitan subjectivity of Wajdi Mouawad: the author, the performer, and the protagonist of this solo performance. Arriving on Greek shores, Wahid finds nothing but disappointment. As he falls through the looking glass of his near-death experience, Wahid visits the underworld. There he meets ancient heroes and philosophers, his mother’s shade, several youths who had committed suicide, and Robert, the poet. Mouawad uses the tropes of Homer’s Odyssey to elevate this story to mythical dimensions and inserts cinematic panoramas of Greek landscapes to foreground the social context of today’s Europe, from which this travel narrative stems. Transporting Sophocles’s tragedy into the context of contemporary Greece serves Mouawad as a point of departure in the work of digital mediation. It exemplifies the first stage of creating the digital double as transposition (Balme in Boenisch 2003, 35). According to Mouawad, any play should begin with ‘the fracture of the character’; ‘the important thing is that the spectators also become distressed, the same way it happens when we learn about the death of someone we love’ (Mouawad in Diaz and Mouawad 2017, 96–97). As the on-screen Wahid crosses the sea and enters a house where the rehearsals of Philoctetes are taking place, the onstage Wahid re-enters the stage. This simultaneity of onstage and projected action constitutes the second stage of making a digital double as intertextuality (Balme in Boenisch 2003, 35), in which actors and projections can communicate with each other. Juxtaposing the body of a live actor with its cinematic projection helps Mouawad to

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‘articulate the consciousness of the present’ and comment on the mechanics of ‘perception of the present body’ (Lehmann 2006, 170). The constitutive use of the mediated image forms the basis of this polyphonic or musical installation and creates the effect of ‘technically mediated self-­ referentiality’ (168). The historical figures of Wahid’s personal life (his collaborators, wife, and children) and the fictional characters of the story (ancient heroes, Gods, and philosophers) appear on screen as phantoms of the artist’s imagination and act as its manipulable mannequins. As the onscreen Wahid reads passages from Homer’s Odyssey describing the hero’s voyage, we see the on-stage Wahid climbing up the screen, while the text of the book is scrolling down, turning into the object of narration. This moment suggests a digital echo effect that ‘operates like a wayward loop of consciousness through which one’s image of one’s self and one’s relationship to the world can be examined, questioned and transformed’ (Rokeby in Dixon 2007, 244). As a consequence of this action, Wahid decides to repeat Odysseus’s trip to the underworld and writes a farewell letter to his children. As the on-screen Wahid finishes his writing, the on-stage one puts the letter into his pocket, now acting as an avatar to his own digital double. This simultaneity reveals the mirror technology enabled by the digital double as a ‘re-creation of aesthetic conventions of one particular medium within a different medium’ (Balme in Boenisch 2003, 35). It also supports Dixon’s argument that in performances that employ a digital double, the performer ‘is almost always conscious of the presence of the double’ (2007, 250). Mouawad’s digital avatar is a replica of the performer’s self. He ‘becomes the “real” that the performer must painstakingly copy and emulate’ and serves as the artist’s personal ‘instrument for self-­ analysis’ (247). In the next sequence, the situation is reversed. The on-screen Wahid leaves his hotel by taking an elevator with several mirrors in it. As he enters this reflective space, the figure of the onstage Wahid becomes reproduced and multiplied through an infinity of digitized mirror images. This device of technological reproduction mobilizes and theatrically constructs the digital double. It turns into a signifier of technological narcissism (Dixon 2007, 245) marked by the search for and worshipping of a technological sublime, a phenomenon that ‘we find equally fascinating and hypnotic as the natural one. The image we peer at places ourselves firmly within, and in control of, a pulsating digital world simultaneously reflecting and synthetically replicating nature, and our own bodies’ (245). In Inflammation du verbe vivre, digital reproduction—to paraphrase Walter Benjamin

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(1970)—turns into one more example of stranger-fetishism, now expressed through the power of mediation, when not others but we ourselves ‘gaze fixedly into, and back at, our new electronic selves’ (Dixon 2007, 245). The digital double becomes an alter-ego of the performer: the on-screen Wahid resembles a living photograph. Speaking of the performativity of a photographic image, Phelan cites its unique quality to present the image as real and to stimulate performative activity in the subject as their desire to imitate their own representation: Portrait photography tries to make an inner form, a (negative) shadow, expressive: a developed image which renders the corporeal, a body-real, as a real body. Uncertain about what this body looks like or how substantial it is, we perform an image of it by imitating what we think we look like. We imagine what people might see when they look at us, and then we try to perform (and conform to) those images. (Phelan 1992, 35–36)

Like a photographic portrait, the digital double allows one to recognize oneself as self and other. In Inflammation du verbe vivre, by constructing a digital double, Mouawad not only creates a mediated image of his own body and his own self, he also invites his audience to participate in the act of self-reflection. Watching the multiplied image of Wajdi/Wahid, a spectator is given a chance to contemplate his/her own self as other. In its hybrid language, Inflammation du verbe vivre is inspired by the cinéma de poésie of the French documentary filmmaker Jean-Daniel Pollet and his film Trois jours en Grèce (1991), a homage to Greece and its people, which he filmed during the 1990/1991 Gulf War. Like Pollet, Mouawad also aims to provide his audience with a view of today’s world ruined by technological progress and global wars (Diaz and Mouawad 2017, 38–39). As is often the case in Mouawad’s theatre, in this work, the past, the present, and the conditional time frames collapse into each other and become one. Much like Pollet’s cinematography, which borders on surrealism, Mouawad’s theatre makes the spatial and temporal dimensions of his story overlap as well. Wahid’s journey into the underworld takes on a fantastic dimension: a dog appears on the screen, while the onstage Wahid talks to it. In the production, Mouawad also dialogues with Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic aesthetics: the images of dripping water and abandoned landscapes are free quotations from the films Stalker and Nostalghia (Diaz and Mouawad 2017, 26–27). For Mouawad as for Tarkovsky, the

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dog is a creature of trust and memory. It speaks Arabic, Wahid’s native language, and brings him to a sacred site to visit his dead mother. As Wahid suffers a heart attack, we see Lefteris, his guide, sitting next to his body on the seashore, waiting for the ambulance. First the camera shows Wahid’s body from the outside, as seen by Lefteris. Then it takes us into Wahid’s mind. We see Wahid falling into Philoctetes’s cave, passing through the corridors of his nightmare, and emerging on the site of an industrial disaster, Greece’s wasteland, where trucks dump piles of trash and birds fly over them. As we watch the scene, heaps of plastic bags are pushed onto the stage, with the onstage Wahid burying himself under them. We hear a pre-recorded speech about forgotten and abandoned objects that compares Philoctetes’s personal suffering to the misery and distraction of the social body of the Greek nation. The play becomes Mouawad’s commentary on the economic crisis in Greece. It portrays Greek culture and its people, the epicentre of European identity, on the verge of explosion, abandoned by its neighbours. He declares: ‘our individual stories are tightly intertwined with the collective history specifically in our over-mediated world’. We are constantly touched by the media, ‘but in a completely perverted way. […] Our everyday and concrete reality […] is the only reality that interests us, but it is also inscribed in a global and virtual world that concerns all others’ (Mouawad in Diaz and Mouawad 2017, 99). To stage the major encounter of this play, between Wahid and his dead friend, Mouawad uses presumably documentary footage of the real Robert Davreu. The onstage Wahid is seated on the upper left corner of the screen, whereas we see the poet’s face projected, as if he is listening to Wahid’s words. Robert, a digital avatar of the dead poet, smiles and speaks his lines in Greek: the dialogue provides one more commentary on digital mediation, technological liveness, and encountering the divided self. It invites the audience to confront their own mortality and recognize their own selves in the actions of the other. A similar effect is achieved in Marina Abramović’s work. If, however, Abramović seeks a performer/audience exchange of energy and so capitalizes on the sense of the real, in Inflammation du verbe vivre, the sense of the real and the effect of liveness are constructed through technological mediations. To this extent, this presumably real image of the late Robert Davreu appears to be the most alive and so unattainable, like any deceased person. To Wahid’s plea to help him resolve the dilemma of staging Philoctetes, Davreu responds

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‘my son, in your fight for victory, victory always comes with the help of the gods’ (Mouawad 2016, 53). The closing sequence titled ‘Vie Divine’ transports Wahid to the gods. Their world is as miserable as that of mortals. Apollo has retired to the North American continent, while Zeus and Athena live in poverty. Deprived of their help, Wahid sets out on his mission. As the onstage Wahid prepares for the ritual, we see the on-screen Wahid gradually transforming into Philoctetes. As the onstage Wahid washes his face, the on-­ screen Wahid reaches the water. Their actions are similar but not identical: the contrapuntal images create the sense of visual syncopation and a commentary on how the divisions work within the self. As the on-screen doctors resuscitate Wahid, his onstage counterpart discovers a box of crayons. The on-screen Wahid takes a deep breath and opens his eyes. We hear the voice of the onstage Wahid narrating the closing monologue. This suggests that Wahid uses the act of creative writing to come back to his own self, to re-discover agency and return to the living. Thus, the creation of a digital double is Mouawad’s theatrical strategy to re-assemble his own divided self. Observing the live action on stage and the projected action on the screen, Mouawad’s audience is confronted with questions regarding the intimacy of the encounter, since the use of video projections on stage encourages narcissistic reflection and invites stranger-fetishism. The aesthetics of intermedial performance in Inflammation du verbe vivre is typical of cosmopolitan theatre: it refuses to stage a single fictional location. Instead, it reflects various forms of cultural communication offstage and comments on how a theatrical utterance is made. It also belongs to a new generation of theatre that uses affectual means of contact to appeal to our intellect. In Mouawad’s case, this position is augmented by his clear sense of being non-European and coming to the culture of Greek tragedy with a different set of expectations and cultural baggage. Perhaps because French is his second language, Mouawad nurtures aural mechanisms of theatrical affect and places verbal metaphors in the centre of his work. He writes: ‘In Greek, the word “metaphor” indicates relocation, my exile may be related to this abundance of metaphors, to my impossibility of saying one thing without passing through the expression of another. […] Having lost my mother tongue, I now write in a language that is not mine. I’m always in the middle of a metaphor, which confers something plethoric about my speech’ (Mouawad in Diaz and Mouawad 2017, 92). In Inflammation du verbe vivre, however, he juxtaposes visual and verbal

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metaphors, the move constituting a new step in his theatre of new tragedy. By working between cultures, languages, and forms of representation, Mouawad reinforces the sense of interconnectedness that characterizes the artistic search of many cosmopolitan artists. In this performance between the real and the mediated body, the encounter between self and other emerges. It relies on the agreement that ‘the norms by which I recognize another or, indeed, myself, are not mine alone; they function to the extent that they are social, exceeding every dyadic exchange that they condition’ (Butler 2007, 31). Most significantly, this multi-directional vector of difference is manifested in the materiality of the actor’s body, as it stages the tension between the body of the performer and that of his/her character, creating multiple selves. It holds a mirror up to the audience, whose self can also be defined by multiplicity. * * * As I have argued in this chapter, the autobiographical solo performance can mobilize a cosmopolitan performer’s homogenized identity. It can also insist that the total amalgamation of histories, traditions, experiences, and knowledge is impossible. Cosmopolitan artists are often trapped between the temporal linearity of the nation and the circular rhythm of their personal histories and cultures. They thus become double refugees— ‘the other’ to both the host culture and that of their origin. The move from the I/Other binary to the position of ‘a citizen of the world’ defines their artistic methods, which is based on dialogue between different world cultures. This dual vector of the artist’s personal experience and their freedom to engage with the works, traditions, and customs of other cultures marks their work as cosmopolitan. It carries the critical potential ‘to shift intercultural theatre from its historical reputation of being a primarily one-­ way Western (white) imperative that appropriates non-Western otherness’ and ‘represents a conceptual, processual, embodied lived condition driven by one’s own multiple affiliations to cultures, nations and faiths’ (Mitra 2015, 15). It also implies the artist’s personal position of insider-outsider that conditions their embodied view of their own liminality as someone who experiences two or more cultures and concepts of time simultaneously. In the next chapter, I shall examine this sense of interconnectedness and multiplicity of self as it appears within the inner dynamic of the group and the ways it can be revealed through staging chorus plays.

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Notes 1. Internal Terrains, written and performed by Natasha Davis, was developed in collaboration with Bob Karper (sound), Branislava Kuburović (written documentation), Elisa Gallo-Rosso (objects), Lucy Cash (movement), and Marty Langthorne (lights). It was commissioned by the Chelsea Theatre, London, the Colchester Arts Centre, Refugee Week UK, and Live Collision, Dublin, and funded by the Arts Council England, Hosking Houses Trust, and Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. Its first public presentation took place at the Colchester Arts Centre on February 6, 2013. 2. The Fish Eyes Trilogy premiered at the Cultch, Vancouver, on January 31, 2015. Its first part Fish Eyes was presented for the first time at the André Pagé Studio at the National Theatre School of Canada in January 2004 and was directed by Kate Schlemmer. It officially premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto, in October 2005 with Anita Majumdar, as its choreographer and actor, and Gregory David Prest as its director and dramaturg. Boys with Cars—its second part—was commissioned and developed by Nightswimming, under the patronage and directing of Brian Quirt. Its third part—Let Me Borrow That Top—was co-commissioned by Nightswimming and The Banff Centre. The national tour of the trilogy included the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa, where I saw it in 2014, the PuSh International Performing Festival (Vancouver), the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), the Belfry Theatre (Victoria), and The Banff Centre. 3. Written, directed, and performed by Mouawad, Inflammation du verbe vivre premiered on June 28, 2015, in Mons. It features Dimitris Kranias on video, with Charlotte Farcet as its dramaturg, Emmanuel Clolus as set designer, Michel Maurer as sound maker, and Mouawad and Dominique Daviet’s video. In 2016, Inflammation du verbe vivre received the Prix littéraire du Gouverneur Général, Canada. I saw Inflammation du verbe vivre in Paris in the summer of 2016. 4. A student of the Kathak, Khan performed in Peter Brook’s Mahâbhârata. Later he created highly experimental solo and ensemble work that would draw his viewers’ attention to the hybrid language of dance as invented by Khan himself, a language in which traditional elements of Indian dance would coexist and dialogue with many components of Western performance. To enrich his vocabulary, Akram Khan employed dramatic narrative and humour, approximating in his style the so-called Tanztheater developed by the German choreographer Pina Bausch. 5. Mahalia Golnosh Tahririha notes that ‘the spelling of this specific style of dance often differs between combinations of its two composite parts “Bharata” and “Natyam”, translated literally from the Sanskrit as “Bharata’s dance”, and seen either as one word or two’ (2017, 41). The published

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version of the play favours this spelling—bharatanatyam—and so it will be used here as well. 6. I briefly discussed this phenomenon in Chap. 2, in conjunction to Mani Soleymanlou’s multilingual solo performances.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1991. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, 5–249. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1970. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–253. New York: Schocken. Bharucha, Rustom. 1996. Under the Sign of the Onion: Intracultural Negotiations in Theatre. New Theatre Quarterly 12 (46): 116–130. Boenisch, Peter M. 2003. CoMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality in Contemporary Theatre. Theatre Research International 28 (1): 34–45. Butler, Judith. 2007. An Account of Oneself. In Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Text and the Talk of Everyday Life, ed. Bronwyn Davies, 19–39. New York and London: Routledge. Canagarajah, Suresh. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Davis, Natasha. 2016a. Interview by Alessandra Cianetti. Performing Borders, July 14. https://performingborders.live/2016/07/14/natasha-davis-july-2016/. ———. 2016b. Contemporary British Performance: Natasha Davis Interview. British Library, April 8. http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-andvision/2016/04/contemporary-british-performance-natasha-davis-interview-.html. ———. 2018. Fifty Rooms  – Journeys between Body, Memory and Land: A Conversation between Natasha Davis, Alena Pfoser and Sara de Jong. Who Are We?, May 7. https://www.whoareweproject.com/fifty-rooms-journeysbetween-body-memory-and-land. Davis, Natasha, and Yana Meerzon. 2015. Staging an Exilic Autobiography. Performance Research 20 (5): 63–69. Diaz, Sylvain, and Wajdi Mouawad. 2017. Avec Wajdi Mouawad: tout est écriture. Montreal: LEMEAC. Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. MIT Press.

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Du Vignal, Phillippe. 2016. Inflammation du verbe vivre, texte et mise en scène de Wajdi Mouawad. Théâtre du blog, June 4. http://theatredublog.unblog. fr/2016/06/04/inflammation-du-verbe-vivre/. Dumesny, Emilie. 2019. Inflammation du verbe vivre. Plays to See, June 14. https://playstosee.com/inflammation-du-verbe-vivre/. Emmerton, Dorianne. 2017. Review: The Fish Eyes Trilogy (Factory Theatre/ Nightswimming). Mooney on Theatre, September 29. https://www.mooneyontheatre.com/2017/09/29/review-the-fish-eyes-trilogy-factor ytheatrenightswimming/. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2009. Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between. New Theatre Quarterly 25 (4, November): 391–401. Gandhi, Unnati. 2005. Inspired by Bollywood Overkill: Classical Indian Dance Meets Stand-Up Comedy, Weaving Ancient Fishing Tales and Destiny’s Child. Globe & Mail, June 18. Heddon, Deirdre. 2008. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jones, Amelia. 2011. ‘The Artist Is Present:’ Artistic Re-Enactments and the Impossibility of Presence. The Drama Review 55 (1): 16–45. Kirby, Michael. 1972. On Acting and Not-Acting. The Drama Review 16 (1): 3–15. Knowles, Ric. 2017. Performing the Intercultural City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kuburovic, Branislava. 2013. The Strangest Homecoming: Natasha Davis’ Internal Terrains. In Natasha Davis: Performance, Film, Installation, 9–24. London: Natasha Productions. Kundera, Milan. 2003. Ignorance. Translated by Linda Asher. New York: Harper Perennial. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the/Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, 75–82. Translated by Bruce Fink. New  York and London: W.W.  Norton & Company. Langston, Patrick. 2014. One Good and One Not-so-Good in Anita Majumdar’s GCTC Double Bill. The Ottawa Citizen, October 17. http://ottawacitizen. com/entertainment/local-arts/theatre-review-one-good-and-one-not-sogood-in-anita-majumdars-gctc-double-bill. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-­ Munby. London and New York: Routledge. Lehmann, Hans-Thies, and Patrick Primavesi. 2009. Dramaturgy on the Shifting Grounds. Performance Research 14 (3): 3–6. Majumdar, Anita. 2015. Personal Interview, December 27. ———. 2016. The Fish Eyes Trilogy. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Marchevska, Elena. 2017. The Displaced & Privilege: Live Art in the Age of Hostility. Live Art Development Agency.

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Martin, Carol. 2006. Bodies of Evidence. The Drama Review 50 (3): 8–15. McLean-Hopkins, Catharine. 2006. Performing Autologues: Citing/Sitting the Self in Autobiographical Performance. In Monologues. Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, ed. Clare Wallace, 185–208. Prague: Literaria Pragnesia. Meerzon, Yana. 2009. The Exilic Teens: On the Intracultural Encounters in Wajdi Mouawad’s Theatre. Theatre Research in Canada 30 (1): 99–128. Mitra, Royona. 2015. Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Mouawad, Wajdi. 2016. Inflammation du verbe vivre. Montreal: Leméac/Actes Sud-Papiers. Pfoser, Alena, and Sara de Jong. 2017. We Are All Displaced. Open Democracy, November 20: 2017. Phelan, Peggy. 1992. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. ———. 2004. Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows. Theatre Journal 56 (4): 769–777. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Shah, Rupal. 2016. Introductory Remarks. In The Fish Eyes Trilogy, XIII– XVIII. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Tahririha, Mahalia Golnosh. 2017. The Creation of New Meaning in Contemporary Intercultural Performance. MA thesis, University of Ottawa. Tasic, Ana. 2011. Live Video Relay in Postdramatic Theatre. In Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre Ten Years After, ed. Ivan Medenica, 119–129. Belgrade: Anthology of Essays by Faculty of Dramatic Arts 20. Tercio, Daniel. 2010. Martyrium as Performance. Performance Research 15 (1): 90–99.

CHAPTER 5

Staging Cosmoprolis: Constructing the Chorus Play

The contemporary chorus play has recently become one of the leading theatre practices dedicated to staging the divided subjectivity of cosmopolitanism. Through a multiplicity of bodies and personalities on stage, it evokes theatrically what Nasr Hafez calls a cosmoprolis—a multicultural public space populated by cosmoproletarians (Hafez 2006, 45), including local folks, transnational workers, migrants, refugees, and tourists. A cosmoprolis can be both a welcoming place and a high-risk environment. It resembles a floating island, whose nomadic subjects do not sink into the environment but engage with it through a series of transactions (46). The contemporary chorus play freely comments on life in the cosmoprolis. Being a type of socio-political and theatrical ritual, it often takes the form of ‘a narrative, and a type of theatricality’ (Fix and Toudoire-Surlapierre 2009, 13). When it is enacted by transnational performers, who are themselves cosmoproletarians, it becomes a unified dramatic force that seeks to generate a complex dynamic in a group of strangers, in which the ‘I’ of the cosmopolitan self surfaces under the pressure of not one but many external gazes. In its formal characteristics, it can be physically or conceptually choral, ‘“tapping into” collective experiences and a high degree of (self-) reflexivity’ (Revermann 2013, 153). It can be logos- or movement-based, similar in its structures to the performative oratorio or modern dance, and performed by professional artists or non-professional community members, and it can ‘ask questions about notions of communality and community, the individual and the group’ (Eastman 2013, 365). Aesthetically, © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_5

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it can resemble a postdramatic performance, in which the materiality of the actor’s presence and the gap between the performer’s body and their character are actualized. To examine how the contemporary chorus play contributes to the reflection about what it means to be a stranger within today’s culture of fear (Furedi 2006) in the context of virulent populism, ethnic particularism, and nationalism (Valluvan 2019, 23–24), I will focus on several case studies that stage current European experiences of migration and the new communality arising from them. These performances not only diagnose the culture of fear in which they originate but also articulate cosmopolitan consciousness as its antidote. They insist that the inner diversity of the group is its power and propose the state of being (inter)connected with, and (inter)dependent on, each other as an alternative to group behaviour motivated by fear. In Chap. 5 we move in the opposite direction to that adopted in Chap. 4: from the fictional and mediated to the real. First, I examine Guy Cassiers’s (2017) staging of Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges (The Supplicants) (2013)1 titled Grensgeval (Borderline).2 This performance employs the language of theatrical stylization, using Jelinek’s text, dancing bodies, actors’ narrations, and digital projections to elevate the figure of the stranger to mythological dimensions. My second example is The Blind Poet (2015) of Needcompany.3 It stages the genealogy of today’s Europe as a multicultural blend, in which all the elements are historically, geographically, and linguistically interconnected. It uses biographical accounts of its performers’ family histories to investigate the aesthetic slippages that define the gap between the performer’s own identity and that of their autobiographical character. As my third case study, I analyse Babel (Words) (2010) and its re-­staging as Babel 7.16 (2016), choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet.4 I demonstrate that this work uses the interdisciplinary language of modern dance to enact diversity on stage. It insists on the value of difference as recognized in the materiality and the semiotics of the body of a single performer and as a dramaturgy of making a chorus play—a recipe for, and a theatrical imprint of, global interconnectivity. I close this chapter by looking at the project 100% City: A Statistical Chain Reaction5 (2008–present) by Rimini Protokoll. This project seeks to defy the impersonality of the ‘pedantic and resolutely undramatic world of statistics’ (Pendle 2011), by inviting one hundred city dwellers—the experts of everyday (Roselt 2008, 63–65)—to enact their city on stage.

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100% City capitalizes on the notion of the real and the expert’s personal knowledge of travelling and exile. It aims to enact cosmoprolis as a performing space of the new history torn between global experiences of migration and rising emotional, social, economic, and political tensions of nationalism. In its formal characteristics, as this chapter demonstrates, the contemporary chorus play resembles the Greek tragic chorus, the modern mystery play, and Brecht’s epic theatre, as it recasts its members from being commentators on the action to its protagonists, who are often also victims of social turmoil. In its casting choices and theatricality, the contemporary chorus play echoes the multiplicity of its audiences and provides them with a chance to recognize and reflect their own unwarranted conditions of being. * * *

The Chorus Play: A Theoretical Primer According to Aristotle, the tragic chorus of Sophocles’s tragedies serves as a spokesman for the tragedy’s ideal spectator and articulates the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic conflict. Thematically, it represents the homogeneity of the collective consciousness and rejects the concept of individualism. The chorus helps ‘settl[ing] moral and religious problems’, but it also expresses irony (Kirkwood 1954, 21). In its pragmatic functions, the Greek chorus acts as the voice of collective reason, while its statements express the chorus’s position of civic responsibility and social status. As a literary device, it offers poets a chance to showcase their mastery in writing verse and their ability to manipulate spectators’ emotions. The contemporary chorus play builds on these pragmatic functions, for it often focuses on the political aspects of the tragic that mark today’s social conflict between the individual and the state (Lehmann 2011, 35). With the development of the modern consciousness, which recognizes subjectivity as a battle of individual wills and passions, the Greek chorus loses its prominence. It resurfaces in Romantic drama and later in Nietzsche’s thought, in which the individual is ‘not a gateway but a barrier to a deep connection with universal psychic forces’ (Fuchs 1996, 27). As the crisis of modern drama unfolds, a new type of chorus emerges. In Symbolist dramaturgy and Expressionist theatre, the chorus signifies the

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renewed search for interpersonal conflict. It also comments on the most important event in any human’s life: the encounter with death. It reaches back to the traditions of medieval theatre, and, in the form of the modern mystery, it becomes ‘a metaphysical play whose subject is salvation’ (Fuchs 1996, 48). The character of the modern mystery is ‘de-substantiated’ (35). It shifts the questions of identity to spirituality and also leads to ‘dressing Marxist doctrine in Christian eschatology’ (44). Likewise, the contemporary chorus play presents the cosmopolitan subject in the troubled singularity of their selfhood but also as someone tightly connected to the group. The contemporary chorus play, composed of a multitude of mini-solo performances which insist on each performer’s cultural and linguistic ­singularity, is similar in its politics to Brecht’s epic theatre. The Brechtian chorus presents a collective protagonist ready to rationalize dramatic conflict (Revermann 2013, 156), whereas Brecht’s songs, performed both individually and by a group, illustrate how ‘the subjective autobiographical narrative’ can be ‘deflected and displaced into the realm of the more general and universal’ (161). Brechtian songs, being characterized by (self-)reflexivity and citing ‘collective experience and collective authority’ (153), pre-structure the audience’s ‘enchantment or empathy’ (162). The Brechtian chorus adopts the ideological framework of Marxism and inverts many traits of the original Greek chorus, its collective wisdom turning into ‘collective ignorance’ (168). Most importantly, Brecht creates ‘onstage representations of the citizen body’ (166), since his chorus is intended to foreground the poor and the underprivileged. Similarly, the contemporary chorus play speaks on behalf of the disadvantaged, identified today as cultural, linguistic, social, and religious minorities. It insists on the heterogeneity of the collective body and investigates how the highly personalized experience of an individual can be revealed through the performance of a collective. It appeals to the audience’s sense of citizenship and uses estrangement to arouse empathy. Physically choral, the contemporary chorus play can resemble ‘a singing collective’, whereas conceptually choral, it can ‘transcend the individual and particular and move towards highlighting the typical, the situational, and the societal conditions under which characters act and make decisions’ (Revermann 2013, 153). The contemporary chorus play is often written as a postdramatic performance text (Barnett 2008, 14), in which the dramatic material is presented to the audience and the ‘representational relationship between the stage and the outside world’ is suspended (15). It tends to break the linearity of storytelling and enjoys problematizing the

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stable and fossilized nature of the character’s identity. It creates ‘charted “landscapes of consciousness” where unattributed speeches have gone into more collective realms of memory and experience’ (16). It can also engage multiple speakers who can equally stand for a single consciousness and for many selves. Politically, the contemporary chorus play can evoke an image of the globalized collectivity as a site of ambiguity, vulnerability, and precarity. It often facilitates what Sara Ahmed calls an ‘eye-to-eye’ or ‘skin-to-skin’ encounter between strangers, which emerges ‘in the formation of bodily and social space’ (Ahmed 2000, 39). The contemporary chorus play capitalizes on the encounter as a social, emotional, and political gesture. It deconstructs and comments upon the culture of fear arising from our ‘belief that humanity is confronted by powerful destructive forces that threaten our everyday existence’ (Furedi 2006, vii). Because it often presents the figure of the other as a statistical stranger, it also speaks of how the culture of fear exhibits hostility towards the other and ‘breeds an atmosphere of suspicion’ (xvi). Fear, at the same time, can function as a unifying force, since it can transform a disjointed group into a smooth mechanism of self-defence or even aggression. In the following, I briefly analyse how the contemporary chorus play can theatrically summon up ‘the social experience of dwelling with other bodies’ (Ahmed 2000, 47) and how it can stage this conflict between the body of the ‘I’ and the body of the other as a site of the new cosmopolitan communalities. * * *

Grensgeval (Borderline): Scripting the Refugee, Mythologizing the Collective Self Guy Cassiers’s Grensgeval (Borderline) is a transposition of Elfriede Jelinek’s postdramatic text Die Schutzbefohlenen into an oratorio-dance performance. Based on Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, the play presents an example of what Jelinek once defined as ‘Sprachflächen (surfaces or planes of language), which consist of montages of playfully and deconstructively manipulated quotes from a wide variety of different spheres and genres, including popular culture, the media, philosophy, poetry as well as classical dramatic literature, intermixed with what reads like the author’s own

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voice’ (Jürs-Munby 2009, 46). Charges (The Supplicants), Jelinek’s response to the migration crisis in Europe, recasts Aeschylus’s tragedy as a social chorus play to be narrated and enacted by one or many voices. It stages ‘the plight of refugees who had arrived from the Pakistan– Afghanistan border area and had been confined in the Traiskirchen refugee centre outside Vienna’ (Wilmer 2018, 31). In Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, the fifty daughters of Danaus refuse to marry their cousins and flee to Argos to seek protection on Greek shores. At first Pelasgus, the King of Argos, denies the Danaids shelter, citing the privilege of the Argive people to decide their fate. However, when the people of Argos rule in the Danaids’ favour, they safely enter the walls of the city, relying on the hospitality of its citizens. Their right for protection, Balme explains, is assured by hikesia, ‘the ancient custom of hospitality’ and institutionalized ritual (2019, 6). In Charges (The Supplicants), as in Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, Jelinek depicts refugees seeking asylum—this time from the Austrian authorities. The performativity of the plea makes them visible and audible, but it does not guarantee they will be heard. Refugees ‘don’t know how people talk here’, Jelinek’s chorus states; ‘no wonder no one bothers to listen to them, not to their suffering, not to their songs which are of no use to anyone but them’ (Jelinek 2016, 113). This statement of Jelinek’s echoes Derrida’s criticism of the modern state, which can offer its hospitality only in the language of the host (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 15–19). Unable to defend their cause in terms familiar to the host, the stranger turns into a figure of danger, a scary barbarian, whose speech produces an effect of internal multilingualism (Arteel and Deutsch-Schreiner 2018, 366) and thus challenges the everyday and legal idiom of the host. Jelinek’s play is constructed as a dialogue with Aeschylus’s tragedy, creating a parallel (inter)textuality that ‘generates relations and disturbances between the two texts through staging them together’ (Jürs-Munby 2013, 214). This technique makes Jelinek’s authorial position explicit: her parasitic drama points at ‘a disruption of political consensus’ and ‘creates a space for questioning and dissent’ (211). To make the chosen material politically topical, Jelinek mixes the voices of refugees and the people of Austria. She casts cultural and political celebrities—Anna Netrebko, Frank Stronach, Tatyana Yumasheva, among others—as dramatic archetypes. These personalities ‘never enter as stage characters, though they are the driving forces, the plotters’ (Honegger 2016a, vii). Their voices emerge from the choral passages, an effect that makes their performative presence as archetypal and mythological as that

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of the play’s collective protagonist—the refugee. When asked who this collective ‘we’ refers to, Jelinek responds: It has to be discovered who the speakers are at any given moment. […] Sometimes it is I who speaks in the pluralis majestatis, sometimes it’s an ironical “we”, it’s something that masses appropriate, when everyone actually says “I” […] Sometimes it is a role I am presumptuous enough to take on by turning myself into one of those refugees, something I am not at all entitled to. (Jelinek qtd in Honegger 2016b, 153–154)

In Charges (The Supplicants), in other words, Jelinek implicates victims, bystanders, and the authorities in the tragedy of migration. The text plunges into the complex question of the identity of today’s European. Jelinek repeatedly asks: who is this new citizen, and what is their relationship to the history of the continent? In its artistic form, Charges (The Supplicants) resembles a long poem, in which the monologic utterances of anonymous narrators are interspersed with their dialogue and hence can be attributed to a single performer or a chorus of speakers on stage. Redefining the chorus as choralité, Jelinek’s play infers that the modern mystery is the only performative form able to reflect theatrically the tragedy of global movements. Charges (The Supplicants) expresses a ‘vehement opposition to a traditional mimetic theatre aesthetics that produces an illusion of life, […] spectator’s empathy and ideological identification with the protagonists’. It adopts a ‘hyper-Brechtian aesthetic model’, in which ‘the organically unifying relationship between text, voice and embodied character’ is deliberately separated (Jürs-Munby 2009, 48). Because it borrows from music and contains mythological and biblical references, the play can be considered an example of ‘Catholic antiphony’ (Jelinek in Honegger 2016b, 257). It features characters as ‘linguistic agitators’ or ‘linguistic templates’ (257). Thanks to this technique, Jelinek’s words resemble musical phrases encoded within the syntax of implied performance. This implied performance monologizes dialogue by employing ‘an excessive consensus’ between the speakers, when ‘the figures talk not so much at cross-purposes but rather in the same direction’ (Lehmann 2006, 129). Jelinek constructs her Charges (The Supplicants) as a logos-driven chorus play—a scenario of implied actions, exaggeration, irony, and vehement political commentary, in which the traditional dramatic character is replaced by a text bearer (Barnett 2008, 18). The work relies on affect as the theatre’s major strategy to

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induce its audiences to encounter the ‘I’ as oneself. By collapsing into one the voices of asylum seekers, those of classical tragedy, and those of people of today, Jelinek’s text raises questions about the spectators’ responsibility for the visible and invisible walls that we erect between the ‘we’ of the host and the ‘you’ of the refugees. Jelinek’s theatre demands innovative staging techniques and approaches in acting. She imagines actors as ‘instruments in a polyphonic composition that exhibits language as something pre-existing the individual who enters it’ (Jürs-Munby 2009, 48). Charges (The Supplicants) has received more than a dozen domestic and international performances: ‘Michael Thalheimer at the Burgtheater (2015) in Vienna approached the play like an ancient Greek drama with masked actors performing largely like a chorus’ (Wilmer 2018, 32). Nicolas Stemann opened his 2015 version in Theatertreffen, Berlin, with a group of local refugees in the cast, whereas Mirko Borscht produced it as a semi-interactive event at the Theater Bremen in November 2014 (30–32). Guy Cassiers’s Grensgeval (Borderline) exemplifies how Jelinek’s political experiment can be translated into a multi-sensorial performative event. Cassiers accentuates the text’s musicality by staging this play as lamentation, with four narrators speaking its dialogue and sixteen dancers enacting its movement. He uses repetitions, visual poetry, and rhythmical patterns to create the figure of a refugee, thus commanding recognition and analysis of the multiple semiotics that intervene in the production’s philosophical and political agenda. This technique engenders the separation of the speaker from the text, so that when texts are spoken chorally, the musical structure or ‘the independent reality of the word’ can be experienced viscerally (Lehmann 2006, 130). As artistic director of the Toneelhuis in Antwerp, Cassiers had been looking into issues of migration for the previous several seasons. He had programmed plays and created events aimed at educating subscribers about migration as the new social and economic European condition. He had also tried to engage refugees in the cultural life of Antwerp. Grensgeval (Borderline) continues this search: it aims to make the theatrical encounter an occasion for historical reflection. In Cassiers’s view, theatre has the power to provide a better understanding of our present reality and even ‘open it to a future’, but this understanding must be ‘founded on a history that cannot be lost’ (Cassiers and Castellucci 2012, 82). This approach raises the fundamental question faced by the performance arts: ‘how to intensify the moment of the here and now, without ever forgetting our

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history’ (82). In Grensgeval (Borderline), Cassiers offers a vision of Europe that wants to speak of its atrocities. He writes: The strength of Elfriede Jelinek’s writing resides in its myriad references to the cultural history of Europe, like The Odyssey, The Trojan War, all those great texts that talk about large movements of population and similar questions. Jelinek combines this cultural foundation with topical events. The photographs of dead children lying on beaches that have been used by the media, or the problem of car pollution, share the stage with ancient drama in Grensgeval (Borderline). (Cassiers 2017)

For Cassiers, working on Jelinek’s text became an opportunity to comment on Belgium’s emblematic position within the European Union. Because Brussels is the capital of the EU, Belgium serves as ‘a wall between major European countries, such as France, Germany, and England’ (Cassiers and Castellucci 2012, 86), an ‘empty space’ to keep them at a distance from each other. It plays a symbolic role in the current debates about migration. For this reason, Cassiers believes, Belgian theatre must demonstrate that being in the middle of Europe means working at the crossroads of its history and its geographical tensions. No European artist can afford to choose just one identity, so it is not surprising to see Zygmunt Bauman’s dictum ‘we live with another, live as another, for another’ (Bauman in Cassiers and Castellucci 2012, 93) reflected in Grensgeval (Borderline), which criticizes not only the legal setbacks in the European refugee programmes but also the role of the media in helping politicians to manipulate public opinion about refugees. The performance brings up issues relevant to Europe in general and specifically to its home culture: In Flanders, to talk about refugees almost means to talk about ‘illegals’, or that’s what the media say, it’s the language they use to turn people against the idea of welcoming refugees. Manipulation starts there, with the choice of the words you’ll use to talk about important subjects and thus orient the reflection of a mainstream audience. But the refugees coming to our countries shouldn’t be seen as illegals before they have even been given a chance. (Cassiers 2017)

To speak ethically and meaningfully about the ordeal, in Grensgeval (Borderline), Cassiers employs technologies of aesthetic distance. This method is contradictory to documentary and testimonial theatre, which privileges the figure of a migrant on stage. By favouring aesthetics of

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distancing over authenticity, Cassiers follows Jelinek’s own dramaturgical strategies. Jelinek uses language to ‘explai[n] the complexity of the situation in which Europe and refugees find themselves (Cassiers 2017) and to attack the structures of power. Listening to Jelinek’s texts, ‘we think of polyphony, the combination of voices or instruments, linked together by the laws of harmony’ (Bomy 2009, 80), but we also recognize their political urgency. Following the logic of Jelinek’s text, Cassiers strips refugee flight of its ugliness. Instead, he stylizes the memories of humiliation and physical dangers faced by refugees and traces them through words, choreography, lighting and soundscapes. To convey the nightmarishness of Jelinek’s writing, the director separates the speaking body from the moving one, thus mobilizing Jelinek’s proposal to recognize the agency of the refugee through the ‘I speak therefore I am’ formula. Cassiers uses movement to convey the violence of the text, which he compares to ‘an urge to vomit that can’t be fought back’: ‘the audience loses track of who’s talking between the Europeans and the refugees, because their words get mixed up to the point of schizophrenia, a symbol of our society’ (Cassiers 2017). On stage the voice of the individual is lost. As Cassiers translates Jelinek’s language into movement, his actors begin to evoke authorial speech, while their bodies turn into language surfaces. The performance suggests archaic rituals, in which choréia, ‘a synthesis between poetry, music, and dance [found] at the origins of the western theatre’, is realized (Bomy 2009, 83). Dramaturgically, Grensgeval (Borderline) reflects the migrant’s journey—a kind of triptych, divided into ‘three “stations” of the “passion” of the refugees’, such as ‘the way of the cross’, ‘agony’ and ‘putting the body into the tomb’: In the first part that tells of the crossing aboard boats, there’s little difference between the words of one actor and the next, as they embody in a way the role of the Greek chorus, which comments and watches but distances itself from the situation. […] The second scene is the long march throughout Europe, the stage lights up completely and gives way to a society characterised by too many images and too much information. Getting to Europe is possible, but it’s harder to find the right way once you’re there. There are many possibilities, and at the same time there isn’t any. (Cassiers 2017)

This third part is the most visually impressive, as the dancers create a series of tableaux vivants evocative of Christian iconography and inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It ‘describes the arrival of the refugees in

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a church that serves as both shelter and prison. The scenic construction closes down on itself to create a claustrophobic scenography, and the semi-­ darkness makes it hard to distinguish the dancers from the actors. The individuals have been absorbed into a shifting and shapeless mass’ (Cassiers 2017). The action, however, is devoid of emotion, as it seeks to evoke the out-of-body experience reported by survivors. At the beginning, the narrators do not intersect with the dancers—their faces are projected in black-and-white distortions on the back wall, while the dancers conjure up images of crossing the sea in a boat. ‘The four actors represent the gods at the height of their power, superior both in terms of physical and symbolic location, watching from afar and effortlessly as men struggle’ (Cassiers 2017). Their projected faces are out of focus, exaggerated, and blurred. Detached from their bodies, the voices of the performers suggest numbness in response to the catastrophe. The actors capitalize on sound as vibration to trigger affectual reactions in the audience and to critically comment on our indifference to the injustices of global moves. In the second part, the actors begin to mingle with the dancers, as if the voices and the bodies can find a way to come together. This gesture of actors and dancers coming together suggests the triumphs and the losses of arrival, when the gods fall from their personal pedestals. In the third part, the performers get lost among the dancers. Speaking their lines, they labour their way out of the crippled bodies that clung to them. This image proposes that in today’s drama of migration, everybody—victims, perpetrators, and bystanders—stands implicated. Like Jelinek’s text itself, in which the reader is invited to find their own path of meanings, Grensgeval (Borderline) turns its spectators into seekers. Perhaps, they might feel trapped ‘in a boat with those refugees’ (Cassiers 2017), but in reality, they must be able to recognize their own place as the other in the history of today’s strangers. My next example, The Blind Poet by the Needcompany, continues this experiment of staging stranger. It reminds its spectators that the cultural, religious, and linguistic homogeneity of Europe is a historically constructed myth, which today’s theatre of cosmopolitan sensibilities is called to expose and shake from within. * * *

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Cosmoprolis Within Oneself: The Blind Poet The complex history and symbolic architecture of Córdoba’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption (or the Mosque-Cathedral), built on the foundations of a Roman temple and the Visigoth church of Vincent of Saragossa, serve as the dramaturgical inspiration of The Blind Poet, produced by the Brussels-based Needcompany in 2015. As he encountered the layered architecture of Córdoba’s cathedral, Jan Lauwers, the artistic director of Needcompany, felt compelled to artistically investigate how this Islamic tradition and cultural presence have been manifested in the makeup of European identity and sense of self. A fierce criticism of the narrow-mindedness and xenophobia of today’s Europe, The Blind Poet poses the only question that is worth asking: ‘Can we still meet as humans in these ruins of history?’ (Maby 2015). To respond to its own question, the production casts its performers’ personal stories within the history of the continent: For seven of the actors in the company—Grace Ellen Barkey, Jules Beckman, Anna Sophia Bonnema, Hans Petter Melø Dahl, Benoît Gob, Mohamed Toukabri and Maarten Seghers—Lauwers wrote seven portraits, seven identity cards, each beginning with the same phrase: ‘I am…’. They are affectionate tributes to his actors. He literally hands over the stage to each one in turn, and thus also gives them the audience’s full attention. But just as his parables unfold as social narratives, these individual portraits open a window on the broader context of history. (Jans 2017, 11)

The Blind Poet presents Lauwers’s political quest to critically examine the idea of the singular identity of today’s Europeans, to present it as a juncture of ‘many facets and backgrounds’, and to discover and pay homage to ‘new branches and unexpected connections’ within one’s own history and thus within the group (Jans 2017, 13). For Lauwers, reality and fiction can easily mix and melt; identity is never just a fact of one’s personal history; it is ‘always also a question of longing, construction and fantasy’ (11). The poetry of the blind Syrian poet Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri (973–1057) serves as the philosophical framework of this performance. Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri is a figure of resistance to blind faith, destined to be destroyed by the fanatics, and a true rationalist. One of his missives reads: ‘The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains’ (Malik 2011). Sceptical of fundamentalism’s ability to free people from the fear of death, Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri

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recognizes religion as ‘a product of the human mind, in which men believe through force of habit and education, never stopping to consider whether it is true’ (Nicholson 1969, 317). Marked by the poet’s anxiety about death, his poetry exhibits ‘pessimism and bitterness concerning the relative insignificance of man’s existence’ in the face of eternity (Khouri 1983, 34). First praised and then forbidden in the East, Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri’s work has found favour in Western countries. The Epistle of Forgiveness, in which he writes about ‘visiting paradise and meeting Arab poets of the pagan period, has often been compared to Dante’s Divine Comedy’ (Malik 2011). During the Crusades, however, Ma’arrat al-Nu’man, the poet’s native city, ‘was captured then completely destroyed. The Men of the Cross slaughtered most of its inhabitants and, as history records, after the fall of the town, the starving Crusaders feasted on barbecued human flesh’ (Salloum 2017). In February 2013, hundreds of years later, history repeated itself. The fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian offshoot of al-Qaeda, beheaded the statue of Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri. ‘The stage was set: on one side, a modern ideology reacting against liberalism and harkening back to an imagined Golden Age; on the other, a medieval thinker looking forward towards a liberal modernity’ (Kamel 2015). Recognizing the complexity of these historical crossings, Lauwers argues that our ignorance of ourselves, of our own culture and beliefs, and our indifference to the other greatly contribute to the rise of xenophobia and far right movements in Europe. Nourished by fear and populism, this intolerance can only further disturb the already uncertain future that awaits us today. In The Blind Poet, he asks: ‘Why does history always lie and deceive us?’ (Lauwers 2015, 8). To set the story straight, Lauwers uses theatre—the art of buffoonery and political counsel (8). Here he offers a view of Europe similar to Benedict Anderson’s imagined political community, grounded not in history but in collective myths that people share and personal biographies they possess (Anderson 1991, 6). In times of global migration, Anderson’s view of the sovereign nation must be taken in conjunction with Edward Said’s concept of imagined geography (1979), which is both a made-up social and cultural space and the product of the patronizing gaze directed towards the colonial or migratory subject. The Blind Poet presents an image of the post-national state characterized not by a unified ideology and economic practice, but by a variety of collective imaginaries: migratory, exilic, diasporic, and transnational. It demonstrates that the strength of the group is rooted in the diversity of its members;

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thus in Lauwers’s production, Anderson’s imagined community turns into the socio-ethnic space of a cosmoprolis. By positioning The Blind Poet between performance arts and theatre, Lauwers focuses on the question of what theatre can really do in its endless confrontation with mass culture and TV aesthetics. He favours frontality and multimedia and rejects psychological realism. Marked by the dictum ‘“real time/real action”, in which all fictionality [is] thrown overboard’ (Lehmann 2006, 55), The Blind Poet creates a peculiar bond between actor and character, described by Lehmann as detachment (54). The performers do not ‘disappear into the phantom of a character but rather display themselves’ (60). They emphasize the fragility and vulnerability of the actor’s body, which can be damaged in the real time/space of theatre action; and they use post-epic narration to present the action in the form of a ‘narrated, reported, [and] casually communicated’ account of the events (108). Using this technique, which foregrounds the personal nature of the narrative and demonstrates the self-referential connection between the narrative and the narrator (110), Lauwers wishes to make his audiences politically aware and enable them to turn their gazes from the narratives of the stage to their own family histories, biases, and beliefs. More specifically, The Blind Poet stages his concern about the theatre artist who has lost their symbolic place in the centre of society and must once again take on political responsibility. To address the questions of European migration and diversity in historical and performative terms, The Blind Poet uses the aesthetics of a contemporary chorus play and theatrical multilingualism. Although Lauwers wrote The Blind Poet in Dutch, the text was translated into French and English to foreground the company’s collective identity. While rehearsing their monologues, the performers work in the languages of their preference, each actor being a multilingual speaker themselves, whether a first-generation immigrant like the Tunisian dancer Mohamed Toukabri or a Belgian native like Maarten Seghers. To ensure the dialogue between the actors and with the audience is unimpeded, the company adds the language of the host country, in which they are on tour, and more English when performing at international theatre festivals (Janssens 2018). This type of multilingualism is pragmatic and anti-essentialist: it imagines the spectators of The Blind Poet as similar but also different, each ready to account for our multiple backgrounds. The Blind Poet begins provocatively, with seven actors reminiscent of a rock band—a drummer, a guitarist, a bass player, and a singer—crossing

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into the auditorium to take their seats in front of the audience. Dressed in a colourful outfit that resembles a cross between a clown’s costume and the dress of an Indonesian princess, Grace Ellen Barkey delivers her opening monologue as a ‘multicultural wonder’, an emblem of the new Europe and a symbol of its suggested ‘multiculturality’ (Jans 2017, 12): I am Grace Ellen Barkey. I was born in Surabaya, on the island of Java in Indonesia, where all women are princesses. […] Part of my family is Muslim. […] My grandmother was a Hakka Chinese. So I am a Hakka Chinese too. […] One of my forefathers was Caspar Barkey, the mayor of Bremen. More than 800 years ago. So I’m German too. (Lauwers 2015, 1, 4)

This account of Barkey’s personal history grows more complex as she adds the story of the family and the company she built together with Jan Lauwers (2015, 5). As this account comes closer to our time, global history collapses into the local one. ‘Here you can see me on the boat from Surabaya to Rotterdam. I was two at the time. This photo was taken when we were sailing up the Red Sea. This was the first photo my father took of our escape. Before that we had kept ourselves hidden. So I was a boat refugee’ (5). The sense of vertigo, for which the style of critical cosmopolitanism is so famous, here takes visible precedence. As Barkey delivers her monologue, the stage remains empty and brightly lit. Occasionally she steps on a piece of embroidery lying on the floor. Later we will recognize it as one of Bruegel’s paintings: ‘Bruegel did this etching in 1559. This is the square in Hoboken. Jan […] was baptized in this church. […]. A cherry tree now stands on the spot where Bruegel stood to do the drawing. Jan’s mother liked telling the story of how little Jan, in his nappy, sat down and looked at the cherry tree in bloom and spoke his first words’. (5) In this closing image of Barkey’s monologue, the European past and present come together, as it offers the space of the encounter between two Dutch artists—the painter Bruegel and the director Lauwers, the younger standing in infinite debt to the older. One by one the performers are called upon to present their stories. The chain of terrifying events that marks their individual stories turns into a horrendous image of the collective history of the Europe they are portraying. These monologues increase the feeling of dizziness. First, it is Maarten Seghers’s turn. His monologue connects his family to Jan Lauwers’s. In the research he conducts for The Blind Poet, he traces his family’s ancestry to the Christian crusaders. The Seghers clan ‘belong[s] to the secret and

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very closed caste of smiths’ (Lauwers 2015, 6). Later his and Barkey’s family trees ‘end up among the cannibals of Ma’arrat al-­Nu’man, the town of Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri, the blind poet’ (7). To this dismal historical image that locates seemingly unrelated Europeans in a tight network of familial interrelations, Benoît Gob, another member of the company, adds: ‘If we want to tell the broader story we have to take the consequences. The historical images are almost always about destruction’ (7); they implicate today’s Europeans in this destruction both as victims and as perpetrators. Gob’s statement evokes the idea of pragmatic cosmopolitanism (Rumford 2013), which imagines every member of society connected to the group through their ancestry and personal actions. Hans Petter Melø Dahl, whose Viking ancestors were cannibals, echoes this observation. In his speech, he constructs a vivid picture of European history based on conquests and defeats, connected to each other through time and geography: This is a photo of Melø, which is where my family was born. The Vikings stem from the Trojans. My family tree goes back the furthest. They left Troy in 1200 BC. Homer, the blind poet, described the empty city. These Trojans would become the first Europeans. Vikings. 2000 years later the Vikings went in search of their roots. […] In 1100 BC, 6000 Vikings in 60 ships left on a crusade, but only 100 of them returned. And one of them was my ancestor. His name was Nils Åbol and he became a farmer. […] Nowadays there’s a camping site at Melø. They’re sleeping in tents there again. History doesn’t change anything. I’m a Viking. The water and the sea. The thousands of fjords and the stories of my ancestors. Strong and never afraid. (Lauwers 2015, 8)

This unforgiving history, however, does not need to go as far back as the Vikings. For Jules Beckman, it begins among the Jews killed by the Nazis in Minsk in 1941. To Beckman, the world consists either of ‘refugees or cannibals’: ‘those who escape into their own world and those who escape into someone else’s world’ (Lauwers 2015, 17–18). Accordingly, in The Blind Poet, the performers’ autobiographical presence, both as the subjects of their narrations and as the narrators themselves, creates a sense of collectivity and a public forum. A collection of monologues, The Blind Poet turns into a chorus play. As we plough through these narrations, the play begins to resemble the Athenian city state, in which male citizens could vote on legislation. This democracy, however, does not allow

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women, slaves, or foreigners to be a part of the city state. The Blind Poet responds to this injustice in the speech delivered by Anna Sophia Bonnema: I am Anna Sophia Bonnema. I am all women. I am the loving mother without a child. I am Lucrezia but I will not commit suicide, I am the amazon Penthesilea who loves Achilles, I am Sappho, the tenth muse, I am Madame Curie, seeing her arm wither. I am Corday, who cries that she has saved a hundred thousand people. I am Zarçamodonia, who cuts off the head of a man who wants to take off her headscarf. […] I am Wallada of Cordoba who burns mighty words in her arms: I offer my lover my cheek and my lips I give to whom I wish. (Lauwers 2015, 13)

Through this monologue, Lauwers arrives at the work’s central statement: everyone on stage and in the audience ‘is connected to everything else. The same wind often brushes unnoticed across everyone’s skin. The same sunlight pierces everyone’s eyes. […] That’s why I am everyone and the world is me’ (Lauwers 2015, 12–13). The issue that The Blind Poet seeks to challenge is therefore what Amin Maalouf has termed the murderous or mortal identity of the stranger, of the individual who is radically different to ‘I’. For Maalouf, the notion of identity cannot be reduced to a single affiliation, because it is always ‘made up of many components in a mixture that is unique to me’ (Maalouf 2000, 2). The idea of a homogeneous identity is erroneous and risky, since it ‘encourages people to adopt an attitude that is partial, sectarian, intolerant, domineering, sometimes suicidal, and frequently even changes them into killers or supporters of killers’ (30). People who defend this murderous identity recognize themselves as a community that is only ‘concerned about what happens to them’ (30). Thus, as The Blind Poet sets out to demonstrate, even those who think of themselves as ‘pure blood’ are marked by the complex history of their own ancestry. They cannot escape their own history of multiplicities either; the heterogeneity of European past and present makes up this so-called European homogenous self. Curiously, it is Mohamed Toukabri, a dancer from Tunisia who recently landed in Belgium, who insists: Hey Grace, you may be a multicultural wonder, but I am the purest monoculture. I am Mohamed the monocultural wonder. Pure sang in my veins. In the Muslim veins of Mohamed Toukabri. Feel it. Perfect monocultural Muslim skin, perfect monocultural Muslim body. (Lauwers 2015, 3)

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This declaration contains an ironic meaning. In his monologue, Mohamed reveals that he could not find his own family tree. But back in his home country, his father, who sends him a tailor-made suit every year, keeps the portrait of Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri hanging above his working table. This portrait symbolizes freedom; it takes us to the eleventh century only to quickly move on to the twenty-first. ‘In 2013’—Toukabri declares—‘they chopped off [the blind poet’s] head in Syria. The world is afraid of freedom. When I came to the north my task was to rediscover freedom. That requires the deepest concentration. It causes confusion, ecstasy, disappointment and sometimes hilarious moments’ (Lauwers 2015, 22). The path to individual freedom also requires learning new things and sharing one’s knowledge: ‘I know Wallada bint al-Mustakfi and Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri, but I had never seen a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I had never read a sonnet by William Shakespeare’, Toukabri admits (22). ‘Our blind poets are not your blind poets. […] History is a lie that fills us with shame’ (22). But we are responsible for the past and the present collapsing into each other: ‘I am the blind poet Homer who invented Troy’, Toukabri says; ‘I am the blind poet James Joyce who stumbled over his luggage in search of his insane daughter, [and] I am the blind poet Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri’ (22). Toukabri finishes his monologue by reciting Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri’s poems in Arabic and moving with their rhymes and rhythms in the whirling dance of a Tunisian freedom seeker. By mixing words and movement, The Blind Poet contests the aspirations of today’s neo-nationalists, who dream of a singular, pure identity. It boldly criticizes the dangerous naiveté of such desires, for in their search for the true home culture they tend to forget that it is ‘fundamentally “unheimlichs”’, a culture that ‘cannot be domesticated’ (Jans 2017, 12). The Blind Poet creates an image of the new Europe as an amalgamation of polyphonic identities. It asserts that, when individuals move chaotically, bouncing off each other, the group becomes more dynamic. This movement creates a culture that ‘is never a place where we can feel completely at home, a “domus” in which we live as members of the same family, the same tribe, the same blood’ (12). Barkey’s closing monologue reinforces the production’s deep irony regarding the righteousness of single identity, history, and its victors. On stage there is a life-sized replica of a horse. As Barkey mounts it, she puts a crown on her head and begins waving at the audience in a gesture typical of royalty. The irony of the image is literal and figurative. On one hand, it

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suggests ‘the archetype of the mother goddess or holy whore’ (Jans 2017, 16): [This mother goddess] is the icon of an unconditional hospitality who enjoins us to give our house and ourselves to the stranger, without asking his name, without any compensation, unconditionally. It is the attitude of an absolute ‘yes’, an absolute openness to anyone or anything that presents itself, prior to any determination, anticipation or identification, regardless of whether it is a matter of a stranger, an immigrant, a guest, or an unexpected visitor, regardless of whether it is a man or a woman, even regardless of whether it is a human, animal or divine being, and ultimately regardless of whether it is a life or a dead thing. […] It is this vigorous, hospitable ‘yes’ that flutters down over countless bodies and thus connects everything to everything else and makes the world one single indivisible world. (Jans 2017, 16)

On the other hand, the image makes fun of the famous painting The Abduction of Europa by Rembrandt: Barkey’s Europe is neither pure, nor innocent, nor young. In its mocking attitude, The Blind Poet disguises the divine bull as a fake dead horse and uses it as a warning. It asks the following questions: what kind of united collective does this disjointed bunch of individualities represent? And what sort of united Europe does this show envision? Lauwers, however, never seeks to provide a simple answer or provide a cathartic end in the form of a moral judgement: he expects something to happen to the spectators themselves, something that will force them make their own judgement, vision, and interpretation. He boldly asks, ‘how much foreignness can we cope with?’ and ‘how foreign are we to ourselves?’ (Jans 2017, 13). The reply he seems to offer is: ‘The true foreigner is inside us’. The real question then becomes: ‘[H]ow could we drive it out without destroying ourselves?’ (13). In my next example, I study how this idea of ‘the foreigner inside us’ is manifested in a movement-based chorus play, in which the performer’s body serves as a vehicle and a signifier of multiplicity. In Babel (Words), the cosmoprolis is enacted architecturally as a cosmopolitan mosaic. It emerges within the choreography of diverse bodies in space, which come together to create a singular, multi-layered collective identity of divided subjects. * * *

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Dancing Cosmoprolis: Staging the Divided Self In 2010, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a Flemish-Moroccan choreographer and artistic director of the Eastman company, and his close collaborator, Damien Jalet, a Belgo-French artist, brought  together thirteen dancers and five musicians of mixed heritage from thirteen countries across five continents to explore through movement, music, and space questions of identity, religion, and nation building. Inspired by the biblical tale of God dividing the languages and peoples of the world, they created a dance piece Babel (Words), which became their metaphor for the cosmoprolis, a place of possibilities and precarity. Babel (Words) enacted ‘a nameless intersection in a faceless city near the borders that define a no man’s land’ and reminded its spectators that ‘to some the tale of Babel represents the gates to enlightenment, to others—chaos, confusion and conflict’ (Cope 2010, 3). It also revealed Cherkaoui and Jalet as deeply troubled by today’s world. Babel 7.16—a second version of Babel (Words)—played at the 2016 Avignon Theatre Festival. Citing the language of computer programming and archaic numerology, Babel 7.16 further re-positioned the tale of language, territory, and God’s will in the new European context of the 2015 migration crisis. As a response to the terrorist attacks of November 2015 in Paris, of which Jalet was a survivor, it spoke of human vulnerability in the age of terror. It referenced the history of its performing venue, the Palais des Papes, as ‘the atrium and ventricle of Christianity’ and as the sanctuary of Pope Clement V (Nair 2016). Babel 7.16 featured all the dancers who made the original piece and some new ones; it used the same stage designs of Antony Gormley and Karthika Nair’s original script augmented with new texts. In this chapter, I refer to Babel (Words) only, because despite the time difference between these two productions, they share the same aesthetic, ethical, and political preoccupations. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, born to a Flemish mother and Moroccan father, is a child of mixed cultural and religious heritage. He could never see himself as a product of one culture, so his personal philosophy has always revolved around notions of completeness, circularity, and reconciliation. In his choreography, Cherkaoui has often explored the ethics of dialogue and exchange, as well as ‘the issues of identity, cross-religious spirituality and diversity raising political debates on questions of empathy and transnational politics’ (Sorgel 2015, 169). Accordingly, Cherkaoui’s work is frequently based on ‘copying and transforming one body into another’ and ‘being able to embody another person’s point of view’ (Cherkaoui in

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Uytterhoeven 2014, 251). This search for continuity and wholeness suggests a view of the self being deeply divided: nothing—no body, no gesture, or word—appears on Cherkaoui’s stage in its singularity. To Cherkaoui ‘each of us has the ability to perform many different functions. […] By recognizing this multiplicity in oneself, you realise that “the Other” (being the other performer, the new culture you discover, or the audience even) is often buried somewhere inside you too’ (in Uytterhoeven 2009, 10). Thus, in his theatre, there is always a double, a repetition, a re-enactment, a difference. The same longing for wholeness characterizes Cherkaoui’s yearning for different cultures; it marks his rehearsal process and artistic vision: ‘The function of my art is to introduce people to cultural elements they don’t know, are not interested in, and against which they may be prejudiced’ (Cherkaoui in Uytterhoeven 2014, 256). Thus, Cherkaoui seeks collaborators, who possess artistic techniques different from his but are willing to use their collaborative work as a dialogue and vehicle for their political agendas and artistic discourses. Through his work, Cherkaoui condemns the politics of a nation state that ‘deliberately keeps people trapped and doesn’t allow them to think in broader terms than are offered to them’ (250). On Cherkaoui’s stage, the aesthetic and the political merge. Babel (Words) exemplifies this tendency. At its core there are questions of global migration, interconnectivity, and reconciliation. The making of Babel (Words) begins with the premise that language can be used as a weapon. In colonial practices, it serves as a tool of oppression; as a commodity, it can be easily manipulated; and as a mechanism of international communication, it is constantly being tampered with. ‘Languages have this martial, violent side’, Cherkaoui and Jalet explain. ‘Language imprints itself on a territory and generates a visceral energy; it imposes itself, which sometimes leads to hybridity. That’s the roots of Europe’ (Cherkaoui and Jalet in Dalant 2016). Babel (Words) summons different languages and different bodies on stage in order to reveal the dark truth of the original myth from which the production stems: ‘it is said that God didn’t want to share His territory with men, whereas all men wanted was to go where God was’ (in Dalant 2016). Every performer ‘has a double identity, and a dual culture’, the choreographers write. In Babel (Words), ‘we each become ambassadors for our cultures. The show plays on the beauty of contrasts, on a variety of colours, accents, and nuances’, with each member of the ensemble called to exhibit a ‘strong personalit[y]’ and ‘to use their identities and their own (spoken and choreographic)

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language […] to assert oneself in opposition to others’ (in Dalant 2016). Thus, Babel (Words) foregrounds and insists on the materiality of each performer’s stage presence, so that their work begins to approximate a non-matrixed representation (Kirby 1972, 5). As each dancer brings on stage their story and their difference imprinted onto their body, the materiality of this experience becomes the major dramatic force of the production. Some performers become the core signifiers of this difference. They emerge as the cosmoprolis’s archetypes: Darryl E.  Woods appears as a ‘posh real estate agent’, who ‘promotes the qualities of contemporary urban architecture’ (Cools 2015, 100); Christine Leboutte performs ‘the migrant cleaner’ (100), and Ulrika Kinn Svensson plays a ‘human avatar produced by IKEA and operated and manipulated by the Japanese performers Kazutomi Kozuki and Shogo Yoshii, who talk to each other in their mother tongue’ (101). These bodies create an image of an urban environment populated by strangers. Thus, the dancers’ autobiographical idiosyncrasies—including their looks and the languages they speak— become primary devices in the staging of this theatrical city life. ‘It is true that Babel asks the fundamental question of who we are in a world in which technology is constantly transforming our relationship to identity, or empathies and connections’, Cherkaoui and Jalet offer. ‘Yet our need to belong is archaic, almost tribal. So how can we think about the notion of identity nowadays: is it something immutable, does it require structure and limitations? Or is it something that is constantly changing and transforming?’ (Cherkaoui and Jalet in Dalant 2016). To address these questions, Babel (Words) uses Cherkaoui’s choreographic signature devices, including repetition with difference, creating uncanny doubles, and open dramaturgy that ‘guarantees that the memories of the dancer [will] trigger the memories of the spectator without them having to be identical or coincide’ (Cools 2014, 187). The play offers its spectators a chance to look into their own selves through the mirror of the performative avatars. Organized as a series of dramatic vignettes in movement, Babel (Words) opens with a symptomatic monologue and a follow-up chorus scene about language and territory: [Svensson] recites an excerpt of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love: Novel (2006), evoking a time before verbal language in which people communicated with gestures instead of words and in which they accepted the potential for misunderstandings. […] Svensson is framed by a square of light and as she continues to speak, accompanying her words with a made-up sign

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language, the rest of the multi-ethnic cast forms a line behind her, squatting on the floor. […] As she steps aside, the first gesture they all make, one after the other, is to mark their territory with their hands while calling out ‘land’ in their different mother tongues. (Cools 2015, 99)

This tension between language, movement, and territory is the focal point of this performance’s dramatic narration. It highlights the complexity of group behaviour and suggests the choreographers’ concern about our personal responsibility for the space we occupy in today’s world of transnational encounters. Seeking this responsibility, Babel (Words) widely comments on Freud’s theory of group psychology, in which individuals are organized together ‘at some particular time for some definite purpose’ (Freud 1949, 3). As a social phenomenon, Babel (Words) demonstrates that the group can exhibit its own mind and can be as ‘intolerant as it is obedient to authority’ (17). At the same time, it can ‘respec[t] force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness […]. What it demands of its heroes is strength or even violence’ (17). Thus, groups can be dangerous: ‘they demand illusions’ (19). Babel (Words) invites its audiences to reflect on the dangers of group psychology, specifically those moments of collective being when our desire for ‘extreme solidarity struggles with [our] fear of sharing’ (Dalant 2016). This political urgency characterizes all Cherkaoui’s work, including the sequence Foi (2003) and Myth (2007), of which Babel (Words) was the final work, or Apocrifu (2007) and Sutra (2008), in which Cherkaoui journeyed from Christianity, through Islam, to Buddhism. However, if ‘the previous works were about people being controlled by their personal impulses or by demons, or by their ancestors’ ghosts’, in Babel (Words), people ‘finally break free and take responsibility for who they are’ (Cherkaoui in Morton 2013). Babel (Words) links its conflict back to questions of leadership, territory, and identification. It reminds its audiences that the group can be ‘an obedient herd, which could never live without a master’ (Freud 1949, 21). Hatred of the other, an alien stranger, can serve as its uniting force (55). In Babel (Words), bodies moving and intersecting with each other form this constantly evolving group. Performers emerge as subjects of an imaginary city setting, which they continuously construct and dismantle. Antony Gormley’s set design, which consists of an empty space and five metal frames manipulated by the performers, brings this image to life:

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[The frames are] raised, knocked down and transformed, as if made of nothing but our thoughts. Space is dissected and appropriated, creating territories, axes and borders that hint at the often random but sometimes deadly geo-political divisions of land, as well as evoking the boundaries and limitations we impose on ourselves and each other. But, of course, by also offering shelter and relief in a landscape of chaos and complexity, structures enable tender, private and intimate moments, without which none of us could survive. (Cope 2010, 3)

The frames signify fictional locales, as well as political, economic, legal, and cultural borders that impede global movements: ‘The five volumes identical to the multiple surfaces created by Anthony Gormley are […] complex, shifting symbols, and notably stand in for the five continents. There’s a magical link, an invisible relationship, between man and those five volumes on the stage’ (Cherkaoui and Jalet in Dalant 2016). Gormley, like Cherkaoui and Jalet, is interested in the human body in space. In Babel (Words), the five structures emerge as an extension of the dancing bodies moving through space. For Gormley, the frames are neither static nor simple; they are actors in the emerging drama of migration. ‘The idea was to play with the illusion of divided space’, Cherkaoui notes. ‘The big cubes or frames, they cut the space in different ways to give you the feeling that you see rooms. There’s a very tall one, a thin one, a large low one, but what’s interesting is that they all have the same volume’ (Cherkaoui in Morton 2013). In performance, therefore, with each new move and re-­ configuration, the frames craft an alternative space and image of a cosmoprolis that constantly exhilarates and becomes more and more hostile to its dwellers. Explaining how he conceptualized this multi-layered space, Gormley states: ‘we live behind our skins, but then we cover our skins with clothes, and we further protect ourselves in rooms, which become buildings, which become towns and cities. [Babel] was a meditation on this idea, and on the way in which individuals and groups cohere in something that we call the urban grid’ (Gormley in Cools 2016, 282). This urban grid envisions a vertical connection between the body of the dancer and the space, suggesting a view of architecture as our ‘second body’, which can make one feel secure. In Babel (Words), however, Gormley wishes to ‘make [one] feel exactly the opposite’ (284), to remind us that architecture grants space new power. At the same time, ‘the city is a particular kind of constructed space and its construction is inextricably bound up with

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constructions of subjectivity’ (Briginshaw 2001, 43). Manipulating frames, the dancers acknowledge these ‘fluid borders between themselves and the city’ (43). They help to translate Gormley’s set design into a visual metaphor of differences. As the show unfolds, the performers form duets and trios; they appear in groups and as a chorus scene: Eventually everybody ends up in a small square in the middle of a larger configuration. The shared living space, a metaphor for our contemporary urban experience, is clearly too narrow and overcrowded. So people drop out again, one by one emptying the space until the three main ‘characters’— Leboutte, Svensson and Woods—are left behind. (Cools 2015, 100)

Oddly for a visual artist used to work with inanimate matter, Gormley is fascinated with the process of ‘burning physical energy’ in space (Edelstein 2011). In sculpture, he suggests, the body is understood as ‘the relationship of bone to muscle to skin’, that is, whereas dance ‘gets to the fundamentals of life’ (Edelstein 2011). Babel (Words) functions as an initiation into this experience. Woods’s lecture about space and geometry, in which he imagines contemporary architecture as a perfect marriage between the verticality of the Western worldview and the Eastern understanding of it as an intersection of horizontal lines, is a philosophical verbalization of the images created in Babel (Words). Time is another metaphor Woods uses to speak of architecture, as it compresses the past-present-future continuum into a single geometrical shape or a transferable structure. These shapes define today’s urban living and so give form to our future. This architecture is also a sign of cosmopolitan impersonality in which people can be lost and forgotten. The monologue transitions into a lamentation sung by Leboutte dressed in ‘a shaggy and old-fashioned outfit’, ‘cleaning the aluminium frames in the background’ (Cools 2015, 100). This verbal and visual juxtaposition of the ‘cleanness’ of the frame and the ‘uncleanness’ of the human body evokes an image of De Certeau’s marketplace (1984) as a space for virtual and global communications. Typically cosmopolitan, it is ‘fractured and fragmented, it is falling apart and full of contradictions. It is utopian and dystopian, attracting and alienating. It is constructed as a labyrinth, free-flowing and uncontrollable, but also containing and trapping’ (Briginshaw 2001, 50). The effects such space produces are challenging: people often feel estranged, ‘isolated, excluded and constrained’ (50). In order to survive in this hostile environment, people must seek human connection, since it is possible that underneath the skin that

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separates us, there are species and individuals similar to each other. In the second monologue that Woods delivers, he explains the importance of mirror neurons for ‘learn[ing] through imitation’ and for ‘develop[ing] empathy for others. The text of this monologue is a literal rendering not only of the words but also of the gestures of a TED talk by Vilayanur Ramachandran’ (Cools 2015, 100), who has pioneered research in neuroscience and psychology on the interconnectivity between the language of gestures and the language of words. Used as a philosophical kernel for this work, this monologue echoes Cherkaoui’s personal beliefs: ‘I belong to the generation that preferred to look at everything holistically and return to the origin of these art forms, when they were more blended’ (Cherkaoui in Uytterhoeven 2014, 253). Translating this philosophical debate into the language of theatre, the artists seek to make all performance elements equal: they give music a special dramaturgical function as it emerges through dancing and thus immerses the audience in the rhythms of performance. The project brings together ‘two musicians who play medieval music from Italy, Spain, and France, two musicians from Rajasthan, whose music features unique melodic nuances, and two Japanese percussionists who play traditional music. Musically speaking, it recreates the Silk Road, which was a powerful cultural and symbolic axis, from Europe to Asia’ (Cherkaoui and Jalet in Dalant 2016). Music turns words into movements, movements into singing, and singing back into words. Cherkaoui calls this technique a somatic experience, as it can elevate both the performer and their spectators beyond themselves. In Babel (Words), rhythm serves as a dramaturgical tool of reconciliation. It implicates viewers and viewed equally in generating the meaning of this performance, and it mimics the working of a cosmoprolis. This movement-based chorus play calls our attention to the materiality of the performer’s body, which is simultaneously erased and over-emphasized. It features performers from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, who can serve as foils and doubles to one other. They evoke images of different minorities—the excluded and the marginalized. Babel (Words), by staging the dynamic of a group composed of strangers, presents its members as ‘the most profound stranger[s] of the self’ (Lehmann 2006, 163). It uses dance to ignite an affectual reaction in the public which can in turn stimulate our imagination and awake the sense of self as other. In the case study that concludes this chapter, I discuss the work of reality theatre (Boenisch 2008, 108) as pioneered by the company Rimini Protokoll, which brings non-professional performers on stage. Reality

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theatre foregrounds authenticity of the everyday experience. It stages the semiotic presence of its performers/participants as a zero sign and thus approximates their bodies to ethnographic artefacts placed in the setting of a museum space in order to testify to the bygone truth of their own history. * * *

Staging the Cosmoprolis of the Everyday: Dramaturging 100% City 100% City: A Statistical Chain Reaction has been conceptualized by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel and launched in 2008 in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre. Since then, Rimini Protokoll has authorized thirty-five versions of this work worldwide and created an online archive of video recordings available for viewing. The project capitalizes on the methodologies of audience dramaturgy (Schipper 2018): one hundred city dwellers are invited to stage a theatrical survey of the rapidly changing racial, linguistic, and social makeup of the globalized metropolis. In every new invariant of the franchise, the aim is to provide spectators with a fresh picture of their own city. As its collective protagonist, 100% City casts experts of the everyday, who appear on stage as ‘foreign or insufficiently known [subjects]’ (Mumford 2013, 154). Migrants, immigrant workers, asylum seekers, and other ‘members of forcibly re-settled communities’ (154) comprise these foreign subjects, who are at the centre of the many intercultural encounters generated by the company. At the same time, ‘the desire to work with these subjects in turn contributes to the company’s own status as a privileged form of global nomad, one that moves within and across national borders in search of thinking bodies, stories, images and performance places’ (154). By presenting a set of diverse bodies on stage, 100% City mirrors the bio-political, social, and economic landscape that constitutes today’s cosmoprolis. 100% City, in line with Rimini Protokoll’s quest for social justice, is positioned at the intersection of performance, documentary, and participatory theatre. It problematizes the notion of the representational and investigates the nature of the real on stage. This approach foregrounds theatrical truth as something ambiguous, located between the project’s

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dramaturgy (according to Rimini Protokoll, theatrical ‘reality has to be scripted’ [Malzacher 2010, 83]) and the experts’ onstage presence, which is intended to make it obvious that the events they narrate ‘have actually already taken place’ (Roselt 2008, 46). This interdisciplinary performative aesthetics defines the forms of acting explored in 100% City. The actions and statements of the participants are never spontaneous: their presence is carefully structured and ‘mediated by the theatrical frame’. Consequently, the focal point of this theatre’s work is the gap ‘between the person in “normal life” and the person on stage, between the self and the self-­ performing him/or/herself’ (Le Roy 2012, 155). In each new city where the franchise creates a performance, the company seeks to explore the notion of foreignness, thereby giving the local audience a chance to acquire a new perspective on their city as seen by outsiders. In its pre-set dramatic structure, the project uses a sort of architectural blueprint of the future cast and dramatic action to be recreated in every new location, so that the company often relies upon predetermined questions and selection filters. This approach compromises Rimini Protokoll’s pledge to respect the authenticity and truth of the encounter in the reality of the cosmoprolis. It makes the work of the company and the project ethically problematic. To defend 100% City against allegations regarding the hegemony of European theatre or accusations of cultural tourism performed by an educated elite, Rimini Protokoll speaks of the ethics of distance from, and proximity of collaboration with, their subjects. This approach allows the artists to escape the downsides of cultural voyeurism (Bowen et  al. 2015, 310–312). Among the questions this project raises are: how do the spectators receive the information created in the space of a performance? And ‘where does it strike a chord, where does it set something off?’ (Haug in Boenisch 2008, 112). The process of constructing a performance begins with the company seeking partnerships with local theatre artists, city governance, and social organizations. To study the city’s population, the artists consult an expert in  local statistics and seek personal encounters with its inhabitants. The statistics expert always serves as the first bead in the casting chain and leader of the city chorus. They invite the second participant to join the parade of one hundred people, the rest of the casting unfolding as a domino or chain reaction. Each new member receives a time frame of twenty-­ four hours ‘to find the next person’ in the chain; this exercise gives them an opportunity to ‘scan their social network’ (Bowen et al. 305). To invite the next person in line, one needs to follow five selection criteria devised

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by the company: these include age, gender, the place where the next person lives, their original place of birth, and family composition. Additional filters apply when it comes to manufacturing the visual appearance of this chorus play, for it must reflect the sociological, cultural, gender, age, racial, and linguistic specificity of each city. When the chain is determined, the company conducts a parade, while the project managers develop a script for the one hundred people on stage. A small number of rehearsals are dedicated to the discussion and negotiation of the original material, since each variant of the performance aims to highlight the discrepancy between the impersonality of statistics and the specific stories shared by the ‘experts’. These stories are intended to stand out from and at the same time resonate with the makeup of the onstage chorus. They become the statistics of the show itself, a representative but highly symbolic number. Plot-wise the project is reminiscent of a ‘ritual game’ (Fordyce 2008, 172). It begins with a parade led by a representative of the city governance or the office of statistics, who provides the official census data on their city. After this opening speech, the ‘experts’ introduce themselves, forming a chain of diverse bodies. In the next set of collective actions that stand for a twenty-four-hour cycle in the life of the city, the ‘experts’ ‘walk, run, type, dance, sleep, talk, ride the subway’ (175) and respond to yes/no and multiple choice questions. They ‘tell a story about themselves or re-enact an event from their lives with the help of other everyday colleagues’ (174). On stage, there is a large green circle or ‘living pie-chart’ (175) used by participants to move in and out of the action space. This image, which is a symbolic representation of the globe, is reflected in a mirror that hangs over the stage, thus providing a bird’s-eye view of the action. The juxtaposition of the action on stage with that projected in the mirror creates a 3D reality effect that also suggests the aesthetics of the real. It serves as the production’s ‘analytic design’ or ‘analytic drama’: ‘abstract numbers are fleshed out in three-dimensional bodies, while at the same time these bodies are being condensed and dehumanized again into a two-dimensional statistical graphic. Individual memories and morals are immediately quantified. Percentages suddenly sprout limbs and talk’ (Pendle 2011). In this way Rimini Protokoll channels our experience of living in a multicultural city into an easily identifiable stage image. 100% City seeks to stage the documentary historiography of statistics, which, whether in numbers or embodied, have a tendency to break the sense of uniqueness; any subject can turn into its own object and an empty sign. Theatrically, 100% City does not really reach the level of metaphor, but it does imagine its

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spectators looking at the ‘experts’ and by extension at each other beyond the impersonality of the numbers, insisting on diversity as the norm of the cosmoprolis. The relationship between statistics and reality changes from one city to the next. This highlights the ‘failures in protocol’ that inform the project’s dramaturgy. Failures can be positive or negative, but they always ‘illuminate the human experience on stage in a way that theatrical convention might not’ (Carlson 2011). Searching for a dramatic conflict that would go beyond ‘a statistical cross-section of the city’ (Fordyce 2008, 170), the project relies on the concrete realities that make up each city setting. For example, when it stages 100% Melbourne, the goal is to give ‘a voice to different communities or aspects of [the] city without having to strictly adhere to representative statistics’ (Bowen et  al. 2015, 305), whereas 100% Montreal foregrounds the historical conflict between the Francophone and Anglophone populations of Quebec, further underlined by the strong presence of immigrant and Indigenous people. In its thirty-­ five variants, the project reveals that it is the multiplicity of identities that defines today’s global city, in which people, regardless of their origins, gather to seek collegiality, community, and support, a feature that turns the global city into a cosmoprolis. At the same time, Rimini Protokoll is aware that ‘when exploring topics such as globalization, one can quickly create victims’ (Haug in Boenisch 2008, 111). Thus, instead of making theatre about globalization, they use the means of globalization to do the work. In 100% City, the artists invite the participants to ‘speak about themselves’ and so turn the conversation ‘back to the individual’ (Mumford 2013, 111). Conversation, questioning, and listening are the dramaturgical strategies the company employs, whereas encounter is their way to explore difference. The project focuses on the question of how strange encounters can re-configure the social body of a group, thereby building on Sara Ahmed’s reading of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, which ‘emphasizes the physicality of emotions that threaten to pulverize the subject and cross the boundary line’ (Ahmed 2000, 51). It demonstrates how encounter with strangers can ‘establis[h] and undermin[e] the border between outside and inside’ (51). In the history of cultural abjection, strange bodies appear as over-­ represented but incomplete objects (Ahmed 2000, 53). In the manner of colonial body politics, in which a clear demarcation between white and non-white bodies is established, strange bodies ‘threaten to traverse the border […] of the white subject’ (52). ‘The threat of contamination posed

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by strange bodies is precisely that those bodies already exceed the place in which they come to be encountered as such’ (53). The cosmopolitan encounters created by Rimini Protokoll challenge these colonial practices. 100% City employs proximity and distance as its methods of working with strangers and representing them on stage. Proximity ‘strives to achieve a democratic and mutually empowering social exchange’; it implies a distance that can allow ‘ethical encounter’ (Mumford 2013, 165). This device of ethical encounter is adopted by Rimini Protokoll to research different cultural and linguistic environments. These encounters force interlocutors to step outside their comfort zones. They make participants acknowledge their differentiated bodies and histories. Multilingualism and self-translation function as tools of communication between these diverse bodies, at the same time creating new distances. Rimini Protokoll’s practices of ethical encounter oblige the company to admit the limitations of knowledge that any research into the unfamiliar can produce: ‘The work really starts from detachment, from an interest in strangers […]. During the production comes a moment of complicity, which is very important. This complicity is possible because you can clearly tell people that the reason they are here is their otherness’ (Haug in Mumford 2013, 155). Through recognizing and respecting the strangeness of the unfamiliar, Rimini Protokoll strives to empower their subjects and produce ‘a non-fetishistic approach’ to the stranger (155). The ethics of encounter exposes and subverts stranger-fetishism by emphasizing and actualizing the difference between the ‘experts’. They become the material signs of a symptom, a cause, and a socio-cultural phenomenon. At the same time, through their onstage presence, the company argues, the ‘experts’ are granted agency, since they come on stage in control of their own stories. This agency is somewhat debatable, in my opinion. Asked to respond to many delicate questions related to different life values, the ‘experts’ are indeed free to express their personal views. Still, the overall picture produced by 100% City is beyond their real influence, and thus, despite the authenticity of their onstage presence, seen in the insecurity and fragility of their work, the ‘experts’ become objects of disingenuous theatrical manipulation and thus turn into elements of the composition. To protect the ‘experts’ from falling into the trap of over-identification with their onstage material, the project relies on Brecht’s alienation of the subject. It teaches an ‘expert’/performer ‘not to confuse their identity with that of the character’ and to make ‘the gap between themselves and the character recognizable’ (Roselt 2008, 60). The ‘experts’ use ‘quoting

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and commenting’, when they talk about themselves (60). ‘Their expertise is not in acting but in the specific topic of the performance’; the experiences they convey are ‘theirs alone and so are the stories they tell, the clothes they wear, the accents in their voices and the specific qualities of their movements’ (Le Roy 2012, 154). Yet, Lehmann compares their presence on stage to the Renaissance Kunstkammer, ‘princely collections that displayed curious and interesting scientific objects’ (2008, 158). The value of these objects’ performative presence was the truth of their own past and present histories, which they were meant to display. In the project 100% City, the ‘experts’ thus occupy positions similar to these Kunstkammer artefacts. This practice, however, raises difficult ethical questions of manipulation and deceit. Responses to these questions lie with the medium itself. In its use of the ‘experts’ as objects of performance and guarantors of its authenticity, 100% City resembles a performative installation or an exhibit, with ‘interesting realities, individual people with a particular knowledge to impart, facts of the most varied sort’ on display (Lehmann 2008, 157). In their transformation from subjects of the action into its objects, the ‘experts’ turn into acteurs trouvés, or ‘found performers’, who ‘require no dramaturgical cunning and trickery to warrant their presence in a dramatic fiction and situation’ (157). Here, the performance of the real depends on a balancing act between the rehearsed choreography of the play and the unpredictability of chance that comes with bringing amateur performers on stage. Comparing different versions of the project, it becomes apparent that it is exactly in the moments of chance and failure that the project’s ‘possibilities for individualization’ come through (Fordyce 2008, 173). The dramaturgy of care and mutual responsibility (Malzacher 2010, 84–85), which defines the onstage communication among the ‘experts’ and their behaviour and attitude towards each other, constitutes one more strategy of ethical encounter as practised by Rimini Protokoll. It spills out into the work of the audience and becomes the reception strategy. By the end of the performance, many spectators can identify and differentiate participants by their looks and names as well as the stories they have shared. They can also recognize the ‘inconsistency, contradiction, heterogeneity, incompleteness and openness’ of the ‘experts’ onstage behaviour (Roselt 2008, 62). In 100% City the stage-audience communication is similar to what we use in social media, with our allegiances constantly re-emerging and transforming. The act of theatrical encounter challenges the positions of

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onlooker and object, so that in the choreography of this chorus play, Rimini Protokoll aims to give agency to the spectators as well. It invites us to construct our own personal dramaturgy of reception, for ‘the most important narration is the one that you build as a spectator for yourself’ (Kaegi in Bowen et al. 2015, 313). This technique also stems from Brecht’s aesthetics, specifically his Lehrstücke. Like Brecht’s teaching plays, the 100% City project aims to ‘highlight, displace or re-place the researcher-­ artist and spectators’ positions as the ones who look and know. Situations are created where spectators are made aware of their voyeurism, where they and the theatre practitioners become the ones observed, and ‘experts become expert observers’ (Mumford 2013, 160). In creating this mirror effect, the project does not follow a typical ‘celebratory narrative of participatory theatre’, which assumes that participation is good because ‘audiences get their voices heard in the creative process’ (Tomka 2016, 21). The company capitalizes on the idea of building a theatre community, whereby the onstage chorus acts out an image of the shared collective self. These communities are ‘temporary formations, a consequence, rather than a goal’ (21); they serve as ‘places of interaction’ and should not become ‘institutionalized and expectable’ (21). By bringing experts of the everyday on stage, the 100% City project diagnoses its own contemporaneity. It identifies diversity, strangeness, and foreignness as the markers of today’s world. It engages with the tensions between the uniformity of a worldview as expressed in the traditional chorus play and the plurality of the gaze evoked by its contemporary counterpart. At the same time, it raises questions concerning the truth and ethics of participatory performance, as well as the impact such performances can exert on its audiences. The company’s objective is to foreground the plurality of the gaze, of which it is itself the ‘expert’. * * * As this chapter demonstrates, the contemporary chorus play calls into question the ideas of Europeanness and what being a European means today. The productions chosen for this chapter recognize migration and the new cosmopolitanism as pressing historical phenomena. They focus on questions of making history and collective memory and seek a new theatrical language to evoke the precarious conditions of different migrant experiences. The contemporary chorus play stages cosmopolitanism and its singularities as being multiplied and diversified from within. This

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condition of the personal divide helps strangers build new communities, as they often share the ‘experience of not being fully at home—of having inhabited another space’ (Ahmed 2000, 94). The newly found collectivity ‘presupposes an absence of a shared terrain: the forming of communities makes apparent the lack of a common identity that would allow its form to take one form’ (94). Acting as the voice of the people, the contemporary chorus play employs performative aesthetics that resembles statistics. The chorus play thus offers a variety of artistic techniques to deal with human data: it stages and critiques the condition of cosmopolitanism as the tension between the group and the individuals of which it is composed. Using a collective protagonist, it presents cosmoprolis as a site of uncertainty and comments on the issues of territory, language, and identity faced by each cosmoproletarian. It problematizes the idea of shared communality, scorning the fear and hostility caused by mass movements of populations. As a type of socio-political ritual, it approximates the image of its public only insofar as it differs from it and thus visualizes the potential but also the limitations of sharing a communal experience. Following Levinas’s plea to recognize the act of encounter as the only tool humanity has to identify the otherness of the self as the otherness of the other, a contemporary chorus play ‘posits an ethic which engages dialectically with both the particular encounter with a particular stranger and the concept of universalism implicit within all such encounters’ (Cooke 2002). It helps its spectators to deal with questions about their own place in the mosaic of a cosmoprolis: facing the multiplicity of onstage bodies—in its fictional dimension and as real—audiences can learn as much about themselves as about the world they live today.

Notes 1. Jelinek wrote the first version of Die Schutzbefohlenen. Europas Wehr. Jetzt staut es sich aber sehr! (Epilog auf dem Boden) in 2013 for Nicolas Stemann’s project Commune of Truth. Reality Machine, to be performed at the Vienna Theatre Festival (Honegger 2016b, 146–149). The text was published on internet in 2013 and in its second version, reworked by Jelinek, in 2014. It was also produced by more than ten theatres in Germany and Austria, as well as other European countries. My citations are from Gitta Honegger’s 2016 English translation, which includes Charges (The Supplicants), Coda, and Appendix.

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2. Grensgeval (Borderline) was directed by Guy Cassiers with the choreography of Maud Le Pladec. It premiered in May 2017  in Antwerp’s Toneelhuis theatre as part of the project Beyond Borders. The text was translated by Tom Kleijn, with set and costumes by Tim Van Steenbergen, lighting by Fabiana Piccioli, video by Frederik Jassogne, and sound by Diederik De Cock. It featured Katelijne Damen, Abke Haring, Han Kerckhoffs, and Lukas Smolders as narrators and dancers Samuel Baidoo, Machias Bosschaerts, Pieter Desmet, Sarah Fife, Berta Fornell Serrat, Julia Godino Llorens, Aki Iwamoto, Daan Jaarsveld, Levente Lukacs, Hernan Mancebo Martinez, Alexa Moya Panksep, Marcus Alexander Roydes, Meike Stevens, Pauline van Nuffel, Sandrine Wouters, and Bianca Zueneli, the students from the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon (CNSMD Lyon). 3. De blinde dichter/The Blind Poet/Le poète aveugle was written, directed, and designed by Jan Lauwers, with music by Maarten Seghers, costumes by Lot Lemm, dramaturgy by Elke Janssens, sound by Ditten Lerooij and Marc Combas. It featured Grace Ellen Barkey, Jules Beckman, Anna Sophia Bonnema, Hans Petter Melø Dahl, Benoît Gob, Maarten Seghers, Mohamed Toukabri, Elke Janssens, and Jan Lauwers. It was co-produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts, KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. It opened on May 12, 2015, at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. My analysis is based on the touring version of this production, which I saw at the Théâtre la Colline, Paris, on October 11, 2017. In this book, I use only its English title The Blind Poet. 4. Babel (Words) premiered in 2010 at De Munt/La Monnaie. It was choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, with the set design by Antony Gormley and live music by Patrizia Bovi, Mahabub Khan, Sattar Khan, Gabriele Miracle, and Shogo Yoshii, with Mohamed ‘Benfury’ Benaji, Christine Leboutte, Ulrika Kinn Svensson, Darryl E.  Woods, Kazutomi ‘Tsuki’ Kozuki, James O’Hara, Moya Michael, Helder Seabra, Paea Leach, Jon Filip Fahlstrøm, Francis Ducharme, Damien Fournier, and Navala ‘Niku’ Chaudhari as its first cast. Babel 7.16 premiered in July 2016, at the Avignon Festival. I saw both versions live. 5. 100% City: A Statistical Chain Reaction was conceptualized by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll. It was designed by Mascha Mazur and Marc Jungreithmeier and launched in 2008 in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre. Since then, Rimini Protokoll has authorized thirty-­ five versions worldwide. My theorization of this work is based on the archival video recordings available on the company website and 100% Montreal that I saw live during the 2017 Festival TransAmériques.

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Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Arteel, Inge, and Evelyn Deutsch-Schreiner. 2018. New Dramaturgies in Contemporary Vienna: Wiener Wortstaetten, Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen, and Die schweigende Mehrheit. Modern Drama 61 (3): 352–379. Balme, Christopher B. 2019. Suppliant Guests: Hikesia and the Aporia of Asylum. In Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre, ed. Yana Meerzon and Katharina Pewny, 6–19. London: Routledge. Barnett, David. 2008. When Is a Play Not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14–23. Boenisch, Peter M. 2008. Other People Live: Rimini Protokoll and Their Theatre of Experts. Contemporary Theatre Review 18 (1): 107–113. Bomy, Charlotte. 2009. Choralite, chouer et corps dans le theatre d’Elfride Jelinek. In Le chœur dans le théâtre contemporain 1970–2000, ed. Florence Fix and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre, 73–89. Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon. Bowen, Jennifer, Ulrike Garde, Anton Griffith, Vicky Guglielmo, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Meg Mumford, and Richard Watts. 2015. Panel Discussion: ‘100% Melbourne’: Contemporary Documentary Performance that Puts ‘Real Melbournians’ on the Stage. In Rimini Protokoll Close-up: Lektüren, ed. Johannes Birgfeld, Ulrike Garde, and Meg Mumford, 302–318. Hannover: Wehrhahn. Briginshaw, Valerie A. 2001. Dance, Space and Subjectivity. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Carlson, Tim. 2011. Matters of Protokoll. In 100% Vancouver [Produced on the Occasion of 100% Vancouver: A Statistical Chain Reaction (January 21–22, 2011)], ed. Jeff Khonsary and Kristina Lee Podesva. Vancouver: Fillip Editions Kaegi. Cassiers, Guy. 2017. Interview with Guy Cassiers and Maud Le Pladec. Grensgeval (Borderline). Program Notes, Festival D’Avignon. Cassiers, Guy, and Romeo Castellucci. 2012. Europe, le regard des artistes. Avignon: Éditions universitaires d’Avignon. Cooke, Paul. 2002. Book Review: Sara Ahmed: Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 1: 55–59. Cools, Guy. 2014. Re-Membering Zero Degrees. In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, ed. Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, 180–190. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

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———. 2015. In-Between Dance Cultures: On the Migratory Artistic Identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan. Valiz. ———. 2016. The Energetic Body. Antony Gormely. In Imaginative Bodies: Dialogues in Performance Practice. Amsterdam: Valiz/Antennae Series. Cope, Lou. 2010. EASTMAN Presents: Babel (Words). Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet and Antony Gormley. Press Document Babel. Antwerpen: Eastman. Dalant, Moira. 2016. Babel (Words). Program Leaflet, Avignon Festival. https:// www.festival-avignon.com/en/shows/2016/babel-7-16. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eastman, Helen. 2013. Chorus in Contemporary British Theatre. In Choruses, Ancient and Modern, ed. Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh, 364–377. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edelstein, Jean Hannah. 2011. Shape-Shifter. Weekend Australian, December 31. Fix, Florence, and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre. 2009. Introduction. In Le chœur dans le théâtre contemporain 1970–2000, ed. Florence Fix and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre, 7–21. Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon. Fordyce, Ehren. 2008. We Go Live at 8 O’Clock. In Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll, ed. Miriam Dreysse and Florian Mazache, 168–187. Berlin: Alexander Verlag. Freud, Sigmund. 1949. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. Fuchs, Elinor. 1996. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Furedi, Frank. 2006. Culture of Fear Revisited. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hafez, Nasr. 2006. Welcome to the Cosmoproletariat. Janus 21 (II): 45–55. Honegger, Gitta. 2016a. Translator’s Preface. In Charges (The Supplicants), ed. Elfride Jelinek, vi–xiv. Translated by Honegger Gitta. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books. ———. 2016b. Greifvogel: I Am a Bird of Prey. In Conversation with Elfriede Jelinek. In Charges (The Supplicants), ed. Elfride Jelinek, 146–200. Translated by Honegger Gitta. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books. Jans, Erwin. 2017. Visions of a Blind Poet. The Blind Poet. On the Lies of History, ed. Jan Lauwers & Needcompany. Press Kit, 11–16. https://www.needcompany.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Dossiers/The%20blind%20poet/BP_ DOSSIER_EN%202017_05_18.pdf. Janssens, Elke. 2018. Personal Email to the Author, January 11. Jelinek, Elfride. 2016. Charges (The Supplicants). Translated by Gitta Honegger. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books.

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Jürs-Munby, Karen. 2009. The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek’s Sprachflächen. Performance Research 14 (1): 46–56. ———. 2013. Parasitic Politics: Elfriede Jelinek’s ‘Secondary Dramas’ Abraumhalde and Faust In and Out. In Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, ed. Karen Jürs-Munby, 209–231. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kamel, Marwan. 2015. The 11th Century Poet Who Pissed off Al-Qaeda. History Answers, February 2. https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/medieval-renaissance/al-maarri-the-11th-century-poet-that-pissed-off-al-qaeda/. Khouri, Mounah A. 1983. Literature. In The Genius of Arab Civilization: Source of Renaissance, ed. John R. Hayes, 17–55. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kirby, Michael. 1972. On Acting and Not-Acting. The Drama Review 16 (1): 3–15. Kirkwood, G.M. 1954. The Dramatic Role of the Chorus in Sophocles. Phoenix 8 (1): 1–22. Lauwers, Jan. 2015. The Blind Poet. Unpublished Script. Le Roy, Frederik. 2012. Rimini Protokoll’s Theatricalization of Reality. In Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts, ed. Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Christel Stalpaert, David Depestel, and Boris Debackere, 153–160. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-­ Munby. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. Theory in Theatre? In Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll, ed. Miriam Dreysse, Florian Mazacher, and Rimini Protokoll, 152–167. Berlin: Alexander Verlag. ———. 2011. Postdramatic Theatre: A Decade Later. In Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre Ten Years After, ed. Ivan Medenica, 31–47. Belgrade: Anthology of Essays by Faculty of Dramatic Arts 20. Maalouf, Amin. 2000. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Penguin Books. Maby, Philippe. 2015. Jan Lauwers & Needcompany, ‘The Blind Poet’: Theatre des identités croisées. Inferno Magazine, May 26. Malik, Kenan. 2011. The Poetry of an Old Atheist. Pandaemonium, April 25. https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/old-atheist/. Malzacher, Florian. 2010. The Scripted Realities of Rimini Protokoll. In Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, ed. C. Martin, 80–87. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Limited. Morton, Frances. 2013. Interview: Babel (Words) Choreographers Damien Jalet and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Metro Magazine, March 6. Mumford, Meg. 2013. Rimini Protokoll’s Reality Theatre and Intercultural Encounter: Towards an Ethical Art of Partial Proximity. Contemporary Theatre Review 23 (2): 153–165.

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Nair, Karthika. 2016. Psalm of the Palace. Personal Email to the Author, September. Nicholson, Reynold A. 1969. A Literary History of the Arabs. Cambridge: The University Press. Pendle, George. 2011. Colour by Numbers. In 100% Vancouver. [Produced on the Occasion of 100% Vancouver: A Statistical Chain Reaction (January 21–22, 2011)], ed. Jeff Khonsary and Kristina Lee Podesva. Vancouver: Fillip Editions Kaegi. Revermann, Martin. 2013. Brechtian Chorality. In Choruses, Ancient and Modern, ed. Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh, 151–169. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roselt, Jens. 2008. Making an Appearance: On the Performance Practice of Self-­ Presentation. In Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll, ed. Miriam Dreysse, Florian Malzacher, and Rimini Protokoll, 46–65. Berlin: Alexander Verlag. Rumford, Chris. 2013. The Globalization of Strangeness. New York: Routledge. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Salloum, Habeeb. 2017. Abu Al- ‘Ala’ Al-Ma’arri: Arab Poet and Philosopher Extraordinaire. Arab America, August 16. https://www.arabamerica.com/ abu-al-ala-al-maarri-arab-poet-philosopher-extraordinaire/. Schipper, Imanuel. 2018. Dramaturgies of Post-Democracy in Rimini Protokoll’s 1–4. Masterclass, EASTAP conference, October 26. Sorgel, Sabine. 2015. Dance and the Body in Western Theatre: 1948 to the Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The Blind Poet. Needcompany. https://www.needcompany.org/en/ the-blind-poet. Tomka, Goran. 2016. Audience Explorations: Guidebook for Hopefully Seeking the Audience. Brussels: IETM International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. https://www.ietm.org/system/files/publications/ietm_ audience_explorations_tomka_2016_1_0.pdf. Uytterhoeven, Lise. 2009. A Cosmopolite’s Utopia: Limitations to the Generational Flemish Dance History Model. Platform 4 (2): 8–21. ———. 2014. On Collaboration and Navigating between Dance Cultures: An Ethics of Reconciliation. In The Ethics of Art: Ecological Turns in the Performing Arts, ed. Guy Cools and Pascal Gielen, 247–258. Amsterdam: Valiz/ Antennae Series. Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2019. The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wilmer, Steve. 2018. Performing Statelessness in Europe. Palgrave.

PART III

Encounters in Time, Space, and History

CHAPTER 6

Dramaturgies of the Gaze: On the Intimate Realities of Cosmopolitanism

Chapter 6 opens the concluding part of this book, which discusses the relational dramaturgy of a cosmopolitan encounter. An artistic device called to imitate and comment upon our embodied transcultural crossings of the everyday, this relational dramaturgy defines the interactions between the performers and their audiences within the aesthetics of a cosmopolitan theatre. In this chapter I focus on a set of performances and installations enacted within the controlled setting of a one-to-one theatre. I study how devices of authenticity are used to stage one’s encounter with the self and examine how one-to-one immersive productions experiment with processes of audience reception. I suggest that these examples of cosmopolitan theatre often seek to reproduce the effect of the real, or what Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’ (1970, 217–253), in which the ontological status of the spectator, our sense of self and mortality, is reinforced. One-to-one productions put ‘the viewer in the centre of attention, focusing on individual, unique experience and on personal narratives as opposed to a commodified, uniform product’ (Schulze 2017, 67). They employ proximity, intimacy, corporeality, and immersion as their dramaturgical strategies in order to structure the labour of the spectator. Such strategies not only help to redefine the traditional stage/audience binary, but they also serve to reveal and critique the complex arrangements of influence and control that delineate our everyday encounters with the other. In order to better understand the politics of such an encounter, one-to-one productions build on and investigate the ambiguity of the gaze. Frequently they create © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_6

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conditions that hamper viewing, subjecting their audiences to physical proximity to the stage and thus to emotional manipulation: they toy with the spectator/participant’s sense of trust. Through their emotional ambiguity, the productions analysed in this chapter re-enact the hospitality and the hostility of a cross-cultural encounter, thereby exposing their audiences to acts of theatrical intimacy but also critical surveillance. The gaze is now directed both ways: not only from the audience hall onto the stage (a phenomenon that reflects and engenders the stranger-fetishism discussed in Chap. 4) but also from the stage to the audience. This ability of one-to-one theatre to create special conditions of encounter, when the performance can ‘stare back’ at its audience, predetermines the levels of discomfort that the spectator/participant may experience. The danger inherent in this preconstructed situation of intimacy, coupled with themes related to the hazards and risks of global movements, forces the spectator/participant to recoil and think deeply about the consequences of mass migration, as well as to seek psychological and performative mechanisms of self-defence. The same processes trigger each spectator’s encounter with oneself as other. Despite the inherent narcissism in their dramaturgies and practices (Schulze 2017, 114–116), one-to-one productions seem to be somewhat more successful in neutralizing the gaze of the postmodern consumer. They turn the gaze towards the consumer’s own subjectivity and their place in the world of shifting political, economic, and cultural paradigms. In the age of hypermodernity, when our everyday performance of ourselves constitutes a new political regime and imposes the discipline of spectacle, the audiences of vernacular cosmopolitanism appear thirsty for genuine experiences. Based on the need to ‘bring back the idea of truth, the real and authenticity’ (36), one-to-one theatre creates these spaces of truth—no matter how risky, fleeting, or questionable they can be. Truth—in this context—is ‘no longer necessarily an absolute, but rather a function of the audience’s perception’, something that can only be experienced and constructed through the instances of ‘human interaction’ or intimacy, something that can eventually be called an ‘aesthetic of trust’ (Hassan 2003, 119–121). In the following, I offer analyses of three one-to-one productions created within this aesthetics of trust and intended to probe the singularity and authenticity of the audience’s experience. Migration and displacement are the central themes of these works, which aspire to evoke the daring conditions of globalization specifically for those of us who are familiar with travelling only as privilege. My analysis begins with a discussion of the theatre installation Flight (2017), produced by the Vox Motus Company of Glasgow.1 Designed as a

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carousel of miniature puppet figures and landscapes to be rotated in front of an individual spectator, Flight stages the journey experienced by two Afghan migrant boys seeking asylum in the UK. Dramaturgically, it engages with the chronotope of the road (Bakhtin 1981), both as the principle of its narrative construction and as the mechanism of audience reception. Politically, it aims to bring the stories of child refugees closer to its privileged audiences, who are often far removed from such experiences. For Candice Edmunds, a co-director of this work, migration and specifically the fate of unaccompanied minors is a topic of personal urgency. A transnational artist herself and a mother of two, Edmunds is naturally drawn to stories that reveal the devastating conditions in which refugee children travel (Edmunds 2018). Making Flight—she explains—was marked by the 2015 migration crisis in Europe and the aftermath of the Syrian civil war that brought the overwhelming truth of images of ‘children washed up on beaches’ (Edmunds in Cooper 2017b). As a result, Flight in many ways toys with the ambiguous position of its prospective spectator, who on the one hand might feel almost like a god-like figure seated across from the fragile puppet characters and realizing that one can ‘just smash them’ (Harrison in Cooper 2017b). On the other hand, however, the conditions of the one-to-one encounter force this spectator/participant to observe themselves, perhaps even with some degree of horror and disgust, turning into a theatrical pervert drawn by the proximity of the carousel and the fragility of these miniature figures and feeling pleasure at prying into the migrant children’s suffering. The second performance I examine is BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience (2007), created by Theatre Replacement of Vancouver,2 which is a crossover between an interactive performance and the Japanese paper theatre Kamishibai. It explores the theatre encounter as intimacy between an actor and an audience member. BIOBOXES involves Foucault’s notion of the panopticon (1977), both as its dramatic metaphor and as a mechanism of actor/spectator surveillance enabled through the proximity and corporeality of a one-to-one theatrical event. The work is constructed as a series of ten-minute performative meetings between one audience member and one performer, who is asked to tell one story of migration in the language of their character (other than English or French) or in one of the official languages of Canada. The production tackles issues of consent and freedom of choice, as well as interactivity, which often mark the ethics and aesthetics of one-to-one theatre. It also adds to the discussion of verisimilitude as related to many of today’s theatre productions, which focus on topics of migration. Questions of gaze and surveillance—who is watching

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whom and at what moment—drive the narrative structure of this theatrical encounter forward. I close this chapter with an analysis of the immersive production How iRan: Three Plays for iPod (2013) created by Ken Cameron and Productive Obsession, an inter-arts performance company from Calgary.3 The work uses the concept of heterotopia (Foucault 1986) as its device of storytelling and as a principle of making a performance space, a meeting point between the theatre space—‘the place of performance, seen both as the theatre building itself, situated within the urban context, and the characteristically divided space this building encloses’ (McAuley 1999, 19)—and the audience space, to which theatregoers have open access (25). How iRan imagines its spectators navigating the space of installation individually by listening to an iPod. This customized listening device is used to investigate ‘the ways listeners receive “neutral” information and how it can transform their theatrical experience’ (Cameron 2018). It makes spectators see themselves mirrored in other peoples’ performative routes and experiences, thereby restoring the agency of the receiver. My thinking is inspired by my personal experiences of encounter as a participant in these performative experiments. My theoretical framework has as its starting point Daniel Schulze’s discussion of authenticity as a ‘structure of feeling’ that defines one-to-one theatre productions and which ‘superseded Postmodernism with its irony, detachment and closure’ (Schulze 2017, 2). The emotional regime of authenticity, a definitive marker of the age of hypermodernity and transnationalism, seeks to bring the concepts of ‘telos, engagement and pastiche’ (2) into the centre of the artistic encounter. Staging migration as the leitmotif of one-to-one performances creates a new level of authenticity, thanks to the intimacy that such a theatrical experiment offers. The plays examined in this chapter use techniques of isolation, separation, displacement, and spatial/temporal disorientation of the spectator, in order to avoid and resist the aesthetics of excess (Zaroulia 2018), in which the figure of the migrant ‘exceeds, spills over and escapes the limits of rationality’ (182). By provoking questions of representation and search for ‘meaningful artistic engagement with the plight of migration’ (182), these productions exemplify this resistance and foreground their audiences’ experience of solitude. At the same time, they force individual theatregoers to seek collectivity—if not during the show, then after it. * * *

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On the Relational Dramaturgies of Gaze and Authenticity: A Theoretical Primer Positioned at the crossroads of theatre and the performance arts, one-to-­ one performances fall into the category of relational aesthetics put forward by Nicolas Bourriaud (1998). Capable of making their audiences experience moments of liveness and sociability achieved through the interpersonal contact between the performer and the spectator/participant, these productions rely on a theatrical regime of authenticity and mobilize the workings of trust, gaze, and encounter (Schulze 2017, 109). They engage affectual mechanisms of reception similar in their emotional impact to the installations of the Bogotá-based sculptor Doris Salcedo, whose silent sculptures, made out of incompatible materials, can provoke strong and sometimes uncontrollable experiences in the viewers as well as facilitate new contacts and interactions between them (109–110). Although Salcedo has produced most of her work in Columbia, where violence and civil war can be ‘viewed as an element of national identity’ and people’s disappearance and historical erasure are everyday practices (Enriquez 2017, 15), her installations are global and cosmopolitan (Salcedo 2017, xvii). Among the anonymous victims of political violence who are the subjects of Salcedo’s work are asylum seekers and political exiles. In her artistic language, Salcedo rejects representation. Using extensive historical research, she employs domestic objects and natural materials to create places of commemoration and history. The onus of representation is on the receiver, who through the gesture of commemorative silence and walking becomes a secondary witness to the injustice referenced by Salcedo’s installations (Levine 2006, 4–6). When the spectator/participant encounters her work, the silence is broken, so that an act of testimony and remembrance can take place. Salcedo’s work engenders affectual responses and offers its viewers moments of self-reflection: it facilitates the simultaneity of solitude and communality of reception, thus implicating the viewer in the historical tragedies she commemorates. The human being is totally absent from Salcedo’s sites; instead, domestic objects and personal belongings become her protagonists. These objects serve ‘to index a body that has been absented by violence; in essence, these objects—found and distorted—become archives of that which by its very absence simply cannot be represented, and yet demands acknowledgment and remembrance’ (Lauzon 2015, 204). Wounded objects, shattered spaces, and smashed pieces of furniture take on the role of hyper-historians (Rokem 2000, 202).

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In Salcedo’s work, these objects, like theatre performers, enact history in a double temporality—as an act of transposition of the historical past and as the process of performance making. The theatrical energy of Salcedo’s performed history provides a space where the real and the metaphorical meet, so that the viewers can ‘create the meanings of a performance, by activating different psychological and social energies’ of the site (Rokem 2000, 192). As we walk through Salcedo’s installations, rupture and enclosure begin to define our labour too. According to Schulze, therefore, encountering Salcedo’s work individually and sharing this emotional experience with other viewers exemplify the relational dramaturgy of authenticity as an aleatory performative product arising between the viewer and the site (Schulze 2017, 110). Like Salcedo’s installations, one-­to-­one theatrical performances aim to ‘facilitate human connection’ and employ ‘relational techniques’ to make an artwork (110). They seek to shatter the proverbial fourth wall, suspend the audience’s disbelief, and make their spectators physically, psychologically, and emotionally active. To do this, the makers of one-to-one performances frequently explore and exploit the mechanisms of trust required from their audiences to advance the action of the play. As a result, they provoke self-reflection and provide the spectator/participant with a real possibility for encounter with the self as other. They also aim to transpose the emotional stimuli received by the spectator into the workings of their imagination and intellect. Peter Boenisch identifies this type of dramaturgy as relational, spatial, and temporal (2014, 235). By challenging the idea of binaries—stage versus audience—as the only way spectators can physically and emotionally interact with the work of art, the relational dramaturgy of one-to-one productions seizes and mimics the interpersonal relationships of crossing boundaries and borders. It mobilizes ‘the full interplay between the highlighted borders’, foregrounds ‘playful negotiations’, and ‘forges relations, changes relationships and calibrates a dynamic interplay’ (227). Relational dramaturgy relies upon the spectators’ durational and (semi- or fully) unstructured presence, their ability to move around, away from and through the performance space without disturbing and/or interacting with it. It benefits from the audience’s aptitude for engaging with performance through play; and it invites us to participate in it psychosomatically, often despite our physical, emotional, and psychological discomfort. Such shifts in audience dramaturgy indicate the contemporary theatre’s desire to ‘exploit the interdependence of representation and theatrical presentation; the interplay between the performance as the actualized texture of a

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mise en scène and the actual event and experience’ (Boenisch 2014, 232). These processes point to the power of ‘mise en event’, in which the focus of the performance shifts ‘from the representation of meaning’ to the very action of presentation (232). Hence, relational dramaturgy focuses on the working of the spectator’s ‘I’ and on theatre’s ability to create situations in which the encounter between the ‘I’ as myself and ‘I’ as other can take place. Although these artistic experiments can be seen as a peripheral phenomenon, given the unprofitable economics of labour cost and market value involved in making and performing one-to-one performances, they can reinforce individualism in its better manifestations (Schulze 2017, 105). They can also evoke in their audiences/participants feelings of responsibility, more visible political engagement, and a sense of historical guilt: emotions that stand in opposition to globalized consumerism (105). One-to-one theatre speaks to its audiences’ hunger for an authenticity that contrasts with the ‘mediatized forms of everyday life, where the individual feels removed from first-hand experience’ (104). In their spatial/temporal dramaturgy, these works respond to their spectators’ ‘shared need for intimacy’ (105), which at the same time can be highly uncomfortable, since in one-on-one performances ‘participants must advance a large degree of trust’ and consent to ‘expose themselves’ to the other (106). These demands create reversed conditions of stage/audience engagement, with theatre makers challenging the performative dynamics of gaze and control and pushing the ethical boundaries of interpersonal encounter. One-to-­ one performances use the tactics of relational dramaturgy as they aspire to shift the ‘power economy between participant and performer’ (Schulze 2017, 111). In order to explore the coercive violence of gaze or voyeurism, these productions manipulate the distance and proximity between the spectator and the performer. They put the performer in control of the performance narrative and expose the spectator to uncertainty and discomfort. These conditions are tightly connected to our experience of the everyday, which presupposes ‘the genuine possibility of failure, embarrassment and a future unknown’ (112). Given the scripted nature of one-toone theatre, which provides minimal freedom to change or influence the narrative structure of the spectator’s experience, these performances can be also highly stylized. They risk falling victim to the mechanisms of performance as gaming, a frequent feature of their dramaturgical designs. Consequently, they can turn into a space ‘where this aestheticized version of “Reality” can be purchased and played out’ (114). By telling stories of political urgency and by bringing their spectators close to real-life

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experiences of vulnerability and precariousness resulting from migration, the one-to-one productions chosen for this chapter tend to counter-balance these strategies of self-indulgence. Using the device of a narrative gap (Iser 1978) as a tool of narrative construction and perception, they seek to provide a special place for critical self-reflection on the audience’s part and for encountering one’s own divided self. They can also force spectators to acknowledge their loss of control over the representation and invite them to seek their own agency by filling the gap. The term ‘narrative gap’ refers to the ‘fundamental asymmetry between text and reader that gives rise to communication in the reading process’ (Iser 1978, 167). As Barbara Postema points out, ‘central to the process of narration’, the narrative gap heightens the suspense and invites the reader to create meaning by working through the gap. On one hand, the reader is ‘involved in creating assumptions about what is missing, based on what is given in the text’; on the other, this process relies upon ‘trial, error, and new suppositions’ made by the reader (Postema 2013, 106). The relational dramaturgy of one-to-one performances foregrounds and reveals the working of the narrative gap. This gap characterizes our perception, because it emerges as ‘an irreducible, necessary distance between the “spectating I” and the “I of the spectator”’ (Boenisch 2014, 237). Staging a narrative gap as a split of a spectator’s self, one-to-one performance calls attention to the internal processes of estrangement as they are experienced by spectators, and it also activates our agency. Staging a narrative gap asserts the audience’s right to navigate their emotions, relations, and actions, as well as construct the meaning of the event. It relies on the logic of spectator emancipation and invites us ‘to confront ourselves as spectators’ beyond one theatrical event, in the real world of aleatory cross-­ cultural encounters (240). This technique exemplifies the aesthetics of theatrical cosmopolitanism, in which our relational self as other is evoked, constructed, and presented back to us. The productions chosen for this chapter engage their audience’s ‘spectatorial agency and “response-­ ability”’ (239). Each of them offers a different option for theatrical encounter between the audience and the performance and between an individual spectator’s ‘I’ and their self. * * *

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Flight: A Chronotope of the Road in 3D ‘How do you begin to recreate the refugee experience?’ Michael Billington asked in his review of a multidisciplinary performance installation called Flight, created by the Glasgow-based Vox Motus (2017). Echoing this question one might add: how do you avoid sentimentalism, patronizing, moralizing, and objectification of migration on stage? To Billington, theatre must ‘eschew realism’ (2017) and seek complex, and ethically aware means to speak of this subject. In response, Flight presents a special example of artistry and ethics by mixing devices from the graphic novel, the three-dimensional rotating diorama, and puppet theatre. It circumvents theatrical verisimilitude to tell a story of two orphaned brothers from Afghanistan, who ‘embark on a desperate odyssey to freedom and safety. With their small inheritance stitched into their clothes, they set off on an epic journey across Europe, in a heart-wrenching road story of terror, hope and survival’ (Flight 2017–2018). Flight is an adaptation of Caroline Brothers’s novel Hinterland (2011), based on her interviews with refugee children in France, and recounts the suffering of refugees from the perspective of unaccompanied minors in a world of strangers. It takes eight-­ year-­ old Kabir and his fourteen-year-old brother Aryan on a voyage through Europe’s dark underbelly, marching from the orange groves of Greece, where they labour as slaves and Kabir is raped, to the refugee camps in France, where they hide from the police raids. To translate this story of migration into the language of theatre, Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, the co-directors of Flight, and Rebecca Hamilton, its designer, decided to seek visual metaphors: ‘As the audience enter the venue they are divided up into groups and instructed to leave their bags and large coats in the waiting area’ (Fraser 2017). Each of twenty-five spectators is invited into a personal viewing booth that opens onto a rotating diorama made of three-dimensional boxes that contain miniature puppets, objects, and landscapes. What follows ‘can be best described as an unfurling comic book that invites the audience into the story’ (Fraser 2017). Seated in the individual booths in close proximity to the diorama, spectators follow the action by watching the three-­ dimensional still images brought into motion by rotation of the carousel. They also listen to the soundscape transmitted into spectators’ individual headphones. This soundscape, designed by Mark Melville, consists of an audio script composed by Oliver Emanuel, who used Homer’s Odyssey and Rumi poetry as his inspiration, and special sound effects. The rhythmic

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juxtaposition of the visual images and the soundscape creates theatrical synaesthesia (Machon 2009), which adds to the dramatic density of the work and helps engage the audience further. ‘The way the sound score was designed’—Edmunds explains—‘was to make sure it can convey the emotions and hardships of the journey as well as its visuality without the diorama itself’ (Edmunds 2018). When ‘the words, music and sounds [are] delivered directly into your ears via a headset [;] this creates an intimate and engrossing atmosphere that heightens the drama and at moments can leave you feeling breathless and thoroughly engaged’ (Fraser 2017). The form of this performative presentation ‘subverts the content’, as Flight insists upon the uncanny but pleasing ‘juxtaposition between the delicateness and almost quaintness of this miniature world’ and the dismal story about ‘human trafficking, exploitation and the horrible, harrowing things that happened to these children’ (Edmunds in Cooper 2017b). The audience’s spatial position is reminiscent of a Victorian peep show, whereas their emotional endurance can be best described through the metaphor of an encounter, during which questions of personal responsibility can be asked. This disconnect between the story and its form creates emotional stillness, as spectators find themselves in an ethically problematic place, enjoying the craftiness of the artistic world, yet also realizing the level of desperation to which its characters are subjected. ‘What do you take with you when you know you are never coming home?’ twenty-year-old Kabir, a narrator/survivor, asks in the space of the audience’s headphones, as we watch the boys preparing for their monumental trip (Oliver 2017, 5). ‘In his pockets’, the grown up Kabir continues, ‘Aryan has 1 plastic wallet, 2000 US dollars, 1 red mobile phone (without SIM), 1 tiny book of Afghan poetry. Kabir has nothing in his pockets except dreams. He dreams of amazing adventures. Impossible futures. He dreams of flight’ (Oliver 2017, 5). This promise of adventure and freedom keeps the boys going, whereas walking functions as their strategy of survival. The narrative structure of pilgrimage, the subject of the next chapter, defines the dramaturgy of this story, with Bakhtin’s chronotope of the road—a methodological lens to construct and examine time and space in literature (1981, 84–85)—serving Flight as the device of its storytelling. The term chronotope of the road, coined for our better understanding of the workings of the ‘adventure novel of ordeal’ (86), is a leading trope in many narratives of migration and exile. It is often used as ‘an optic for analyzing the forces in the culture that produce these configurations’ (Naficy 2001, 152). In its formal characteristics, the

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chronotope of the road presupposes a rigidly structured plot focused on the adventures of the protagonist, whereby the dimensions of space and time determine their afflictions. These ordeals take place in ‘a very broad and varied geographical background’, including crossing seas and passing through vast landscapes, the narration focussing on ‘the habits and customs of populations’ (Bakhtin 1981, 88). Such time expressions as ‘suddenly’ or ‘at just this moment’ signify unexpected changes in the action, when ‘the normal, pragmatic and premediated course of events is interrupted’ (92). These interruptions provide an opening for a ‘sheer chance’, defined by the logic of contingency, simultaneity and rupture, and disjuncture in time, all literary techniques intended to make adventure plots more complex and suspenseful (92). Often stories of migration narrate a traveller’s miseries, when the fate of the protagonist is subjected to chance, dependent on the actions of villains (figures of authority, often representatives of the state or smugglers), whose sole purpose is to stop the action (95). In Flight ‘sheer chance’ is the plot’s defining element: it makes the characters stumble upon terrible encounters and experience tragic events— abductions, escape, pursuit, captivity, and imprisonment—as consequences of the vagaries of space and time. This world, in other words, is alien. Defined by unsurmountable distances, it presents everything ‘indefinite, unknown, foreign. Its heroes are there for the first time; they have no organic ties or relationships with it, the laws governing the socio-political and everyday life of this world are foreign to them’. Consequently, this world is ‘utterly and exclusively other’, for ‘the native world from which the author [or the character—YM] came […] is nowhere to be found in it’ (Bakhtin 1981, 101). Kabir’s (the narrator’s) homeland ‘serves as the organizing centre’ from which the characters’ encounters with ‘alien countries and cultures are seen and understood’ (104). Travel itself functions as a principle of narrative construction. The effect of time-space compression (105–107) characterizes Flight’s inner dramaturgy, which references a contemporary world that is simultaneously more accessible for travel and hostile to its practices. In the novel, Brothers capitalizes on the idea of travelling as power-­ geometry (Massey 2014). She opens her story with the boys’ arrival at what they hoped would become their promised land. However, although Kabir and Aryan have safely crossed the border from Turkey into Greece, ‘they have arrived two weeks too late’ (Brothers 2011, 13). Because of this bad timing, the brothers have to march together with other refugees along the river Evros. In Flight adults, seen through the eyes of a child, become

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signals of danger. Once we see a silhouette of the rapist who molested Kabir; another time we are presented with angry seagulls, who stand in Kabir’s mind for French police officers. Brothers’s novel and after it Vox Motus’s performance, by insisting on the discomfort and danger, as well as the fear, mistrust, and agony that characterize this march, suggest both the gaze of a child and that of a survivor, who locks their emotions inside in order to stay focused on the only task that matters—survival on the road. The story itself is characterized by detachment and fragmentation. At times it is reminiscent of the daily news as narrated by a refugee, whose job is to register the details of the environment and the steps of the journey. Inspired by Shaun Tan’s graphic novel The Arrival (2006), the one-to-­ one performance Flight translates Brothers’s novel into the rhetoric of a comic book transformed into a 3D structure. It uses a rotating diorama of 200 mini boxes connected to each other with wires and switches on the inside of the carousel. These boxes serve as attention units of the narrative (Postema 2013, xiii), each of them presenting a miniature scene from the boys’ journey. Using stop-motion technique, each box focuses its viewers’ gaze on a single unit of action. Like a 2D comic book, the diorama consists of ‘the placement of panels and gutters, the size and shape of titles and captions, and the icons and symbols used in the representation’ (xiii), each box serving as a window into a particular mental environment stored in the mind of the spectator. Using the 3D boxes sequentially, Flight depicts its characters, environments, and events as a sequence of images ‘facilitated by the shapes of the panel borders’ (Cohn 2013, 10) and manipulated into a spatial structure that ‘combines geometric information with our abstract knowledge of concepts’ (11). Here, the individual boxes and their sequences convey temporal and spatial information, whereas their size, shape, and position function as the means of framing. Flight uses the rhetorical layout of storyboarding like continuous editing in film, so that in its constructed performativity it ‘draws attention to itself’ (Postema 2013, 113), whereas its rhetorical scheme consists of action pointers that form narrative phases (Cohn 2013, 70). Put sequentially, these phases constitute a narrative arch of the plot reflecting the tripartite structure of the closed dramatic action (70). Based on ‘the cohesion shepherding separate images into a “process of transformation”’ (Postema 2013, xviii), Flight connects the single boxes into a dramatic movement that relies on the temporality, spatiality, and rhythm of visual storytelling. Fragmentation, segmentation, and connection are its fundamental

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principles, with the progression of time conveyed through the motion of the panels. As its ‘actors’, Flight uses miniature printed figures and objects produced in the Glasgow-based Step 3D studio and hand-painted by the Vox Motus team. The theatrical bodies and actions of the two boys ‘emerg[e] as a result of performative acts’ (Wagner 2006, 128); they remind the audience of the ambiguity of puppet theatre with its promise to turn an inanimate object (the puppet) into a subject or ‘actor’: The faces of the two boys, especially that of wide-eyed eight-year-old Kabir in his woolly cap, are highly distinctive. Even if the images are small, you also get a sense of an epic, two-year odyssey that takes them on a journey all the way from Kabul to London. You see the boys crossing hazardous seas in rickety, refugee-filled boats, being treated as slaves in sunlit orange-groves, marvelling at the bustle and excitement of Athens. Some of the images, such as the portrait of passport-authorities and police with pelican beaks, are strange: others, such as one showing what it is like to be stashed away in a refrigerated meat-truck, are horrifying. (Billington 2017)

Thus, Flight illustrates Jiří Veltruský’s argument that in theatre an acting subject should be defined not by spontaneity or liveness, but by its ability to initiate action as ‘the originator of the intent’ and this action’s agent (1990, 83). To Veltruský, an actor is ‘a dynamic unity of an entire set of signs’, so that ‘the actor centres all the meanings upon him/[her]self’ (84). Because we associate movement with the agency of the puppet and its force of action, the ruptures and the splitting of the material that makes up the puppet create both an irritating image of the other—the stranger— and also activate its theatrical liveness. By bringing inanimate matter to life, Flight builds on the idea of the ontological other translated into the figure of a migrant. On the other hand, the materiality of an object produces a corporeally involved perceiver (Wagner 2006, 128), who watches, listens, and participates in making the work not only through their intellect but somatically. The perceiving body of the spectator and the body of the puppet become ‘mutually dependent’ (128). Consequently, the spectator recognizes their self as the other in the puppet (132). The fragility of the world evoked by Flight reminds its adult audiences of their own childhood traumas, as it makes them feel a little more vulnerable and a little more exposed than they were before they entered the space of this performative event.

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Flight translates Kabir and Aryan’s journey into the intricate layout of the three-dimensional storyboards positioned at different vertical and horizontal levels of the carousel. It relies on the spectator’s bodily work and imagination, since we must adjust our gaze and sitting positions to different levels of the diorama on which the scenes appear. The layout of these planes imitates the dramaturgy of motion or the chronotope of the road as implied in the novel, and so Flight imagines its spectators, eagerly participating in processes of narrative construction and decoding resembling in their mechanics the reading of a comic book. Flight manipulates the audience’s attention through the strategy of windowing or spotlighting (Cohn 2013, 59), like a close-up in film. Each of its mini boxes serves as a narrative frame, so that our attention ‘can be guided to the different parts of a depicted graphic space: the whole scene, […] just individual characters, […] or close-up representations of parts of an environment or an individual’ (11). These windows are filled with active entities (characters and objects) that move across sequences and inactive entities that remain in a single panel (56). Hence, the juxtaposition of individual boxes differently situated on the rotating carousel sculpts the spectator’s gaze and puts our bodies into motion. It also translates the reading skills needed to interact with a comic book into those of watching a multi-level rotating diorama. For example, when it comes to dialogue, in comics the work of the discourse (titles and captions) and the storyline (visual images) coincide (Postema 2013, 112), whereas using a rotating diorama of three-­ dimensional frames and figures, Flight creates its own gaps of visual narration. Instead of titles and captions, however, it employs a complex interdependency between the three-dimensional images rotating in front of the spectators’ eyes and an atmospheric soundscape. It uses fragmentation and sequencing to activate the spectator’s attention. Encountering a narrative gap forces the spectators into the active position of filling out the fictional, temporal, and psychological lacunas left by the narration and thus makes their work visible. As twenty-five spectators are seated in their individual booths, the carousel begins to spin. It slowly reveals each three-dimensional image box in its finalized mise en scène, with the puppets firmly positioned in their own spaces.4 Looking at these figures awakens the spectator’s bodily memory of a journey. This memory connects them back to the working bodies of the artists who put these figures into the box. The viewers constantly adjust their sitting positions to obtain a better view of each panel. The work of the spectator/watching body trapped in their little booth

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approximates the work of the reader. Reading a comic book, the reader ‘must remember that drawings are produced because of bodily actions’ (Cohn 2013, 32), and they must be able to decode transitions between the panels as bridges of meaning to ‘construct the whole environments in [our] minds’ (79). Watching Flight demands similar decoding and connecting actions on the part of the spectators. Moving one’s body up and down or left and right during the performance helps interpret the meaning of the story, but it also reinforces the stillness of one’s sitting position. To a certain extent, this tension between the stillness of the spectator’s sitting body and the need to move one’s torso to better follow Flight’s visual narrative mirrors the journey of the characters in the book. In this artistic setup, in other words, the spectator’s body becomes simultaneously the seeing subject and the object to be seen: the object of the gaze cast upon them by the inanimate figures in this rotating diorama of children’s forced migration. Flight closes with the view from the window of the UK orphanage where Kabir now lives. The expected happy ending—Kabir has made it to safety—has a bitter taste and does not bring a sense of closure. Aryan did not make it: while covering Kabir with his own body, he froze to death in a refrigerator truck on their way to the UK. A row of identical grey roofs and fences presents an image startling in its sadness and drastically different from the one at the beginning of the play, with sunny fields and blue mountains full of the promise of an exciting journey. Kabir has reached his destination, but the price he has had to pay and the sufferings he has had to endure are an ordeal that cannot be reconciled, forgiven, or forgotten. This ending prompts the major question the audience of Flight is expected to ask: what is one’s personal responsibility for the children migrants, and can we tolerate any longer a system of governance that forces children to experience the unimaginable? The power of the artistic experiment, therefore, lies in its ability to exploit the sense of estrangement that its visual language creates and thus, even if quite paradoxically, makes the conversation about displacement and migration personal for each of its viewers. Not every theatregoer who attended Flight would share this conclusion. Michael Billington, for example, openly lamented the fact that there were no people on stage. He found himself emotionally disconnected from the action, and so the entire project was, for him, somewhat problematic (2017). Contrary to Billington’s desire to feel emotionally ravaged, the company chose to engage its spectators through alienation and hence avoid the aesthetics of excess (Zaroulia 2018). If the setting creates

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intimacy, its figures and their silence create distancing, so that spectators are forced to experience emotional discomfort and a post-Brechtian type of alienation. Because Flight turns the story of two Afghan boys into a metaphorical narrative of abandoned childhood, it induces its audiences to muse further on the impacts of mass migration. Flight scales down the size of its fictional world and brings audiences into close proximity to it, thereby emphasizing the vulnerability of the refugee. It puts the viewers into the space of rupture, making them also feel uncomfortable and confused. The language of the miniature conveys ‘a sense of naiveté’, whereas the aesthetics of a graphic novel help the artists to subvert it (Harrison in Cooper 2017a). In the next section, the chronotope of the road, which defines the story of Flight, turns into the practice of the theatrical panopticon, with actors and audiences placed in a peculiar spatial/temporal position in order to investigate Foucault’s philosophy of space as the politics of architecture and a spatial category of power. * * *

BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience—Staging an Immigrant Panopticon Created by the Vancouver-based company Theatre Replacement, BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience is a collection of several ten-­ minute bilingual performances, presented as intimate one-to-one encounters between the performer and the spectator, in the space of a small box put on the shoulders of a performer. Each performance tells one story of migration to Canada and exemplifies a type of documentary theatre, in which the fictional account of the truth of migration is inspired by the life stories of the real people who were interviewed by the performers during the research stage of making the show. The performance directs individual spectators from one controlled experience to the next, from one performance station to another. Using Japanese paper theatre Kamishibai as its point of reference, BIOBOXES invites its spectators to look into immigrant experiences while becoming the objects of performative scrutiny themselves. It reminds its audiences that behind the civility of the law, there is always a dangerous relationship between the state and the individual and translates the political and social tensions of migration into a

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‘peer play’ of ambiguity. It questions the notion of difference, both the social difference of the border crossing and the ‘affective difference’ that sets a traveller against the host culture’s norms (Solga 2014, 180). The production imposes the following questions: what roles do we—the bystanders to migration—choose to perform in this game of power? What character do we have to play if there is no choice given? What other roles can be performed for and by us? What degree of performative deception is involved in this power encounter? BIOBOXES, produced in the culture of terror triggered by the events of 9/11, builds on the idea of a panopticon, in which the visibility of each player is ‘organized entirely around a dominating, overseeing gaze’ (Foucault 1977, 152). The panopticon—a mechanism of imprisonment and surveillance—made confinement and separation necessary measures of control. It also foregrounded individualization as an alternative system of power, as it exposed all the individual actors of the social performance— the prison—to the gaze of power. As a disciplinary mechanism, it insisted on the regulation of multiplicity. BIOBOXES investigates this interconnectedness between, on the one hand, the gaze and its subject as the formative mechanism of the panopticon and, on the other, the use of the entertaining nature of immersive theatre experiences to advance its audiences’ political awareness. As spectators enter the space of the play, six performers appear at their respective stations and call individual audience members by their names. This act of naming controls the spectators’ choices and movements, for each audience member can approach only that performance box from which their name has been called. Dressed in white coats, the actors resemble a group of scientists. This image suggests a protocol of surveillance, further accentuated by the presence of larger-­ than-­life transparent screens that envelop the space. On the screens, the actual dialogues between the actors and their interviewees are continuously played. The story of migration enacted in this play thus turns into a haphazard system of mirrored structures of power. The production cites the methods of its own making: using interviews of first-generation Canadians as their point of departure, ‘six artists of diverse backgrounds have created tiny shows that can be performed in both English and another respective language, including French, Japanese, Cantonese, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and German’ (BIOBOXES). The interviewees—projected onto the surrounding screens—‘watch’ the actors performing their stories to strangers, whereupon the spectators become the objects of the gaze. This dynamic changes the moment an actor puts a lavishly decorated

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cardboard box on their shoulders and turns into a three-dimensional Kamishibai character. At this moment, the spectator is given a master key to the language of their individual show, so that they can request that the language of narration switch from English to the other language spoken by the bilingual performer. The knee-to-knee proximity between actor and spectator creates awkwardness, vulnerability, and extreme emotional tension, since it forces both spectator and actor into an uncomfortable intimacy. As the spectators’ expectations get unsettled, they are also tempted to ‘change the terms of engagement between self and other, actor and auditor’ (Solga 2014, 176): they become aware of the inner limits that define their own selves. Thus, by testing stage/audience proximity, BIOBOXES obliges each spectator to simultaneously play the role of observer and observed and enacts the panopticon. For Foucault, the panopticon was a laboratory of total surveillance (1977, 204), in which no individual could be left alone, but would always see themselves reflected in the observing gaze of the other (217). As a technique of coercion, it was also a prototype of today’s judicial system. It created superficial connections between seemingly free subjects under surveillance and prevented them from forming new communities, hence revealing the mechanisms of control practised by the state. BIOBOXES does exactly the same thing: it provides its audience with the freedom to choose the language of narration but also reminds them that their behaviour is controlled. The play’s subtitle—‘artifacting human experience’— reflects this performative mechanism, as it concretizes its subjects (the spectators) as objects of the Canadian system of institutionalized multiculturalism. BIOBOXES ‘is a site that encourages [spectators] to seriously consider the slippage between social performativity and theatrical performance, how racialized bodies register for different viewers, and precisely how publics make meaning’ (Kim 2016, 35). It ‘explores the affective and political dimensions of these representations, and demands that audiences take notice of how these two registers are often disconnected’ (44). BIOBOXES was inspired by Maiko Bae Yamamoto’s participation in the street performance festival in Guanajuato, Mexico. It models each of its performative spaces in the form of a one-on-one theatre encounter, which takes place in a standard cardboard box twenty-four inches wide, sixteen inches high, and sixteen inches deep (Yamamoto 2018, 2). This kind of theatre requires performers to mobilize their personal histories, so that in its narrative and performative creativity, biographical, meta-­ theatrical, and intercultural devices intersect. BIOBOXES invokes ‘the real

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on stage, to hem the absent subject with real markers of performance’ (Stephenson 2012, 130), in which two threads—the ‘verbatim biographical performance and the self-reflexive audience member’ (132)—can be juxtaposed and intermingled. To prepare BIOBOXES, the actors, sometimes immigrants themselves, wrote their own stories based on individual encounters with immigrants they knew. In their acting approaches, they looked for new levels of sincerity, something one can rarely achieve in the space of the traditional proscenium stage. They embraced an opportunity to speak in their native language and in English at the same time, in order to question artistically whether changing languages can significantly add to the meaning of the play (Memisevic 2018). The ‘Japanese box’, written and performed by Vancouver-based artist Cindy Mochizuki, for instance, engaged with the interviewee’s personal memories (Kim 2016, 34–35). As a result, the storyteller’s personal background of immigration became an act of authenticity, reflected in the objects and the designs of her box (Solga 2014, 175). The mini boxes that functioned as performative storytelling platforms were inspired by the Kamishibai, a crossover between oral storytelling and a puppet show. Kamishibai’s origin lies in the tradition of emaki (illustrated scrolls) that eighth-century Buddhist monks used to archive the history of their monasteries. Kamishibai is the ancestor of the contemporary manga book (Nash 2009, 57). Each platform features a performer/ narrator, kamishibaiya, who operates illustrated boards placed on a miniature stage, advancing the storyline with every new image placed on a new board. The narrative layout of Kamishibai relies on techniques resembling Eisenstein’s montage ‘to create contradiction, opposition, and conflict in the image on screen’ (111). BIOBOXES imitated the function of Kamishibai in that each of its six performances resembled a separate panel on the storyboard. In BIOBOXES, the platforms/boxes are connected to each other by invisible transitions that became tangible through the movement of the audience. The inner dramatic construction of the boxes facilitates movement, as each monologue involves the actor’s interaction with their performative environment and the story they tell. In the German box, for example, the performer takes a video of the spectator, whereas in the Japanese box the actor is asked to take photos. These activities force the audience to become ‘hyper-aware of the spectatorial structure shaping [their] experience’: ‘you’re trying to get inside it, and you’re having a

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dialogue with yourself at the same time as you’re having a dialogue with the box’ (Solga in Levin et al. 2009, 67). The challenge of this encounter marks the work of the performers as well. Una Memisevic—the performer in the Serbo-Croatian box—speaks of the physical and psychological strength that was required of her (2018). Not only was it physically demanding to perform bending within the box, but it was also intellectually and emotionally strenuous to switch from one language to another. Most importantly, it was both exciting and risky for her to meet her sole spectator knee to knee, since the success of the encounter would fully depend on the heightened sense of trust between the participants. To create this sense of trust, Memisevic used the kind of techniques needed to act in front of a camera, freezing her facial expressions and lowering her voice (Memisevic 2018). These techniques also recall Kamishibai, for in its earliest form, Kamishibai was ‘strikingly similar to silent films, with panels of intercut action and close-ups to express emotional intensity’ (Nash 2009, 61). In Japanese silent films, live actors—benshi—would enact the dialogue for ghosts on screen and comment offstage ‘on the pictorial action. When talkies finally came in, unemployed benshi actors turned to kamishibai’ (Nash 2009, 62). When a Japanese benshi narrator becomes visible within the action space of a Kamishibai, they turn into a three-dimensional paper character, a practice that suggests the process of reproducing a live human. Similarly, attending BIOBOXES, one becomes aware of one’s ‘role as audience member’ (Schweitzer in Levin et  al. 2009, 62). Through our presence within the box, or rather under our gaze, the actor’s body as if slowly turns into a puppet: ‘even if there were no puppets […] the actors’ bodies recalled the style of puppetry’, and they often used ‘their bodies as objects as well’ (Levin et al. 2009, 66). This way, BIOBOXES comments on our preoccupation with authenticity, specifically the truth of migration stories, in which real people and their suffering emerge as guarantors of empathy. Daniel Schulze proposes that the experience of truth and authenticity can be sustainable in one-to-one performance only when the act of storytelling emerges as a ‘very individual one’, suggesting the personal truth of the shared story, ‘along the lines of “I” trust you and will tell you my story’ (Schulze 2017, 124). To achieve these conditions of authenticity, it becomes the responsibility of the performer to ‘advance trust toward the spectators’ (124). In BIOBOXES, it is more the presence of the ‘live’ audience that grants this one-to-one production the sense of truth, as ‘the

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intimate geography of BIOBOXES not only brings the performer into high resolution but also renders me as audience member highly visible’ (Stephenson 2012, 131). In fact, BIOBOXES switches the search for authenticity back towards the audience. The intimacy of the setting and the implied awkwardness of the encounter make spectators focus on themselves—their feelings of embarrassment, confusion, hesitation, and inner conflict: ‘By focusing on what it means to be an audient, BIOBOXES redirects some significant portion of [the spectator’s] attention to what is happening on this side of the proscenium. What is real in this theatrical equation? I am’ (Stephenson 2012, 131). Practising bilingualism turned out to be the most contested mechanism of inclusion and exclusion in the work. It created ‘an alienating and distancing relationship’ between the stage and the auditorium, and it ‘emphasize[d] otherness’ (Stephenson in Levin et  al. 2009, 63). Many spectators, specifically unilingual Anglophones, felt alienated from the action. They obediently followed the rules and switched languages, thereby losing the thread of the narration and its meaning. This way, I argue, BIOBOXES foregrounded Derrida’s reading of hospitality as impossible empathy, as it can truly take place only in the language of the host (in Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 15–16). As Jenn Stephenson recollects, participating in BIOBOXES: I [Jenn Stephenson] wondered about putting the language control in the hands of the audience members. It is also about power. And about how I was managing my comfort … so yes, there’s an obligation to hear this story, in its original language, but I also felt that if I heard it in its original language, it was a bit more safe for me, because I wasn’t hearing the story in the same way. I felt I would be more engaged in the emotion if I could immerse myself in the details of the story. (Stephenson in Levin et al. 2009, 63)

Laura Levin compared her experience watching BIOBOXES to taking a selfie in a photo booth; this one-to-one encounter ‘stresse[d] the narcissism of the spectatorial experience. You enter the black box to have your own image reflected back to you’ (in Levin et al. 2009, 67). To Kim Solga, being a spectator of BIOBOXES presented an ethical challenge: In its physical setup [BIOBOXES] produces a level of intimacy that makes anything less than full-body immersion almost impossible. […] I feel, simply, compelled to act: to keep things moving, to honor the story, and to get

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to the end. And I wonder: is this what it means not just to ‘watch’ another immigrant story but to bear witness to the struggle of its telling, the awkwardness of its own making, but I’m also oddly unfazed by this hearing, in the oddly crowded space between performer/creator and me? (Solga 2010, 165)

My own experience of watching BIOBOXES was slightly different. Perhaps more like Una Memisevic, I felt shielded by my own immigrant biography and multilingualism. Like other spectators, I found myself lost in the narrative threads of the performances when I switched into a language I could not speak, but I did not feel frustrated about that. I was more interested in the technical aspects of this game. Switching from one language to the other has become the norm of my everyday communications, so for me BIOBOXES served both as a place to exhibit my language skills and as an invitation to explore the possibilities of multilingual theatre. At the same time, moving from one box to another, I was also becoming aware of the scripted nature of this experience and of the other ‘I’ that was emerging to observe, control, and even judge me. BIOBOXES made both its actors and spectators accomplices in the exercise of regulated diversity, displaying ‘both sides of the multicultural/intercultural divide’ (Solga 2010, 164). This ambiguity of different experiences brings us back to the major question I seek to answer in this book: how does today’s theatre shape the narratives of migration and cosmopolitanism? And does it really engage us with these stories? In its conclusions, I believe, BIOBOXES draws on Levinas’s ethics of encounter of the self ‘through responsibility for the other. […] In Levinas’s thinking, acknowledging the other means that the self steps out of relatedness to itself and into difference to itself. The humanity of the self exists in the acknowledgement of the mortality of the other and in making the other’s concerns one’s own’ (Pewny 2012, 275). In theatre, for spectators ‘the exposure of the other is an invocation, command or assignment for the self to show responsibility’, regardless of whether these spectators are directly involved in making a performance or ‘appear to be passively sitting in their seats’ (275). BIOBOXES foregrounds displacement as personally experienced by the actors/creators and their interviewees. Through the act of controlled movement and putting the power of language into the hands of the beholder, it stages the spectator both as the director of this play of encounters and as its object; it also makes one accountable for one’s actions.5 BIOBOXES evokes the panopticon as a new collectivity of

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individualized gazes and thus reflects the mechanisms of ideological and political control practised by Canadian multiculturalism, in which an individual subject and/or cultural group is granted freedom of self-expression, a gesture that paradoxically prohibits these individuals and groups from coming together in the utopian equality of a common place (Dib et al. 2008). As a metaphor for today’s panopticon of the border-crossing, BIOBOXES also generated an intercultural affect (Solga 2014, 173) of circles of power, with the internal layer located at the most intimate encounter in this play, between the actor and their individual spectator. The second layer referred to the interpersonal relationships between spectators: as one watched one’s individual mini-shows, one could also hear the presence of the others in the same performance space. Hence, one began to eavesdrop on and watch one another. James Long compared this experience to an overcrowded subway car or a restaurant in a multicultural urban setting, in which the distance between oneself and the other is compromised, pushing one into an uncomfortable but now habitual proximity to strangers (Long 2018). The third circle of power referred to the artificially created conditions of collective surveillance, to which each spectator and each performer belonged. Changing places for each new performative encounter, collecting trophies in the manner of cultural tourism, and sharing stories of immigration in the intimate setting of one-to-one performance constituted the artistic identity of the work. It also reinforced the spectator’s role as a voyeur situated outside the work of art. In the next section of this chapter, I discuss how the circles of power generated by the workings of a theatrical panopticon can be translated into a heterotopia of interactive theatre experiences. * * *

How iRan: Constructing the Divided Self Through the Heterotopia of an iPod How iRan: Three Plays for iPod—a site-specific, sonically based piece of immersive theatre—was inspired by the thirty years of Iran’s history after its Islamic Revolution in 1979. Created by Ken Cameron and Productive Obsession, it built on the experiences of migration told by Iranian-­ Canadians, specifically the story of the political blogger Hossein Derakhshan:

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[Known by his pen name ‘Hoder’], ‘Derakhshan began writing about Internet and digital culture for a popular reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan while living in Iran in 1999. After this paper was closed down by the judiciary system, he moved to Canada. […] From his base in Canada he wrote for The Guardian newspaper in the UK, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and spoke internationally about the use of the internet as a means for social and political reform. […] Upon a visit to Iran in 2008 Hossein was arrested and held without trial for 400 days. After global protests from Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and the Canadian government, Iran finally acquiesced to putting Hossein on trial … and subsequently sentenced him to 19 ½ years in prison’. (Cameron 2012)

Mapping and heterotopia constitute the central dramaturgical structure of this one-to-one site-specific play, which is designed to be enacted in the space of a public library. Its blueprint, which contains several itineraries to follow, is reproduced here (Fig. 6.1). ‘When you arrive at the library’, Ken Cameron explains, ‘you are asked to choose between a red, white, or green iPod—the three colours of the Iranian flag. Depending on which iPod you choose, you follow one of three protagonists through a story that spans thirty years’ (2014, 62). The story that I listened to, when I saw this performance in Ottawa, focused on Ramin, who left his wife and son in Iran to immigrate to Canada. Now a security guard in one of the local libraries, Ramin met a librarian Emily, an American expatriate, who emigrated from the USA to Canada to accompany her husband, a draft dodger from the Vietnam campaign. The random connection between these two characters and the impossibility of a happy ending for either of them was translated into the performative structures of the production, marked by the devices of theatrical mapping and heterotopia: Once you turn on the iPod, each of the ten tracks automatically advances you along a path. Each track directs you to artwork or installations strategically placed throughout the building to augment the audio experience. […] Areas of the library contain miniature models, window boxes, and/or other installation art. Each scene and each artwork juxtaposes themes of Iranian experience, immigration, social status, and rebellion against an imaginary narrative. But not all iPods have the same content. So no single spectator has enough information to piece together the entire narrative. Further, each iPod is set to shuffle, so you and everyone else experience your story in a non-linear order. (Cameron 2014, 62)

Fig. 6.1  How iRan timeline worksheet. (Image by Anton deGroot 2013)

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How iRan was imagined as a guided city tour or a maze, with each audience member following their own personalized route of experience and listening to the instructions and explanations through the iPod. It was based on Michel De Certeau’s grammar of space (1984) and its spectators’ solitude. To guide the audience’s movement, How iRan employed theatrical heterotopia (Tompkins 2014), constructed here through different mapping strategies. The sense of connectivity that we associate with digital technologies informed its structure and politics. Thus, How iRan became an artistic exploration of the act of encounter between an individual audience member and the performance space and between the ‘I’ of this spectator and the self as other. As spectators choose their iPods, they are also given a small three-­ colour map that helps them navigate the space but also serves as a metaphor of the journey. The map ‘allows you to follow your trajectory through both the narrative and the library’ and ‘makes clear your partial view of the narrative’ (Finn 2014, 59). It evokes proximity as a mechanism of this show’s reception, since it is tightly connected to the experience of mapping space by foot, the topic of the next chapter. By forcing every spectator to be responsible for their next physical move, the mapping causes dislocation, spatial confusion, and self-estrangement in the audience and thus creates for them new experiential conditions of performance intended to mimic the experiences of travelling. However, because walking from one exhibit to the next can be confusing and distracting, the small exhibits the audience members encounter on their route serve as punctuation marks for their individual experiences. The fact that the story is delivered in fragments means that these encounters, together with the mapping, oblige the spectator/participant to develop strategies in order to put this performative puzzle together. Every station reveals a new section of the story, which comes together only at the very end of the journey, when the group gathers in the neutral zone of the after-show space to exchange information and create closure. Walking creates pockets of not-knowing and suspense that border on a dream experience when spectators loosen their personal control mechanisms and begin to trust the shuffling apparatus of the iPod. This experience could make their minds wander and turn the emancipated spectator, the agent, into a traveller lost in the labyrinth. In their uncertainty as to the route and their need to move through the experience, spectators begin to resemble migrants. They suddenly realize that they are the guests, not the hosts in this performative city. As Cameron suggests:

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To a certain extent this experience replicates Canadian immigration systems; it mimics how newcomers to Canada have to deal with the incomprehensible language of our bureaucracy when you can be explained things many times but the language these systems use is impossible to understand. The experience of being lost and the need to find your spot again, being a little unsure of what is coming next, is this kind of somatic experience of displacement that marks this show. (Cameron 2018)

Using a public library as the play’s performative site gives How iRan special meaning. The public library is often the first point of contact with Canadian society for immigrants, serving them not only as a repository of knowledge, since there are books and other learning materials that immigrants can consult, but also as a space of safety—the last fortress of Western democracy. There is, therefore, a deeply thought-through connection between the physical site of How iRan and its fictional space, manifested through a theatrical heterotopia—a space of memory and a juncture of time put together within the ‘enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point’ (Foucault 1977, 197). As this performance/guided tour unfolds, each spectator visits different installations and listens to the dialogue. They also encounter other people who might be visiting the same sites but listening to different narrations through their own iPods. This juncture of narratives, visitations, and audiences’ different reactions to all these multidimensional encounters turns How iRan into an archive of meanings and a collective repository of its spectators’ memories and associations. The way the routes intersect, overlap, and somewhat repeat each other creates a theatrical heterotopia, whereby the library space merges with the fictional place of the play. The library itself—a place of fantasy, reflections, and memory— becomes a performative counter-site or ‘effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1986, 24). One can argue, as Cameron suggests, that in How iRan the site creates the story; and it envisions its ideal spectator, whose embodied experience of walking shapes by the rhythms and the structures of the performance (2014, 62). The public library space carries personal importance for Cameron, who started working on this script in Calgary Public Library. As the play developed, he became a silent observer of its inner creative folds, watching how the space of the library slowly influenced the play’s characters and stories (Cameron 2018). Cameron realized that, much like any artwork of

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relational aesthetics, How iRan referred to and mobilized peoples’ need for social engagement. It addressed the ‘fundamental ground of spectating’, the spectator’s ‘complexity of self-consciousness in the presence of others’, a type of intersubjectivity that wrestles with ‘embarrassment and our other affective responses to being with other people and being visible to them’ (White 2016, 23). It created ‘intimate, implicated, embodied’, and thus emancipated spectatorship (24). Cameron identifies the iPod as the performative and mobile site in which How iRan unfolds. It is also a miniature space of theatrical heterotopia—a somewhat distorted mirror of our own experiences of walking, encounter, and the gaze. Heterotopia can be outlandish, but it can also be connected to a real place by routes of experience and through mirror effects (Foucault 1986, 24). It can act as a space of crisis (when one behaves differently from societal norms and expectations) and can carry historical memory (25). A space of illusion, it can stage ‘places that are foreign to one another’ (25). In one-to-one performance, it can be manifested as heterochrony: a place where time is accumulated, and  when it becomes flowing and transitory, eternal, and historical (26). Similarly, the space of the public library, in which the stories of migration are told, and the time of the walk, which each of spectators spends listening to these stories, constitute the heterochrony of How iRan. Moreover, this performative heterochrony of How iRan translates into isolation, randomness, and sociability that Cameron associates with listening to an iPod and thus with the working mechanisms of theatrical heterotopia (Cameron 2018). In How iRan, isolation, randomness, and sociability serve as leading dramatic strategies of narrative construction, whereas the performative soundscape of this production functions as its storytelling. For Anton de Groot, a designer of the play, walking and listening are two very familiar experiences. How iRan requires each audience member ‘to be equally engaged with the audio inside and the visual installations outside’ (deGroot 2018). ‘I used to think of this piece to be deeply voyeuristic’, deGroot explains, ‘but bringing sound into it emphasises the idea of audience participation, implicating them into the unfolding drama, begging the questions of who we are in the moment, who we are to the characters, and who we are within the broader societal concerns that the work leans into’ (2018). To Cameron, listening to an iPod creates isolation as it immerses spectators in their own world, a world structured by sound and remote from other people (Cameron 2018). In this regulated environment of walking, the isolation creates randomness in the choices

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made by audience members. Because each iPod is set on shuffle, every spectator experiences a story route differently. The shuffle mode allows iPod users to build personal playlists and play them at random. In How iRan, the story and the dialogue are broken into three non-­ linear narratives. Depending on where an individual spectator begins their journey, they might pursue romance or witness a political drama: ‘if the first scene one listens to is a romantic encounter between Ramin and Emily, we interpret this play as a romantic tale; if the first scene we encounter is Hassan in jail, it becomes a political play; and if the first scene is Ramin’s arrival to Canada, the show turns into a story of migration’ (Cameron 2018). How iRan does not use a narrator, so the spectators/ listeners become their own storytellers: ‘The voice of each character dictates their perspective on the story and so it changes the listener’s perspective too. Although the story is written “objectively” from the 3rd person’s view, it becomes subjected in each listener’s mind. The listener decides whose story this is really about’ (Cameron 2018). Listening to the dialogue on the iPod promotes the audience’s further engagement with the landscape of the production: ‘our perceptions are being colored by audio recordings’, so that connecting sound to movement creates an effect of immersion, the way we ‘navigate the world’ (Di Benedetto 2010, 156). Listening to the iPod, one imagines the fictional environment of the play and its characters and relates them back to one’s historical knowledge of migration and personal experience of travelling: ‘Amplification translates the subtlety of touch into an audible play with surfaces and textures. If soundscape works, traces of tactility are embedded that help to link distance and everyday places. We explore auditory experiences and memories of natural and urban environments and attend to and reflect upon the depth of daily rituals’ (154). At the same time, ‘we wonder who this character is, where he is from, and what he thinks about the world. We make judgements about him because of the sounds that we hear and the rhythms that we feel. We relate to him as a live person’ (160). Auditory experiences provide spectators with ‘a tangible connection to the past, although there [can be no] direct experience of what they heard, smelled felt or saw’ (160). The goal of an embodied experience is to create a dynamic engagement ‘with stimuli beyond language and action’ (132). This ability to coordinate and juxtapose sound and movement in How iRan engender the time/space dichotomy of the action, a somatic effect similar to suspense. Not only does the audience need to move, but it also has to work through the emotional impact created by the sound score, so

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that listeners become more actively involved in co-constructing the show. The spectators’ hearing system functions as ‘an alert system’ (Di Benedetto 2010, 127), whereas sounds are ‘located in space, identified by type, intensity, and other features’ (150). Furthermore, depending on how a shuffle mechanism customizes the scenes, the meaning and the focus of the story change. Shuffling and randomness lead to non-linearity, fragmentation and memory gaps in the listening experience, effects that somewhat mimic the way immigrants remember their travel ordeals (Cameron 2018). This narrative structure suggests the trauma of being uprooted and justifies the non-linear dramaturgy: ‘The telling can leap forward or jump back in time, but what it also reveals is that for many immigrants the experience of moving into another place is non-linear, as they feel disconnected from the place of their origin and from the place of their new home’ (Cameron 2018). Random objects, unexpected encounters, and unfamiliar places might trigger migrants’ memories: ‘when an immigrant goes to a grocery store or passes someone on the street, a total stranger, suddenly they might find themselves transported into their past, completely different time and place from where they are now’ (2018). In designing the points of intersection between the different routes of How iRan, Cameron strove to highlight this type of fragmentation of the immigrant experience. In performance a single location could serve as a reference point for several different narrative moments in the play, whereby several spectators might find themselves at the site of one installation but listening to different sequences of the dialogue. Through this simultaneity, a site of performative intersubjectivity is created, and so spectators become the mirror surfaces of each other and of themselves. This simultaneity also imitates the working of cosmopolitanism: our subjectivity is ‘distributed beyond the brain and the body’; it is a result of our being ‘in the environment and in relation with other people’, so that ‘their presence frames our perception of ourselves and puts demands on our action and inaction’ (White 2016, 23). This response might be conscious or unconscious. Most effectively, it reveals how social space ‘manifests itself to us. It is the social affordance that makes us ready to know other people and to know ourselves in relationship to them’ (23). With its intention to mix the physical site of presentation with the imaginary action space of the story, How iRan merges the performance space of the audience (physically occupied by the walkers/listeners and installations) with the fictional space (to which one listens on the iPod) and the space of one’s imagination. What spectators observe in their inner

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minds remains fundamentally different to each member of the audience. In its performative dramaturgy of mirroring and simultaneity, in other words, specifically when each installation serves as an affective stimulus for the audience’s gaze, How iRan refers to the spatial/temporal experiences of migration. The objects and the rooms of How iRan, for instance, are often evocative of the cultural references Iranian migrants carry to Canada: Three of the boxes contain small airplanes representing the journey to the new world. In one, a solemn face looks out through the glass into the future. In another, a fractured abstract landscape represents the place where the planes land. In the final example, a blue sky frames the nose of the plane, while a drawing portrays a desolate scene in black and white. (Finn 2014, 61)

There is also a proverbial immigrant suitcase, with spices and books of Rumi poetry. One of the central images is a kitchen installation: it features a table, a carpet, and two chairs—all frozen in a moment of falling, leaning on each other, and holding onto the power of the Farsi words running across them. This image is particularly powerful as it evokes both the situation of the flight and the inability of words to depict the pain of people whose home has been destroyed or left behind. This precarious positioning of objects suggests the destruction of the coherent world, now resting in ruins, an image imprinted in the memory of the artist who offered this installation but opted to remain anonymous, an image now engraved in the heterotopic space of Ottawa’s central library and in the minds of its audience.6 The final dramaturgical principle of making How iRan is socialization, used as a device of mapping the performance space and as a strategy of its reception, with the production’s second act—the gathering of a community—crowning the experience and thus serving the play as a ritual of communal witnessing. Act Two is a meeting point for the spectators and the director to exchange impressions and thoughts about the experiential part of the event. Ken Cameron acts as a facilitator of this exchange and as a spectator of the performative action of the audience. This exchange helps one construct a sense of community: as spectators come together to discuss the story they have just witnessed and to process their personal physical, emotional, and affectual journeys, they also ‘fill in the narrative blanks’ (Langston 2016). They all agree: listening to the story through the iPod and simultaneously experiencing the narration through the act of walking

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creates a space of safety to engage with the production and also foregrounds each participant’s vulnerability. The way the audience members connect auditory and spatial information in their minds creates a cognitive confusion that resonates in their navigation of the performance space and defines their experience as a meeting with the self. Act Two reinforces this process: it becomes an act of community building with the spectators taking on the roles of storytellers. Automatically, people who shared the colour of the route become friends and allies, evoking in this gesture of solidarity many immigrant experiences. Hence, if in Act One disruption and reconstruction serve as milestones of audience labour, Act Two helps bring individual experiences to reconciliation: As we hand in our iPods and receive our identification [cards]  back, the experience changes once again. We find that the photos on our IDs have been replaced with an image we recognize from the show. That image— now called Blindness—is a replication of another picture. The original, by Canadian artist Francis A. Wiley, had been stolen and made into street art by Icy & Sot—and now is repurposed to replace our faces. In addition to being gathered together by Cameron at the end of the show, we also become part of the performance in every sense. (Finn 2014, 60)

In other words, in its complex systems of encounters, gazing, and listening, How iRan relies on three performative dimensions—the visual (what we see and who sees us), audio (what we hear and who hears us), and movement (how much we are asked to physically move during the show and how (non)restricted this movement is). In its spatial dramaturgy, it brings to life a metaphor of migration. It exploits techniques of fragmentation, montage, and patterning to challenge the idea of the linear, self-contained, and coherent narratives of travel. The play speaks ‘about our world today’ and about Canada (Finn 2014, 61), and it foregrounds theatre-going and theatre-viewing as the experience of gaze and encounter, as social and communal activity, and as a crossover of centrifugal and centripetal vectors of mobility. * * * Conceptualizing the artistic project of modernity, Sascha Bru argues that ‘experimenting with modes of perception, experience and representation in art, the modernist avant-garde held the promise of an alternative to

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here and now. From the start it thereby also sounded political overtones’ (2006, 9). Not surprisingly, in their plays, paintings, music, and literary works, many exilic artists of that period chose to engage with the stylistic idiom and artistic devices of the avant-garde to more accurately portray the cognitive and perceptual processes that marked their exilic conditions and the exilic artist’s estranged gaze and subjectivity. Often, they opted for the devices of fragmentation, suspension of disbelief, syncopation, distorted focalization, and the grotesque. In their philosophical texts, plays and novels, paintings, or music, these artists utilized the devices of estrangement and surrealist imagery to depict the alienating power of the exilic voyage as a separation of self from self and self from other. The artistic practices of one-to-one performance fall into a similar vein of experiment: they mobilize the relational dramaturgy of everyday transnational encounter to shape the performance and the audience spaces of theatre. When attempting to evoke the experiences of migration in performance, these theatrical events often challenge the traditional place of the theatre spectator as a voyeur in control of, and with authority over, the action unfolding on stage. One-to-one productions aim to blur the borders between the artwork and its addressee. They often focus on and investigate the isolation, separation, displacement, and spatial/temporal disorientation of the spectator. Being organized according to the principles of relational aesthetics and dramaturgy, they repeatedly evoke the conditions of perception practised in performance art. Thus, one-to-one productions often leverage the excitement of the real promised in each individual spectator’s active involvement as they perform and give life to the narrative structures of the performance. For the encounter to be authentic, however, the participation must always be new and exciting. Peggy Phelan writes: ‘The belief that perception can be made endlessly new is one of the fundamental drives of all visual arts. But in most theatre, the opposition between watching and doing is broken down; the distinction is often made to seem ethically immaterial’ (1992, 161). In one-to-­ one plays, however, the power of judgement and gaze resides both with the spectator/participant and with the work of the performer: ‘Always compensatory, however, the law of the gaze is invested with a lure, an image to distract one from that failure. The lure is the erotic kernel of the gaze. Desire is enflamed by the lure, by the gaping space between the gaze and the eye. In the opening created by the distinction between the eye and the gaze, the seeing I is split (again)’ (34).

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The relational dramaturgy of the one-to-one performance activates ‘the full interplay between the highlighted borders’ (Boenisch 2014, 227). By utilizing proximity and intimacy, the one-to-one theatrical event acts upon its spectators emotionally and politically. Its major characteristics include the durational and somewhat structured presence of the spectators, their supposed freedom to interact with the performance by engaging with it physically and (syn)aesthetically, as well as the situational, site-specific, and environmental forms of production that incite more interaction between audience members, and not necessarily between them and the work of art. Most importantly, the productions discussed in this chapter, like other works of relational aesthetics, have the capacity to suspend their audiences’ disbelief by making them physically active. Hence the relational dramaturgy of the labour of the spectator reflects the theatre’s ability to speak individually to each of us and to make us transpose the emotional stimulation we receive during the action into the working of the intellect (Boenisch 2014, 235). What is new to this aesthetics is the theatre’s focus on constructing acts and environments of authenticity, its ability to stimulate the working of the spectator’s ‘I’ and to create situations when the formal encounter between ‘I’ as myself and ‘I’ as other can take place. The strength of this aesthetics lies in activating a Rancièrian call for an emancipated and politically aware spectator (2009). By forcing each individual member of the one-to-one play into a situation of discomfort and choice, the chosen works demonstrate how this engaged participation and the term ‘par(t)-take in the world’ (Boenisch 2014, 227) can be brought to life. Often a one-to-one production causes its spectators to experience a new sense of sociality and community. The effects can be both positive, as in the example of How iRan, and negative, as in the case of BIOBOXES, when the singularity of our personal experiences is only further reinforced. The concluding chapter of this book examines how the spectator’s singularity can be challenged and redefined, specifically in those cosmopolitan theatre practices that seek to reshape theatrical collectivity as affective citizenship and communitas.

Notes 1. Flight was the winner of the 2017 Herald Angel Award of the Edinburgh International Festival. It is based on the 2011 novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. Commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and supported by Creative Scotland and Glasgow City Council, it was presented in

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association with the Beacon Arts Centre. It was adapted for the stage by Oliver Emanuel and directed by Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds, with designs by Jamie Harrison and Rebecca Hamilton, Mark Melville, and Simon Wilkinson. I saw it live at the 2017 Edinburgh Theatre Festival. 2. BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience (2007) was created by Theatre Replacement of Vancouver, as part of an ongoing collaboration between James Long and Maiko Yamamoto that began in 2003. In December 2019, Maiko Yamamoto and James Long were awarded the Siminovitch Prize in directing. BIOBOXES premiered at the High Performance Rodeo Festival, Calgary. It was created and performed by Anita Rochon, Marco Soriano, Paul Ternes, Cindy Mochizuki, Donna Soares, Samantha Madely, and Una Memisevic, with designs by Kofu Yamamoto and Candelario Andrade and dramaturgy by Kris Nelson. The text was published in 2012. Please, refer to Rochon et al. (2012). I saw BIOBOXES at the Dorothy Somerset Theatre on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver during the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, June 1, 2008. 3. How iRan: Three Plays for iPod premiered at the 2013 IMPACT Festival in Kitchener, Ontario, a multicultural theatre festival produced by MT Space theatre company. Written and directed by Ken Cameron, it featured Anton deGroot and Richard McDowell’s designs, with the voices of Mani Soleymanlou, Catherine Fitch, Niaz Salimi, Ravi Jain, and anonymous members of the Canadian-Iranian Community recorded at Bamahang Studios in Toronto. I attended this production on November 16, 2016, at the Ottawa Public library. 4. Initially the carousel was to be eight metres in diameter, but the Edinburgh International Festival was able to provide only a space that would accommodate a carousel of four metres. This drastically changed the design and the speed with which the diorama rotates. The story was to be adjusted to a two-level structure, which made the inner layout of the carousel not only dramatically dense but also complex in its rhythm (Edmunds 2018). 5. Many spectators who came to see BIOBOXES shared the immigrant experiences reflected in its stories; if they did not share them personally, they were aware of migration that took place elsewhere. James Long cites the experience of his own mother, who resides in rural Canada and who came to see BIOBOXES seeking cultural and theatrical encounters. For her, the intimacy of this work was both overwhelming and life-changing (Long 2018). 6. Among the Iranian-Canadian artists who participated in the project, the role of Majdi Bou-Matar, the artistic director of the MT Space Theatre (Kitchener, Ontario), is very important, as he introduced Cameron to the Iranian community in the Waterloo Region of Canada. The Ottawa-based artist Shahla Bahrami provided one of its installations inspired by a series of community workshops she had offered. Bahrami created a giant replica of

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the Iranian flag which hung in the Ottawa Library’s major staircase. Using the notion of a ‘magic carpet’, she wove the participants’ sketches together and framed them with green and red panels, thus creating an act of homecoming.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, 84–258. Austin: Texas University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1970. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–253. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Billington, Michael. 2017. Miniature Models Tell Epic Refugee Story. The Guardian, August 6. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/aug/06/ flight-review-edinburgh-festival-vox-motus-church-hill-theatre-refugees. BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience. 2007. http://theatrereplacement. org/portfolio-item/bioboxes/. Boenisch, Peter M. 2014. Acts of Spectating: The Dramaturgy of the Audience’s Experiences in Contemporary Theatre. In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, ed. Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, 225–243. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses Du Réel. Brothers, Caroline. 2011. Hinterland. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bru, Sascha. 2006. The Phantom League. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-­ Garde and Politics. In The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (1906–1940), ed. Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens, 9–35. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Cameron, Ken. 2012. How iRan: Three Plays for iPod. Media Kit. ———. 2014. How iRan: Three Plays for iPod (Selections from the Green, White, and Red iPod Scripts). Canadian Theatre Review 159: 62–67. ———. 2018. Personal Interview, March 2. Cohn, Neil. 2013. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cooper, Neil. 2017a. Vox Motus Makes Theatre in Miniature to Tell a Tragic Story. The Herald, July 31. http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/15445169. Vox_Motus_make_theatre_in_miniature_to_tell_a_tragic_story/. ———. 2017b. Candice Edmunds, Jamie Harrison and Vox Motus  – Flight. Coffee-Table Notes, August 1. https://coffeetablenotes.blogspot. com/2017/08/candice-edmunds-jamie-harrison-and-vox.html. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. deGroot, Anton. 2018. Personal Interview, March 16.

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Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Di Benedetto, Stephen. 2010. The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre. New York: Routledge. Dib, Kamal, Ian Donaldson, and Brittany Turcotte. 2008. Integration and Identity in Canada: The Importance of Multicultural Common Spaces. Canadian Ethnic Studies 40 (1): 161–187. Edmunds, Candice. 2018. Personal Interview, April. Enriquez, Mary Schneider. 2017. Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums. Finn, Patrick. 2014. Inside Information: Ken Cameron’s How iRan. Canadian Theatre Review 159 (Summer): 58–61. Flight. 2017. Vox Motus. http://www.voxmotus.co.uk/flight/. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. ———. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacratics 6 (1): 22–27. Fraser, Steve. 2017. Flight at Church Hill Theatre: Vox Motus Presents a Miniature Story of Hope. The Weereview, August 6. http://theweereview.com/review/ flight-2/. Hassan, Ihab. 2003. Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust. In Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer, 199–213. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London and Henley: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kim, Christine. 2016. The Minor Intimacies of Race: Asian Publics in North America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Langston, Patrick. 2016. How iRan: A Thoughtful and Intriguing Production. Capital Critics Circle, September 28. http://capitalcriticscircle.com/ iran-thoughtful-intriguing-production/. Lauzon, Claudette. 2015. A Home for Loss: Doris Salcedo’s Melancholic Archives. Memory Studies 8 (2): 197–211. Levin, Laura, Marlis Schweitzer, Kim Solga, Jenn Stephenson, and Belarie Zatzman. 2009. Performing Outside of the Box. Canadian Theatre Review 137 (Winter): 61–67. Levine, Michael G. 2006. The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Long, James. 2018. Personal Interview, February. Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)Aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Massey, Dorren. 2014. Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John Bird et  al., 60–70. London and New York: Routledge. McAuley, Gay. 1999. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Memisevic, Una. 2018. Personal Interview, February 25. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Film Making. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Nash, Eric P. 2009. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater. New York: Abrams ComicArts. Oliver, Emanuel. 2017. Flight: Audio Script. Unpublished. Pewny, Katharina. 2012. The Ethics of Encounter in Contemporary Theater Performances. Journal of Literary Theory 6 (1): 271–278. Phelan, Peggy. 1992. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Postema, Barbara. 2013. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Rochester: RIT Press. Rochon, Anita, Marco Soriano, Paul Ternes, Cindy Mochizuki, Donna Soares, and Una Memisevic. 2012. BioBoxes. New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays, 127–168. Edited by Kim Solga & Roberta Barka. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Rokem, Freddie. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Salcedo, Doris. 2017. From the Artist. In Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, ed. Mary Schneider Enriquez, xvii–xix. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums. Schulze, Daniel. 2017. Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Make It Real. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Solga, Kim. 2010. Artifacting an Intercultural Nation: Theatre Replacement’s BIOBOXES. TDR 54 (1, Spring): 161–166. ———. 2014. Meet Me at the Border: Theatre Replacement’s BIOBOXES.  In Theatres of Affect: New Essays on Canadian Theater, ed. Erin Hurley, 171–192. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Stephenson, Jenn. 2012. BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience. In New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays, ed. Kim Solga and Roberta Barker, 129–133. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Tompkins, Joanne. 2014. Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space. Sydney: Palgrave Macmillan. Veltruský, Jiřy. 1990. Man and Object in Theatre. In The Prague School Selected Writings 1929–1946, ed. Peter Steiner, 83–92. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wagner, Mieke. 2006. Other Bodies: The Intermedial Gaze in Theatre. In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, 125–136. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press.

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White, Gareth. 2016. Theatre in the ‘Forest of Things and Signs’. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4 (1): 21–33. Yamamoto, Maiko. 2018. Tiny Thinking: Building for a Very Small Stage. Email to the author, February 16. Zaroulia, Marilena. 2018. Performing that Which Exceeds Us: Aesthetics of Sincerity and Obscenity During ‘the Refugee Crisis’. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23 (2): 179–192.

CHAPTER 7

Staging Affective Citizenship: Constructing Communities of Hope

Jill Dolan, writing about the theatre’s potential to create utopian communities that might instil hope in their participants and audiences, asks: ‘Why do people come together to watch other people labour on stage, when contemporary culture solicits their attention with myriad other forms of representation and opportunities for social gathering?’ (2001, 455). In response to her own question, Dolan suggests: ‘I believe that theatre and performance can articulate a common future, one that’s more just and equitable, one in which we can all participate more equally, with more chances to live fully and contribute to the making of culture’ (456). Cosmopolitan theatres often share and practise this idea of the theatre performance as a space to rehearse the utopian future; they offer what Dolan calls ‘the intense present of performance’, in which can be staged ‘if not expressly political then usefully emotional, expressions of what utopia might feel like’ (456). By performing acts of communal encounter, cosmopolitan theatres also propose training in interpersonal and cross-­cultural behaviour. They enact utopian communities dramaturgically by telling political stories of encounters and global migration, criticizing the realities of crossing borders, and constructing a message of hope and, affectively, by deploying immersive, participatory, and durational strategies of performance. What interests me here is how cosmopolitan theatre transforms its spectators into members of a utopian communitas or affective citizens (Fortier 2010), whose belonging to the group ‘is contingent on personal feelings and acts that extend beyond the individual self as well as beyond © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_7

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the “private” realm of family and kin, but which are also directed towards the community’ (Fortier 2010, 22). At the core of this practice is the transformative aesthetics of politically and affectually engaged spectatorship (Fischer-Lichte 2018), based on the processes of creating a community. In theatre, actors’ and spectators’ ‘bodily co-presence’ plays ‘a key role in generating a feedback loop’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 51) or energy and information exchange between the stage and the audience. It serves as a foundation for making theatrical communities both in traditional or designated theatre spaces and within participatory, immersive, and durational performances. These theatrical communities may be stable or mobile, and they can be defined by physical and emotional borders, which separate its inhabitants from the outer world of non-fiction and the everyday. They can also be physically real or imaginary, as well as temporal, ephemeral, and transformative. To better understand how a theatrical community originates and functions, I will examine three examples of contemporary performance, whose themes focus on personal exile and collective migration and who stage the emotional labour of migrants and travellers as affective citizens. These performative events comment on the concept of community as a phenomenon of social and political order, which can be made up of people who come to do things together either by choice or by force. People on the move—migrants and travellers—often form such communities of survival. Their collective presence on the land of unfriendly or hostile hosts can become an act of spectacle and resistance, and it can be a gesture of agency manifested in ‘the productivity and creativity of migrant mobility’ (Rygiel 2011, 4). Often migrants conceive the idea of belonging ‘in the plural and as non-static allegiances’ (Parati 2017, 14). They build ‘personal and communal spaces in which the connections in, at and from a distance are mediated through affect’ (23). By studying affect as an experience ‘shared by people on the move’ (23) and seeing how migrants refigure and remake the geographies of their host countries, we can explore the possible political implications of building and presenting a utopian community on stage. To study how cosmopolitan theatre mobilizes this affective citizenship, in this chapter I examine theatrical communities as anthropological (Turner 1969, 1975), political (Anderson 1991), and performative constructs (Fischer-Lichte 2008). This discussion begins with an analysis of Katie Mitchell’s 2012 adaptation of W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn,1 which stages its protagonist’s individual journey through the English countryside. This production exemplifies the construction of utopian communities on stage

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by casting an ensemble of four performers to enact the consciousness of its immobile protagonist. The onstage space of The Rings of Saturn literally transforms into the mind of Sebald’s autobiographical narrator, whereby his emotions, thoughts, and memories are transmitted through the speech of the four performers who stand frontally aligned. The four performers narrate the protagonist’s actions and emotions, and they use objects to recreate the environment and soundscape of his journey, while documentary footage of British landscapes and their destruction is projected behind them. The soundscape created by the actors foregrounds the sense of the ‘vanishing of conversational dialogue’. Their voices act as ‘the Sprechraum [space defined by speech]’ which ‘include[s] both stage and auditorium’ (Hauthal 2018, 274). The chorus, however, does not aim to impersonate Sebald’s autobiographical character. The effect is similar to that of a radio play: the actors’ onstage presence turns into a sound transmission, their bodies serving as annunciators of the text. Thus, ‘by visually, and often anachronistically, incorporating sound technology and performer/operators into the performance’, Mitchell’s staging makes Sebald’s journey tangible (Brown 2005, 116) and therefore creates a type of utopian community on stage. My second example is The Jungle (2017), written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson—a semi-fictional retelling of the dismantling of a refugee camp in Calais (the Calais Jungle or Camp de la Lande) that took place in October 2016.2 The play casts its characters as an onstage assembly of agents and its spectators as a collective body of witnesses. It creates an immersive setting resembling a refugee camp, with a large portion of its audience positioned in close proximity to the stage, while others are seated in the balcony. The actors/characters—refugees and volunteers who reside in the camp—mingle with the audience, who in turn seem to be also cast as the camp’s dwellers. In this way, the play connects its fictional space to that of the auditorium, thereby staging a theatrical community offstage. The political objective of The Jungle is to create a situation of role reversal (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 40–51), in which the audience member becomes an active maker of the performance, without necessarily actively participating in or interrupting the action on stage. In its playfulness, however, it falls short of its utopian promise: neither fully participatory nor fully immersive, it balances on the dangerous edge of popular entertainment and risks commodifying the subject of migration and profiting from the plight of the refugee.

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In the final case study examined in this chapter, I look at experimental forms of participatory performance based on the dramaturgy of walking (Heddon and Turner 2012), which leads to making up of a new communitas of hope. Refugee Tales is a multidisciplinary project, initiated by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and Kent University.3 It includes three volumes of migration stories edited by Anna Pincus and David Herd, an online performance 28 Tales for 28 Days enacted by leading UK actors, and walks in solidarity with refugees. In their performative aesthetics, the walks of Refugee Tales aim to turn the spaces of migration into places of solidarity, comradeship, and personal and institutional commitment. They are durational, participatory, and performative. The project—both in its literary functions and as a series of performative walks—capitalizes on the concept of encounter, in which the physical, emotional, and affective work of the participants overlaps, thus creating one more model for constructing a performative community of hope. By building utopian communities and creating affective citizenship, I argue in this chapter, cosmopolitan theatre often invites its spectators to endure physical and emotional labour. Although it does not always keep its utopia-making promise, every so often it showcases the affective potential of political theatre and uses the theatrical community as a device to create an activist performance. * * *

Staging Affective Citizenship: Creating Communities of Hope The notion of utopian community adapted for this chapter stems from Victor Turner’s definition of the communitas as a social antistructure of equal individuals (1975, 45–96). ‘A direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities’ (132), communitas can be linked ‘with spontaneity and freedom’ (49). Liminality defines communitas as a place of in-betweenness, dedicated to acts of comradeship. A communitas is a space for rites of passage but can also manifest as a state between the point of departure and the point of arrival in a physical, social, or existential experience of a journey. Although Turner’s theory has encountered substantial criticism, Benedict Anderson adapted communitas to his view of a nation as ‘an imagined political community’ that is ‘inherently limited and

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sovereign’ (Anderson 1991, 5). Narrative and performative imagination is the driving force of Anderson’s imagined community. Each nation and each community are distinguished ‘by the style in which they are imagined’ (5) and by the practices they employ to construct their affective subjects and affective citizenship. Refugees moving from space to space as ever-changing gatherings of strangers exemplify Turner’s idea of a communitas. Often formed as temporal places of belonging, these imagined communities emerge on the margins of society, with their members connected to each other by the principles of belonging. These processes stipulate the feelings of affect, which in turn can lead the members of these marginalized communities to recognize their sense of belonging as affective citizenship based on the autonomy of the community’s citizens, both in the context of the emotional bonds formed between the subjects and through their multiple commitments to ‘intersecting communities’ (Mookherjee 2005, 37). Affective citizenship is critical and transformative. It transgresses family relations and characterizes the significant bonds that join people across society, specifically with those who share similar experiences of ‘social disadvantage’ (Mookherjee 2005, 36). These experiences are ‘often constituted through direct or remembered pain, loss, humiliation or even the psychological disorientation’ (36). Affective citizenship implies that all subjects partake in collective responsibility ‘for the existing unequal relations between social groups’ (37). This responsibility is based on the citizens’ recognition that ‘the condition of hybridity is central to all identities’ (37). Building affective citizenship implies affirming and revaluing a community and creating emotional bonds within it, as well as reclaiming public places for its representation. Affective citizenship means understanding affect as the relation of emotions to space and realizing that through community building people can actively participate in political decision-­ making. Issues of critical and ethical commitment to the representation of individual and communal bodies in the arts are at the forefront of the affective citizenship project, which can therefore become a device of performance making and reception. Cosmopolitan theatre stages affective citizenship by challenging the stage/audience power binaries and by evoking communitas on and off stage. By telling stories of travelling and obliging the bodies of the performers to confront the spectators’ bodies in the space/time of a live performance, it puts the spotlight on everyday models of interpersonal communication and creates utopian communities bound together by

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hope, in which individuals come to form a distinctive post-migratory society. This performative experience can serve as an act of resistance, since it stipulates a ‘positive role for the stranger’ (Rumford 2013, 33). Instead of ‘heralding a new multicultural consensus’, cosmopolitan theatre can stage the stranger ‘as a figure which forces us to think creatively about diversity and reminds us that one-size-fits-all social policies fail to account for the unpredictability of the social relations which strangeness can engender’ (33). It can turn a nameless migrant into a proper individual, someone who possesses a personal history, memory, and agency. Moreover, cosmopolitan theatre can stage affective citizenship by helping individuals reconnect with one another through shared traumatic memory and reclaim their position as subjects of minority cultures within the majority. In theatre, by staging affective citizenship, ‘we can move beyond a concept of citizenship that is constructed from above and move toward a discussion of a plurality of articulation of how migrants, refugees and their children define (or redefine) citizenship’ (Parati 2017, 14). Focusing on the spatial/temporal characteristics of a performance, implicating spectators in the action, challenging stage/audience binaries, and building imaginary communities on and off stage all constitute a toolkit of artistic devices that can be used to rehearse affective citizenship as well as to ‘encourage people who take their belonging for granted to rethink and re-feel that space they think they own’ (28). Central to these processes is the idea of building theatrical communities of hope (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 40–51), which can be enabled on stage through the dramaturgical devices of storytelling, creation of fictional worlds, and work of the actors. They can also appear offstage through the labour of spectatorship that takes place within the audience and performance spaces of traditional, as well as immersive, participatory, and durational performance practices and projects. Space in theatre comprises a synthesis of visual, auditory, and tactile components and signs. It presents a tension between the physicality of a given place and the fiction (McAuley 1999, 25), and so in performance, it works physically, semiotically, and emotionally. The theatre spaces become cultural, social, and affective places of encounter and facilitate foregrounding audience reception ‘as part of a social experience’ (25), regardless of whether the play is performed within a designated theatre building or it is a site-specific production. Building the fictional world of theatre presupposes creating an energy feedback loop, a set of emotional and affectual connections between the stage and the audience (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 40), which originates within the audience space claimed by the spectators

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(McAuley 1999, 25). When theatre space and audience space overlap and the two groups of agents—performers and audiences—‘meet and work together to create the performance experience’, a performance space emerges (26). This performance space is of special interest in cosmopolitan theatre. Like a spatial-temporal lagoon, it ‘accentuates the individual’s response to the performance’ (McAuley 1999, 248) and facilitates ‘the construction of a sense of occasion, or a sense of the group as a collective’ (249). It builds on the social energy aroused by stage/audience interaction and can serve as means of constructing a dynamic and engaged spectatorship. The performance space can be activated either through the creation of a special atmosphere between the stage and the audience or by mobilizing spectators, that is, modifying the proximity of spectating and acting bodies. A performance space ‘can facilitate the formation of a sense of the group as collectivity’ (250), whereby ‘the visibility of spectators to each other and the performers during the performance’ can function as a catalytic agent to release audience energy (275). The actor/spectator bodily co-presence within this performance space constitutes the theatrical community (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 51). It ‘highlight[s] the fusion of the aesthetic and the social’ (55) and mobilizes physical contact, including the interplay between proximity and distance, as well as touch and liveness. For example, participatory and durational performance—specifically political activism and performance walking—can emphasize performance spatiality not as a given condition of theatre or the set of atmospheres on stage, but as something that must be ‘brought forth anew’ (114) through interpersonal relationality among the makers, the participants, and the space of a performative event. Performance spatiality builds on the devices of audience provocation and marshals theatregoers’ natural predisposition for role-playing, so that ‘the responses and actions of the participants become part of the fabric of the show’ (370). Often, it invites spectators to participate in the action by making them mobile. Political marches, migratory processions, occupy movements, and flash mobs utilize performance spatiality, immersion, and duration as their artistic strategies to create a fleeting and utopian communitas of engaged participants. Similar mechanisms of entrapment and community building can be found in immersive theatre projects that employ the dramaturgy of walking, performance spatiality, and duration to make political theatre of migration and cosmopolitanism. These performances often integrate religious and social rituals, community celebrations, and forms of public mourning, including interactive street performances and processions.

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They can also ‘use installations and expansive environments, which have mobile audiences, and which invite audience participation’ (White 2012, 221). Such interventions can rely on the visceral experiences of the spectators (229), with the scale of immersion varying from intimate one-on-one plays to expansive productions that attract many spectators. Participating in immersive and durational events can thrust spectators into new environments remote from their everyday experiences and can reinforce their creative agency. They can also lead to an uncanny recognition of self as other. Thus, the creation of an immersive community as an act of choreographing absence stages post-Brechtian types of estrangement and enables the spectator’s encounter with the other within the self. In the following, I propose a brief analysis of three performative events that use dramaturgical, theatrical, participatory, and immersive means to create utopian communitas on stage and within their performance spaces. The chosen productions demonstrate how cosmopolitan communities can be built on stage in the fictional space of a traditional theatre work (The Rings of Saturn), between the stage and the audience (The Jungle), and offstage in the participatory and durational performance of walking (Refugee Tales). My analysis begins with a discussion of the productions that require the least mobility and physical work from their spectators and proceeds to those that are fully dependent on the physical labour of their participants. * * *

The Rings of Saturn: On the Architectonics of an Onstage Theatrical Communitas As Rebecca Walkowitz writes, W. G. Sebald’s postmodern ‘novels gather disparate stories of migration and globalization’ (Walkowitz 2006, 153). Positioned at the crossroads of fiction, memoir, travelogue, and photo-­ embedded literature, they focus on the individual voyages of their characters and thus enhance their readers’ cosmopolitan worldview. The Rings of Saturn exemplifies this practice: at the core of its narrative structure are the experience of displacement and the act of writing. The novel, which is comprised of ten steps or encounters—the ten rings of Saturn—paints an extensive picture of historical and personal destruction as observed by Sebald’s semi-autobiographical narrator, a cosmopolitan flâneur, and it

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reflects Sebald’s personal trajectory of exile. This use of auto-ethnography is thus revealed to be another important tactic of critical cosmopolitanism. As we follow Sebald’s narrator through the English countryside, we see him crossing histories and continents. To translate Sebald’s autobiographical account of his 1992 pilgrimage into a theatre play, Katie Mitchell opted for self-reflection and distancing, both major tactics of critical cosmopolitanism (Walkowitz 2006, 154–155). I saw Mitchell’s adaptation in German with French subtitles presented for the international and multilingual audiences at the Avignon Theatre Festival, a condition that re-enforced the sense of estrangement and vertigo inherited in the novel. To Katie Mitchell, a British theatre director who often chooses not to work in her native country or language, directing Sebald’s prose about the English countryside, written by a German author who spent most of his life in voluntary exile in the UK teaching German literature and writing books in German, offers a unique opportunity to explore the cosmopolitan imagination. Responding to the question as to why she picked this material in the 2010s, Mitchell says: In recent years, I worked a lot in Germany and I made many trips between my native island and the mainland, which has considerably changed the way I look at my country. The fact that W. G. Sebald, a native German, came to settle almost permanently in England in the seventies […] allowed me to discover an image of my country very different from the one I had. (Mitchell in Perrier 2012)

In addition, adapting this book for stage allows Mitchell to pursue her search for a new theatre aesthetics to express the experience of the contemporary nomad and to think about her own position in British theatre and in the world.4 ‘In 1992, Sebald crossed [the east coast of England] on foot’ Mitchell explains (in Perrier 2012). ‘I went through it on my own in 2011 and saw first-hand the changes—and especially the destruction— that had taken place between these two dates. I wanted to “celebrate” in my own way this terrible movement and crossing landscapes […] I felt that when I walked on the coast of Suffolk, I made a pilgrimage inverse of his, but that it brought us closer’ (Mitchell in Perrier 2012). As a result, Mitchell opts for the dramaturgy of walking as her storytelling device to enact The Rings of Saturn on stage. This theatrical strategy helps the director to demonstrate how global networks of history can influence and

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change local experiences; it also invites Mitchell’s audience to roam inside the narrator’s mind and by extension in their own selves. Death and its proximity are the leitmotif of The Rings of Saturn. In 1992, Sebald took a long walk through the county of Suffolk in Eastern England. A year to the day after his departure, he found himself in the hospital completely paralysed. Memories of the journey returned to him in horrifying images of historical and ecological destruction. The narrator’s attempt to record these memories constitutes the narrative thrust of the novel, whereby the very act of writing allows Sebald to return to his past and encounter his self both as self and as a product of history. The book opens with the author’s musings on the significance of the death of a single person, with the following chapters describing dying and decay as a historical phenomenon, including the debasement of land and property, ethnic wars and colonialization, and the destruction of nature and its species. In Chapter 6, the book speaks about the disappearance of history into time and about the irresponsibility of the West’s intrusions into and destruction of the East. In Chapters 7 and 8, the author examines the destruction of the self as a concept of settlement. As the focus zooms back on the narrator, in Chapter 9, Sebald inserts a photograph of himself under the Lebanese cedar at Ditchingham Park (Sebald 1999, 263–264). On the following pages, he describes the growth and the decline of this park, which culminate in a hurricane of the autumn of 1987: ‘Without warning, the storm came up out of the Bay of Biscay, moved along the French west coast, crossed the English Channel and swept over the south-east part of the island out into the North Sea’ (Sebald 1999, 265). The storm was devastating: it destroyed the glory of the park and turned its life upside down (268). ‘The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay’ (268). The birds, who would wake the forest at dawn, fell silent, so ‘there was now not a living sound’ to be heard (268). By focusing on this particular episode of natural destruction, among many others in the book, Sebald renders the tenth ring of Saturn visible. The final passages are dedicated to the author’s lament that his attempt to make this novel ‘a long account of calamities’ seems to have failed (Sebald 1999, 295). Writing is the only strategy to resist the power of time to erase everything. It is a device for committing experience to memory, for turning one’s journey into not ashes but traces (296). The traveller’s encounters with the landscape are scattered across Sebald’s pages. Distancing,

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fragmentation, and hyperbole are the defining features of his writing. Its present-to-past trajectory takes the reader outside the present moment and into a state of vertigo, so that we begin to identify the events of our time as distant history and experience estrangement. This power of narrative reflection identifies the coordination of ‘words, soul, eye, and hand’ of the artist (Benjamin 1970, 108). The psycho-physical experience of walking engenders an intricate connection between Sebald’s narrator and the sites through which he passes. The devices of literary auto-­ethnography deployed in The Rings of Saturn create ‘a striking resemblance between the anonymous narrator and Sebald himself’ (Behrendt 2013, 57). His personal pilgrimage turns into a ‘springboard for historical study’, stimulating a ‘reflection upon the liminal existential position of humanity and the endless struggle between the civilizing’ (Gray 2010, 44). The circular movement of the narration as well as ‘ashes and preserved artifacts’ turn into an allegory of life, ‘to which they once metonymically belonged’ (46): Ashes, teeth, fragments of bones, coins, pieces of armor, jewelry, opals, buckles, even a completely unscathed water glass and a scrap of purple silk: all these objects that survive destruction in the burial urns assume the nimbus of transcendence, they become symbolically numinous entities that stand outside of temporal flux and its trajectory of destruction. (Gray 2010, 46)

In the novel, Sebald’s narrator appears disengaged from the Suffolk landscape. He emerges as a collector of time, standing still in the posture of a detached spectator of history, looking at things in the present continuous of his own writing (Stein 1926). To render visible this intimate connection between the writer’s point of view and historical anxieties on stage Mitchell separates the figure of the narrator from the figure of the person reminiscing about the walk: a technique of post-Brechtian distancing that creates a very special tension on the plateau ‘between this motionless character and the other actors who move incessantly’ (Mitchell in Perrier 2012). In addition, to convey theatrically this intimate connection between Sebald’s pilgrimage and the multiple deaths in his narrative, Mitchell highlights the anxieties of hypermodernity contingent on the practice of encounter and the complex sense of curiosity, detachment, and responsibility conveyed in the novel:

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On stage is a triptych. On the right, we see a noise-making machine and the pianist. In the centre, there is a man in his hospital room. […] He is the narrator, who walks, and the walker, who observes. […] On the left, there is a space dedicated to making live sound effects. […] The performers recite the text of Sebald’s novel. It sounds like a litany. The tone, deliberately monotonous, is that of a reader who reads silently. Behind them, there is another group of actors. They produce sounds to illustrate everything that the narrator passes on his walk: the breath of the wind or the flowing water, the thunder that rumbles, or the cutlery clashing onto the plates. (Camboulives 2012)

To make the narrative power of the novel more vivid, Mitchell adopts encounter as her rehearsal pedagogy. When she arrived at the Schauspiel Köln to work on the novel, she discovered a profound disconnect between the sense of destruction inherent in the book and the actors’ minimal knowledge of history (Sutton 2013). I do not want to suggest, of course, that everybody in the company was ignorant of this history: that is simply not true. Mitchell’s assistant, Stefan Nagel, for instance, was born and raised in Cologne, ‘and the collective history of the German people—written into the landscape of cities like Cologne—is deeply significant for him personally’ (Sutton 2013). However, as Isabel Sutton writes, ‘What was extraordinary to Katie [Mitchell] was how little the German cast had ever learnt of the bombing campaign over Germany. This aspect of the history of the war was largely excluded from their school teaching, and the cultural consciousness of Germany after the war’ (2013). Moreover, in Germany Sebald is often seen as a controversial figure: ‘his voluntary exile from Germany and his criticism of other post-war German writers have both served to make him unpopular in some quarters’ (Sutton 2013), so sometimes his writings are not ‘so well received as [they are] in the UK’ (Mitchell in Sutton 2013). Thus, to overcome the Schauspiel Köln actors’ sense of disengagement from the material, Katie Mitchell invited them to go on a pilgrimage to the UK. This experience of collective encounter and encounter between actor and landscape was intended to build a communitas that would inform their work (Sutton 2013). Experiencing the novel ‘live’ helped performers better understand the type of immersive reading that Sebald’s writing encourages and the type of performance experience they needed to create. To foreground the formal elements of Sebald’s narration, Mitchell privileged the synchronic point of view of storytelling, in

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which the time of perception would coincide with that of the storytelling itself. The atmosphere of The Rings of Saturn is marked by melancholia—the emotion of grief and distancing. It demands the technique of slow reading: the reader’s laborious movement through an elaborate hypertext, their mind transitioning from one deviation to the next, creates meaningful links between seemingly disjointed passages, images, and historical events described in the narration. This device promotes dramatic irony, so that ‘the reader must keep in mind and evaluate all the different perspectives of the narrative’, conveyed to the reader ‘through the filter of multiple, differing points of view’ (Behrendt 2013, 64). These techniques evoke a state of vertigo, first in Sebald’s narrator and then in the reader. To create this sense of vertigo within the spatial dramaturgy of the production, Mitchell foregrounds the onstage chorus, which in its turn becomes a small performative communitas: Texts in hand one by one the actors read excerpts from Sebald’s book while facing the audience straight on. Their performance, captured by a forest of microphones on tripods, is loaded with sound effects that they produce as though they were Foley artists: pondering the floor with their feet, shaking branches to make the sound of wind in the leaves, rolling pebbles to imitate the swish of the surf, the clickety-clack of a speeding train created by frantically tapping on a suitcase. This ballet of sounds establishes continuity between all the theatrical elements, voices and movements of the actors, live music, video projections and the set with two backgrounds. There is only one world […] inhabited by fiction and reality, the self and others, one that is still happening and the other that has already passed. (Malfettes 2012, 9)

Mitchell’s staging combines the actors’ voices and mechanically created sounds in a contrapuntal soundscape resembling a theatrical oratorio. It generates a sense of collective time and expands the space of the performance in the spectators’ imagination. This approach enables Mitchell to create multiple production spaces, each differently marked by the flowing rhythmical configurations of bodies and objects on stage. Characterized by ‘the visible rhythm of the changing stage, visually expressing the dramatic rhythm of the action’, these configurations make visible onstage playing areas that serve as ‘transitional point[s] between what we have seen before and what we shall see after it’ (Zich 2017, 55). This spatial/ temporal phenomenon or force field defines the architectural, theatrical,

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and dramatic places of performance (56). The director’s task is to identify these force fields in the chosen dramatic material and reveal them on stage (56). By staging Sebald’s pilgrimage as a theatrical force field and realizing a suspended perception (Stein 1926) of what and how the traveller sees, Mitchell turns the process of creating the performance inside out. She brings out onto stage those theatre technologies that are usually hidden from the eyes of a spectator: Using boards, sticks, pebbles, screens, and sand, the actors make the sound effects visible. This sound score accompanies the actors’ reading of Sebald’s text, while the projected images of his walk scroll down the walls […] so the words, themselves, […] appear sharp, powerful, precise, and dense, as if heard by someone in a state of coma. […] This way, the audience is exposed not only to the inner working of Sebald’s memory and imagination; we witness the making of theatrical illusion itself. (Salino 2012)

In other words, by separating the subject of the enunciation and their speech, Mitchell underlines Sebald’s moral point of view, since in her adaption, fragmentation, syncopation, and self-reflexivity match the different ruptures in Sebald’s consciousness. In its philosophical dimensions, Mitchell’s The Rings of Saturn becomes an ‘experience itself’, ‘the passage and departure toward the other’ (Derrida 2001, 103). Politically, the director forces her spectators not only to face their individual histories but also to imagine themselves as a society concerned with the future of a world in a state of destruction. Her production illustrates Peter Boenisch’s statement that theatre today ‘functions as a “training centre” for new modes of perception’ (2003, 38). The Rings of Saturn foregrounds the representation of self as a collective experience with many participants. It generates a sense of encounter that takes place between the actors in the fictional world, the material elements of the performance, and its spectators. Mitchell creates a theatrical community on stage using fictional (how the world is constructed on stage), sensual (how the actors create space through their interactions), atmospheric (how the layout of the building and its structures create a certain ambiance that prepares our experience), and acoustic devices. * * *

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The Jungle: On the Dramaturgy of Assembly and Communities of Hope The Jungle, written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson of the Good Chance Theatre Company, uses the dramaturgy of assembly to tell a story of the making and demolition of a refugee camp in Calais. In its aesthetics and the use of performance space, it brings together a traditional theatre play and an immersive experience. It also capitalizes on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of role reversal as the primary category of constructing a utopian communitas offstage (2008, 42). Role reversal presupposes the audience’s collective participation and individual spectators’ autonomous decisions about whether or not to enter the space of the play. It conceives of a theatre performance as a social gathering which has a political impact (42). The Jungle adds to the working of role reversal by staging the anthropological, economic, and political processes that take place in migrant communities. It reveals these processes theatrically by invoking and enacting the history of the Calais camp, which, for more than a decade—since 1999 (Rahman-Jones 2016)—served thousands of migrants living on the border between France and the UK as a place of refuge and inclusion. After the Sangatte refugee camp was closed in 2002, ‘the “new jungle camp,” built on a former toxic waste dump in the outskirts of Calais, was [for thousands of refugees] a fortified space of deterrence and detention, with routine administrative procedures of harassment, incarceration, deportation, and destruction’ (Sanyal 2017, 1). This camp—known as the Calais Jungle—was also a space that privileged the personal agency of migrants as subjects of mobility, not of exclusion (Rygiel 2011, 3–4). In February 2016 the French authorities evicted the southern sector of the Jungle and then demolished it in October of 2016. On both occasions French officials turned the destruction of the camp into a spectacle which conveyed to migrants the message that the world, and France in particular, was getting serious about protecting borders and was adopting a harsh line about migration in general (2). Based on Murphy and Robertson’s personal experiences and summation of their seven-month stay at the Calais Jungle, the play, The Jungle, aspires to examine the powers of inclusion and exclusion that govern a refugee camp, thereby turning the tables on the audience. The action of The Jungle is set in an immersive theatre arrangement: a fictitious ‘Afghan Café’ transforms the London’s Playhouse Theatre—its stage and auditorium, its backstage and halls—into a refugee camp.

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Covered in mud, the set is filled with buzzing noises. The audience sits in close proximity to each other and to the actors—a device of theatrical intimacy that allows the production team to challenge the conventional techniques of making political theatre. Placing spectators close to each other and to the action space allows the artists to invite their audience’s reflection on social, political, and personal injustice that life in the camp produces. The play involves interactive acting techniques: before the action begins, several youngsters, representing inhabitants of the camp, offer spectators hot chai, while an older man hands out pamphlets in languages many of the audience members do not speak. The objective is to ‘dismantle the Cartesian theatrical dichotomy of actor and spectator’ (Lewicki 2017, 276), to debate difficult questions of belonging and human rights, and to ponder, if not necessarily act upon, the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being a citizen. In its attempts to critically examine the role played by bystanders, sympathizers, and volunteers in the tale of globalization, The Jungle invokes Imogen Tyler’s idea of social abjection as a ‘theoretical resource that enables us to consider states of exclusion from multiple perspectives’ (Tyler 2013, 4). The play seems to suggest that ‘if state power relies on the production of abject subjects to constitute itself and draw its borders, the state is also that which it abjects’ (4). This social abjection refers directly to refugees and asylum seekers, as the production examines how political and social discourses are formed. It references the ‘asylum invasion complex’ (76), which is marked by a ‘deliberate conflation of migrants into a singular national abject’ and which limits any transformative potential of the recognition of suffering and injustice (76). Tyler’s target is the UK’s neoliberal government and the UK’s migration regulations. She advocates a critical counter-mapping grounded in affect as one possible response to the practice of social abjection: The recognition of suffering and injustice has limited transformatory political potential in a context where the deliberate conflation of migrants into a singular national abject—the bogus asylum seeker—has overwhelmed public culture. Nevertheless, the melancholic states that critical processes of counter-mapping make visible are important critical responses to the ontological obliteration of personhood that is central to Britain’s neoliberal immigration industry. This mapping can produce alternative ways of looking, however partial, depressed, reactive and liminal the ensuing knowledge might be. (Tyler 2013, 76)

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Murphy and Robertson’s The Jungle is an example of the performative potential of counter-mapping, which attempts to re-humanize the ‘figurative scapegoats’ of social abjection (Tyler 2013, 9). Although not documentary theatre, the play brings its audiences ‘into the heart of that makeshift, unofficial settlement and testifie[s] to the experiences of those living in its limbo, hoping to make their way into the U.K.’ (Trueman 2017). By re-enacting the events that led to the destruction of the camp and collapse of its precarious life, The Jungle foregrounds the individual within the collectivity of a modern tragedy; it also implicates the character (a migrant) and the spectator (a bystander—either a native citizen or a cosmopolitan traveller) equally in the making and experiencing of global migration. The social relationality that defines the spatial/temporal dimensions of the camp and thus the play’s thematic and visual dramaturgy also dictates the makeup of its dramatis personae. In the play, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Africans come together to work, to pray, and to celebrate their differences: The Jungle shares its sympathy equally between refugees and well-meaning volunteers, all trying, but all tested by the squalid, crowded conditions. At its center, two teenage boys—hot-headed Afghan Norullah (Mohammad Amiri) and cold-tempered Sudanese Okot (John Pfumojena)—forge a friendship out of a frosty first encounter. Their British contemporaries are a few years older, but seem far younger even as they come of age in the Jungle. Wet-behind-the-ears old Etonian Sam (Alex Lawther) moves from treating the place like a geography field trip to cutting covert allegiances with French civil servants, while Rachel Redford’s grounded, Welsh, gap-year student stands up to brutish border guards. (Trueman 2017)

The performance that I attended took place on July 2, 2018, during the week when Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and one of few remaining pro-migration leaders of Europe, announced her personal defeat to Germany’s interior minister Horst Seehofer. From this point on, Germany would comply with the anti-migrant actions of other European states; it would ‘establish transit centres close to the border with Austria where asylum seekers already registered in another European Union country will be processed before being returned to that country where possible. Where that is not possible, the parties have agreed the asylum seekers will be sent back across the border to Austria’ (Schmidt et al. 2018).

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The Jungle tells the story of such a transit refugee centre. Although it does not imagine its audience actively interfering with the action or the actors’ work, it does evoke Augusto Boal’s notion of an active and involved spect-actor, ready to ‘experiment, converse, and experience problem solving for problems and issues that are directly relevant to them’ (Gammon 2012, 16). The Jungle makes privileged audiences confront the reality of global migration by telling them one concrete story from the life of refugees and by using refugee actors as this story’s major narrators, thereby aspiring to activate its spectators’ sense of responsibility. At the same time, Olivia Lamont Bishop cites 80 GBP as the regular admission price to see The Jungle on the West End (Lamont Bishop 2019, 107). Such a high ticket price raises questions regarding this production’s target audience and the privileged material and financial conditions of doing political theatre in the West End.5 For the purposes of this chapter, however, I would argue that placing this work in the West End, the producers of The Jungle seemed to be trying to prepare their privileged audiences to open up for the possibilities of a ‘social change’ rather than masking them feeling ‘deactivated through a traditional cathartic moment’ (Gammon 2012, 16). Due to its spatial layout, with the majority of the audience positioned in the close proximity to the action, this production generated performative encounters of relation: the encounters that were characterized by ‘the production of sociality’, ‘communal forms of collaboration’, and establishing a sharing atmosphere (Kunst 2015, 53–55). Most importantly The Jungle seemed not to take sides. The play features residents of the Calais camp (refugees), the French authorities (the figures of their nemesis), and UK volunteers, who had come to the camp driven by their personal sense of guilt as bystanders and thus silent supporters of their government’s attitude towards refugees. To a certain degree, these volunteers mirrored their West End audiences, who might have felt implicated in the story both as its witnesses and as accomplices. As the marketing blurb on the National Theatre website indicates, The Jungle is intended to shape the aesthetic and emotional experiences of its spectators as a community: Audiences are invited to choose from two unique experiences: take a seat in the bustling Afghan Café in the stalls, or watch from the traditional theatre seating of the “Cliffs of Dover” in the Dress Circle, where the view overlooking the dynamic performance space is enhanced by accompanying video

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screens relaying “live news broadcast”-style footage of some of the action. (The Jungle at the Playhouse Theatre)

Seated around the action space, the spectators become both the play’s watching subjects—following the action on stage and the reactions of their neighbours—and its objects of surveillance by both the characters on stage and fellow spectators in the audience. This added voyeuristic quality makes The Jungle ‘an intelligent satire of how the Calais Jungle became […] a repository for the utopian scheming, hapless curiosity, adventurous instincts and need for escape of the many British people who flocked there to “help”’ (Saville 2018). Thus, by experimenting with making a utopian communitas in theatre, the play offers a response to the major question any politically engaged theatre might ask: what value—apart from pure entertainment—can the performing arts possess? According to the Syrian actor Ammar Haj Ahmad, who plays Safi in this production, The Jungle attempts to re-write ‘the rulebook on how theatre is done in London’s West End. Forty percent of tickets have been kept below £25 ($32)—cheap by West End standards—and some have been reserved for refugees and their families’ (Haj Ahmad in Gill 2019). In Haj Ahmad’s view, by keeping the production somewhat more accessible, the producers attempted to turn their theatre into a meeting place for ‘people from so many cultures, so many languages’ (Ahmad in Gill 2019). ‘Written by two white boys who went to Oxford’, The Jungle, Haj Ahmad wants us to believe, is able to bring ‘many people from different backgrounds’ onto its stage and into its auditorium (in Gill 2019). The Calais camp is presented here as the epitome of the impossible: simultaneously a space of home and a space of human despair. It is ‘a temporary migrant settlement’ but also a space of ‘exceptionality outside the law’; it is a place of ‘illegality and abjection’ but also a makeshift community, ‘where migrants reveal their resourcefulness in navigating increasingly difficult border restrictions’ (Rygiel 2011, 10). Thus, although everybody dreams to leave it, the Jungle turns into the peoples’ home with ‘churches and theatres and art and restaurants’, but ‘isn’t this how all places once began? with refugees stopping at a river, a beach, a crossroads and saying, we’ll just pause here for a bit. Put on the kettle, kill a chicken’ (Gill 2016). By turning a space of rest into a place of habitat, the play suggests, a migrant can begin to resist the dehumanizing power of social and national abjection. The refugee who claims the camp as their home can even reacquire a face (Levinas 1998).

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In the play, Kurds, Afghans, Sudanese, and Eritreans compare their camp to Hope Town or a new Babylon (Murphy and Robertson 2018, 51), where people of different cultural backgrounds, languages, and religious beliefs negotiate their differences and face ethical dilemmas. Safi, ‘an English literature graduate from Aleppo’ (Gill 2019), the play’s narrator and its consciousness, must make his choice too: ‘A Kurdish people smuggler who has a soft spot for [Safi] wants to get him to the UK […]. But to do so [Safi] will have to take the place of a young man from Sudan’s Darfur region, who is more vulnerable and has suffered more than he has, facing death and torture to make it to northern France’ (Gill 2019). When he strikes a deal for his escape, Safi compromises his position as an objective observer of the action. By turning Safi into a morally unreliable narrator, Murphy and Robertson follow the example of Brecht’s Lehrstücke or teaching play, in which moral goodness serves as a testing ground for its characters’ actions. In The Jungle, however, it is not only Safi who must make difficult moral choices. The play also stages the ambiguous role of ‘the naive and well-meaning English volunteer’, who visits the camp to help fight its eviction (Gill 2019). Henri, a representative of the French authorities, warns Sam, the Eaton graduate, who helps people building shelters, that now, because of his efforts in planning the camp, this wasteland is about to become a proper habitat: ‘you’re building a city’, ‘you are giving these people not only everything they need, but anything they want’, but you do not assume any responsibility for their future (Murphy and Robertson 2018, 99). Despite this uncomfortable truth, Sam continues his double game and strikes a deal with the French government. Knowing when and what part of the camp will be destroyed, he can carefully choose what infrastructure he should further invest in. In his hubris, therefore, Sam’s character echoes Brecht’s Mother Courage and reveals the double-edged agenda that often surrounds the economic practices of global migration. The play underlines this point even more, when a very drunk Derek, another English volunteer and representative of the disillusioned generation of liberals of the 1960s and 1970s, declares the Jungle, a makeshift refugee city, to be a utopia of social equality come true: The paradox in the heart of the Jungle is that the refugees are running in one direction and the volunteers are running in another. We have met here, in this middle ground, but we are running towards the same thing! We’re building an image of Britain that doesn’t exist! That’s never existed!

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Certainly not in Britain. It exists in our dreams only. But I see the beginnings of it in this place. […] Of course, there are challenges. But we are facing them together. We can solve them. (Murphy and Robertson 2018, 102–103)

By demonstrating the ambiguity of the moral goodness displayed by the UK volunteers, the play challenges one of the foundational myths of the British state, which tells a story of the country’s ‘ancient and proud history of granting asylum to foreign nationals fleeing religious or political persecution’ (Tyler 2013, 79–80). The Jungle evokes the so-called invasion complex that marks the British gaze at the figure of the foreigner, someone who emerges in the national consciousness of the empire as ‘a catastrophic natural disaster, a fetid torrent of diseased bodies overwhelming the borders of the national body’ (81). This nineteenth-century invasion discourse, still present today in UK immigration policies, reposes on this view of the stranger as danger (Ahmed 2000). It reflects ‘the ubiquitous presence of strangers, constantly within sight and reach’ of their hosts. Strangers ‘provide a convenient […] outlet for our inborn fear of the unknown, the uncertain and the unpredictable’ (Bauman 2011, 60). In this context, the fact that the emergence of the camp was partially conditioned by the UK’s system of asylum seeking makes the irony of the myth even more troubling. Mohammed, a refugee from Sudan, confronts Derek’s utopian and somewhat offensive view of the camp as a model for the new Britain: ‘… we could have our own currency’ or ‘start taxing people!’; they could introduce ‘passports and borders’, even a ‘Jungle army’ (Murphy and Robertson 2018, 103). Mohammed’s lines suggest the irony of the situation and the mistrust refugees feel towards the volunteers. They also reveal the sad truth about the only communal action the people of the UK and their former colonial subjects can perform together: despite the democratic forms of self-governance (such as dialogue and consultation) by which the camp is run, the only future the jungle can have is eventually turning into another site of national governance—a nation of refugees. There is an inherited irony in this suggestion, since to a certain extent the historical Jungle does resemble a symbol of the nation, just like the Refugee Olympic Team that competed for the first time in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, representing the lost nation of some 68.5 million displaced people worldwide at the time, according to UN statistics. The Jungle links its characters—figures of social abjection—to the politics of

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the neoliberal state, which is unable and unwilling to embrace the problem of the other, not as a nuisance to be easily ignored and dismissed, but as its new reality. It demonstrates that ‘these abject figures are ideological conductors mobilised to do the dirty work of neoliberal governmentality. They are symbolic and material scapegoats, the mediating agencies through which the social decomposition effected by market deregulation and welfare retrenchment are legitimized’ (Tyler 2013, 9). Theatre has the power to resist these practices: unlike other performative media, it relies on the communality and immediacy of audience work. Using devices of tragic ethos—from fear to catharsis, from shock to irony, and from distancing to affect—it can appeal to the receiver’s empathy. At the same time, understanding the camp requires a special language of citizenship, for those ‘banned from the political community or polis (the city or city-state) find themselves living in a “state of exception”, but one that becomes permanent through [its] spatial organization’ (Rygiel 2011, 3). Although an exceptional habitat, the refugee camp operates under ‘the normal order’ and so constitutes a political community (3). Settling in and protecting their camp allow refugees to act as politically viable ‘citizen-­ subjects’ (6), whereby the language of citizenship and the governing set of rules practised in the camp suggest the migrants’ agency. By analogy, in its aspirations to create an alternative to the nation state, The Jungle is reminiscent of Derrida’s utopia—the City of Refuge—which can also ‘welcome and protect those innocents who sought refuge from […] bloody vengeance’ (Derrida in Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 17). Because it is conditioned by the right to reflect ‘on the questions of asylum and hospitality’ and is a space for ‘a new order of law and a democracy to come to be put to the test’ (23), the Refugee City enables urban cosmopolitanism. The Jungle reminds its spectators that although ‘every single body has a certain right to food and shelter’ (Butler 2015, 129), individual bodies are dependent on others and need ‘networks of support’ (130). Collectivity is essentially relational—it implicates vulnerable and non-vulnerable into its own making (132), and it has an equal power to dehumanize the refugee and to bring the individual into focus. Thus, The Jungle tests its audiences’ ethical standpoint. By providing spectators with two possibilities of self-­ identification—either with the British volunteers or the refugees—The Jungle presents on stage the age of migration, in which nobody can linger as a disengaged onlooker or a passer-by. The size and the inevitability of global migration have already implicated each of the characters and thus

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each of the play’s spectators in its ever-growing currents. The destruction of the Calais camp—the opening and the closing image of the play—leaves the ending open and so forces spectators to debate these moral dilemmas. * * *

Refugee Tales: Engendering the Architectonics of Pilgrimage The multidisciplinary outreach project Refugee Tales has as its political goal to end indefinite immigration detention in the UK, the only country in Europe (pre-Brexit) which practises this type of legal discrimination. Although not entirely new, indefinite immigration detention was openly supported by Theresa May, who back in 2013, as the UK Home Secretary, promised ‘to create a “hostile environment” for illegal migrants to Britain’ (Travis 2013). However, indefinite detention is ‘arbitrary from beginning to end’ (Muir 2017). A person who finds themselves within the claws of the system ‘doesn’t know when they will be detained; and when they are picked up, they won’t know where they are being taken. Very often, the only belongings they will be allowed to take with them are the clothes they stand up in’ (Muir 2017). Depending on the alleged crime one committed, detention can last from twenty-eight to forty-two days in the case of suspected terrorism or for many years. The point is that often detainees do not know ‘when, or how, their detention will end’, so ‘to be so detained, without charge and without sentence, is to be rendered fundamentally vulnerable because it is unclear on what basis [and when] such detention will end’ (Muir 2017). To bring this inhumane practice to the attention of the UK authorities, to make them accountable for the violation of one of the fundamental human rights—the right of free movement and seeking asylum—the project Refugee Tales organizes yearly communal walks that host between eighty and one hundred fifty people, one-day walking events, and other literary and performative activities. With three volumes of migration stories and by walking with refugees, Refugee Tales aspires ‘to make the statistics flesh’ (Muir 2017). Its ultimate goal is to provide a safe space for encounter, so we can ‘hear from migrants themselves about the fears and terrors and pressures that often led them to undertake arduous, terrifying journeys over land and sea, only to find themselves subject to our lamentable procedures for deciding what should happen next’ (Muir

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2017). The walks play a crucial role in making this encounter ‘real’, that is, immediate, embodied, and effective. Durational and laborious, these walks welcome former detainees, representatives of the law, civil servants, academics, social workers, artists, and anybody from the local and international community ready to stand in solidarity against injustice. They provide ‘an opportunity for former detainees to experience the countryside in a walking community’ and ‘to break the daily routine, enjoy some physical exercise, see new landscapes and meet people who are keen to welcome new walkers’ (GDWG Walking Project).6 For its literary and narrative structures, Refugee Tales borrows Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—a classic of medieval English literature that recounts the physical and spiritual pilgrimages of its fictional narrators—whereas as its political and performative dramaturgy, the project adopts the aesthetics and the methodologies of performance walking (Heddon and Turner 2012). An example of cultural performance, Refugee Tales borders on performance activism and presents one more strategy for constructing affective citizenship. Walking in a group remains its major political, performative, and affectual tactics; and it helps creating the offstage communitas of hope. Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner trace the genealogy of the walking subject (on the West) to the period of the Enlightenment, which imagined the act of walking as ‘individualist, heroic, epic and transgressive’ (2012, 224). Contrary to those practices, contemporary female artists use performance walking to ‘challenge the dominant discourses that remain attached to walking practice’ (225). This new type of performance walking ‘prompts a necessary and renewed attention to the relative and contextual— mobile—nature of concepts of freedom, heroism and scale, on the one hand, and to the relational politics that make up the spatial on the other’ (225). Similarly, cosmopolitan theatres criticize walking as privilege, as an act of ‘seek[ing] out adventure, danger and the new’ and ‘releas[ing] oneself from the relations of everyday life’ (Heddon and Turner 2012, 226). They aspire to promote the idea of freedom using performance walking as an artistic and political tool, so that the act of movement emerges as highly performative and reconstructive. Performance walking re-enacts the routine of belonging to a new space that migrants ratify on a daily basis. It often emerges in dialogue with Michel De Certeau’s view of the site as a poetic and migrational construct, enabled and mobilized by its dwellers (De Certeau 1984, 93). Walking, in De Certeau’s theory, acquires

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characteristics of language, with walkers’ encounters on the route serving as its vocabulary and punctuation (97). A pedestrian speech act, walking ‘transforms each spatial signifier into something else’ (98); so by choosing where and how to walk, a city dweller actualizes the given possibilities of the space and increases its structural and thematic variables. Most importantly, walking initiates new contacts with the space, an activity that makes a pedestrian speech act phatic (98–99). Likewise, walking with Refugee Tales serves as an act of solidarity and as a therapeutic tool for the victims of indefinite detention. It refers to Yi-Fu Tuan’s idea that walking is based on emotional and physical labour or topophilia, ‘the affective bond between people and place or setting’ (1974, 4). Emotional attachment to a space obtained by an individual through walking, Refugee Tales seems to demonstrate, can ‘engender a polyvocal history that connects the fluid identities of the people who inhabit a place and the impermanent borders of such a space’ (Parati 2017, 118). Moreover, the act of walking can approximate the participants’ coping mechanisms of marching forward to the migrants’ strategies of performative mapping of the exilic city (Jestrovic 2013). Exilic city emerges through our personal responses to the unfamiliar-to-us urban environments. One’s gait, rhythm, and speed of movement as well as personalized routes taken to carry out domestic and professional tasks aid migrants to create an alternative map of the new-to-them city; its signposts and landmarks, however, ‘do not necessarily match those of the official map’ (Jestrovic 2013, 195). Walking with Refugee Tales helps former detainees to feel more at home with the new-to-them landscapes and people. It also accentuates the political symbolism of each performative itinerary. In 2015, on its very first walk, Refugee Tales marched ‘from Dover to Crawley via Canterbury. Following the route of the North Downs Way, that inaugural walk was framed by the location of detention centres […]. In 2016 the project walked again, from Canterbury to Westminster, via Dartford’ (Herd 2017, 113). In 2017, it walked ‘to Westminster from Runnymede, site of the signing of Magna Carta’ (113). The 2018 walk began in St Albans—a city that is believed to have served as a shelter to a Christian priest who ran from persecution and was saved thanks to Alban, one of its Romano-British citizens. It ended by marching through the streets of London, to its final stop in Parliament Square next to Westminster Abbey, where Chaucer is buried in its Poets’ Corner. I participated in the 2018 version of the Refugee Tales’s walk; and hence my analysis of its

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performative, political, and affectual outcomes is marked by my own experiences of walking and talking to its participants. Walking with Refugee Tales begins with a small registration fee one can pay over the internet or at the site of the event. This fee covers one’s weekly lodgings, community meals, afternoon meetings with activists and artists, and evening performances. Former detainees are welcome to join the walk for free; often they also receive train tickets and other support to get to the walk and return back to their places of settlement. Depending on personal circumstances, level of physical fitness, and health, participants can follow the entire route or leave the pilgrimage at their convenience. Upon their arrival, walkers are assigned to their walking groups and walking leaders and given safety instructions. The first communal meal is served and brief introductions are arranged. After the night’s rest, the walking begins. In 2018, our first walk took approximately fifteen miles. It began at the Fleetville Community Centre of St Albans, where the group initially gathered, and ended in Hertford at the All Saints’ Church. The evening performance was hosted by Bidisha, and it featured a reading of ‘The Father’s Tale’ written by Roma Tearne and performed by its protagonist, the former detainee himself. Thanks to the support provided by different community centres, volunteer organizations, and parishes, the walkers received food and sleeping arrangements for each day of the five-day march. With each walk of approximately fifteen miles, Refugee Tales relied on the strategies of community building reminiscent to how people relate to each other over the lengthy periods of time. As the group moved along the designated route, every walker marched at their own pace, changing companions and holding different conversations. This structure created new sociality particular to this political endeavour and also reminiscent of the Chaucerian traditions of pilgrimage. Originally, pilgrimage was ‘a one-way journey to a destination, made for a purpose worthy of reverence’ (Howard 1980, 6), whereas medieval pilgrimages featured participants ‘during their preparations for departure, their collective experiences on the journey, their arrival at the pilgrim centre, their behaviour and impressions at the centre, and their return journey, as sequences of social dramas and social enterprises’ (Turner 1975, 167). By Chaucer’s time, the pilgrimage had turned into a form of cosmopolitan travel (177), a type of ‘institutionalized or symbolic anti-­structure’, ‘increasingly sacralised at one level and increasingly secularized at another’ (182). Later it assumed other connotations, including ‘the individual

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Christian’s internal struggle in the world’, ‘a metaphor for human life’, and ‘growth in character’ marked by the pilgrim’s ‘moral crises and choices’ (Howard 1980, 7). In the nineteenth century, however, it was replaced by romantic visions of ‘exploration, the chivalric quest, the sojourn, even the prodigal’s return’, so that the physical journey has often been internalized (8). Similarly to the traditions of a medieval pilgrimage, walking with Refugee Tales creates a temporal place of refuge. A procession of difference and diversity, the walkers move across the geographical periphery of the country. The action begins with a symbolic separation or departure from the tenets of civilization. It unfolds in the space of the limen and closes with the act of re-entry into the community (Turner 1975, 196). Thus, in its spiritual and political symbolism, Refugee Tales turns into a sacred route and a ‘mythical journey’ (198), which gives it the status of a communitas. A utopian and performative construct, it emerges as ‘a temporary social reality’, something short-lived, transient, and ephemeral (Fisher-Lichte 2008, 51). A type of performative protest, it also engenders ‘a spectacle of welcome’, so that people ‘who are hidden by and from the culture, rendered invisible by the procedures of the state, [may take and assert] their place in the landscape’ (Herd 2016b, 134). As Refugee Tales moves through the English countryside, the detainees, the storytellers, the volunteers, and the supporters all become directly and equally involved in constructing this fleeting and liminal comradeship. The project thrives on the participatory and durational mechanisms of collective being but, at the same time, creates moments of estrangement. As naïve and stoic this might sound, the hard labour of walking fifteen or more miles per day, under the hot sun and with no proper shelter, brings both jet-setters and asylum seekers back to their inner selves. I would not claim it makes us equal; but I would argue that the sense of endurance, both collective and personal, turns each of us back to our inner humanity, making possible the encounter with the other as oneself. The strength of this endurance also lies in learning to support and rely on one’s neighbour: in the age of hypermodernity, which privileges blatant individualism, the meaningfulness of this lesson in pausing and perceiving the stranger as oneself cannot be overestimated. Refugee Tales aspires to construct an imagined heterogeneous collective, to which every new walker contributes as they are placed ‘in relation to group structures’ that are ‘simultaneously reconfigured and problematized’ (Turner 2014, 208).

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Porous dramaturgy (Turner 2014) defines this political spectacle. Refugee Tales invites its participants to actively interact with the landscape. As an organized procession, the walk turns its individual members into ‘a single fluid body’ (Turner 2014, 203) but also gives them a chance to (dis) engage from the group and from the landscape. As one ‘flow[s] out of the artwork’, their personal choices of (dis)affiliation or ‘entrapment’ form the story of building and dismantling this utopian collective (Turner 2014, 203). The walkers’ interactions with the site, which include direct contact with the given structure framing or shaping the event, influence the level of performance porosity (204), so porous dramaturgy of walking implies continuous redefinition of the relationships between the proposed site and its audiences. It respects the centripetal movement in the group and allows space for individual contemplation and rest, away from the collective self (210). Likewise, the participants walking with Refugee Tales can be emotionally entrapped in the experience, but they can also practise ‘negotiation between self and other’ (209). Central to this political structure is the transformative power of endurance. Separated from the privileges and seductions of civilization—including mobile technologies and the elaborate comfort of home life, such as hot showers and comfortable beds— participants are forced to rediscover the essentials of being. They acknowledge their own vulnerability and precarity and begin to see themselves as other. One can argue that walking with Refugee Tales works by osmosis: personal discomfort, being cut off the civilization, and encountering close proximity of many walking bodies make the embodied experience of this project resemble precariousness of migrant travel. Marching with a group of strangers pulls walkers out of their emotional comfort zones, and it appeals to our sense of reality. It prompts personal agency and offers new conditions for staging the divided self: the act of walking accentuates both the power of collective performance and the solitude of each of its participants. This paradox helps the organizers translate each walk into a series of political objectives, including the project’s goals to ‘redraw borders’, to ‘redefine them within England’, and ‘to open up a pan-national geography where texts (if not people) are able to travel freely’ (Barr 2019, 85). As a result, Refugee Tales produces a unique aesthetics of processional pilgrimage or solidarity, which offers ‘a reorientation of mediatized processional aesthetics’ (Cox 2017, 487). It reinforces the importance of affect as a strategy of community building. Here each walker’s singular experience is foregrounded but also increases the sense of the collective ‘we’. In

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the act of walking, each participant is positioned in relation to the other. Not only does this performative walk operate within the values of solidarity and care that such an event demands, but also it relies on the hope and commitment of its participants. Among the performative structures of Refugee Tales are the nightly gatherings between the participants and their hosts during the walks. These performative encounters include reading stories, playing music, and meeting local activists or authorities. During the 2018 walk, several former detainees read their stories publicly for the first time. The pain they felt in their own bodies and their onstage presence gave their performances an authenticity similar to the truth we might perceive watching an autobiographical performance. These performative interactions are a realization of the implied theatricality of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which, with its complex web of narrators and listeners and God as the ultimate addressee and judge of human behaviour, was intended to be performed aloud (Ganim 1990, 56). It also echoes the aesthetics of the medieval English theatre, such as mystery plays, city processions, court ceremonies, tournaments, and elaborate spectacles (34–37). Refugee Tales mimics this performative style, its literary structures often using elevated or stylized forms of English. As a further echo of Chaucer’s work, the stories told in Refugee Tales are tales of survival, patience, frustration, and shattered dreams experienced by refugees in UK detention centres. They are narrated by UK poets and novelists, who sometimes can be migrants themselves. Thus, the project presents each refugee’s story as the elaborate translation of meaning that takes place between the writer listening to the detainee and the storyteller/refugee recounting his/her experiences of torture, rape, death, and detention. The fact that an artist collaborating with the Refugee Project is ready to give a new literary form to this testimony, which the refugee might be giving for the first time, helps protect the intimacy of the refugee before a sympathetic audience—and thus provides them with some relief from their pain. The artist’s labour of listening and retelling these stories in writing has an immediate objective—to provide a written record of the injustice, to ‘open politics’, and to ‘establis[h] belonging’ (Herd 2016a, v). Language, however, can do more than just create a narrative. By replacing hostility with hospitality, it can create new geographies, partnerships, networks, and freedoms (viii). Dragan Todorovic’s ‘The Migrant’s Tale’ opens the first volume of the three-volume collection Refugee Tales. There is a special meaning in this choice. Todorovic’s story

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resonates with the most heartbreaking of Chaucer’s tales—The Man of Law’s Tale—which tells of the Italian princess Custance, ‘set adrift on the sea between Rome, Syria, Northumbria, and back to Rome again’ (Barr 2019, 87). This story astonishingly and horrifyingly resonates with today’s experiences of migration. The rigors of exile are far from a foreign experience for the author. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Todorovic, an established journalist with important publications and awards under his belt, had to flee his native country during the Yugoslav War. Since the mid-­1990s, his life and career have been marked by this state of exilic liminality. Although widely published in English and now a professor of creative writing at Kent University, Todorovic continues to be sensitive to the power of one’s native language and the authority of the performative speech act, of which many asylum seekers are deprived when they are forced to give testimonies of their suffering in a foreign tongue (Herd 2017, 140). Todorovic insists on the artistic and ethical responsibility of writing refugees’ tales, for each writer must find appropriate language to tell the story of violence and abuse that their subject chooses to share. The narrative dynamics of Todorovic’s ‘The Migrant’s Tale’ is based on an act of prolonged and engaged listening, through which the gesture of secondary witness is mobilized. Not only does Todorovic assure the detainee that his story is being heard, but he also supplies the words, the images, the rhythms, and the cadences of the new language, thus providing the refugee with a safe place for a performative testimony. As David Herd writes, ‘it is this fact, the holding of people outside the skin of the language, that principally motivated Refugee Tales […]. In each case, the writer was invited to take the necessary formal decisions toward a 20 minute performance. Equally, the tale had to be grounded in the reality of the experience that the person’s original telling presented’ (2016b, 141). Todorovic’s tale was inspired by his rereading of Chaucer’s texts and the sense of responsibility that he felt encountering Aziz, the name his subject/detainee adopted in his story. These impressions are reflected in the narrative structure of ‘The Migrant’s Tale’. Todorovic interweaves Custance’s travels with Aziz’s sorrows. The writer’s own place as a mediator of the past unfolds in front of him both through the words of Aziz spoken in Arabic and in the translation provided by an interpreter: We are sitting on the second floor of a corner office in Birmingham. This is an area of white shirts and Pink Floyd streets. Metal blinds are all down. I

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put the chocolate cake I’ve brought for Aziz on the coffee table connecting the three of us, and it feels inappropriate. Cream over pain. (Todorovic 2016, 1) His speech becomes broken at times. A short outburst of words in Arabic is followed by a sudden silence. It sounds like automatic weapons in close combat. It sounds like the streets of his hometown today. […] He holds his upper arms and rocks back and forth. Slow and steady, waves in the bay. I’ve seen the same movement, this same posture, in other times and other cultures. When the big emotional plates deep below the skin start hitting each other, this wave of pain appears on the surface. […] This is the dark zone. I was asked not to ask about his imprisonment. (Todorovic 2016, 4)

In this story, the encounter in language, in the speech of the other, takes on special significance. The narrative dynamics of storytelling are based on an act of prolonged and engaged listening, sometimes at such length that ‘the experience being relayed grafts onto and alerts the listener’s language’ (Herd 2016b, 141): ‘a story that belongs to one person now belongs, also, to other people’ (142). In the act of listening, the gesture of secondary witness is mobilized once again: ‘the other people acknowledge the experience that constitutes the story, but also that in making that acknowledgment they register responsibility’ (142). When these stories are read aloud and/or performed in the open space of a public performance on the yearly walks or in the space of the internet, a new testimony takes place, which casts its audiences both in the roles of witnesses and new storytellers. Thus, an encounter in body, the second important element of cosmopolitan theatre aesthetics, takes place; moreover, telling stories in performance, as a form of ritual gathering, creates empathy and community. Refugee Tales’s meaning lies in the hope and commitment that emerges as the product of this socially engaged performance work, which demonstrates that the spatial-temporal circumstance of making art as a community is the most promising device for theatre work focused on migration and cosmopolitanism. This type of utopian communitas aspires to nurture Rancière’s emancipated spectator (2009), who on one hand actively participates in the activities of the group but on the other, almost in a gesture of post-Brechtian alienation of the self, must be left alone for in-depth reflection. Refugee Tales, by building on the ethics of encounter, recognition, and building communitas, not only provides a possible response to the question ‘what can theatre and performance actually do about the refugee crisis?’ but also points out the ‘unbearable slowness of institutional

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change’ faced by any socially engaged performance (Marschall 2018, 149). Refugee Tales confronts the foot-dragging, indifference, and defensiveness of British asylum-seeking laws. It therefore proposes a model of interpersonal behaviour that demonstrates how social art practices can ‘make us rethink how performance’s political efficacy might reside in its potential to encompass multiple temporal rhythms that refrain from a dramatic beginning, middle and end’ (162). It illustrates that the artistic project becomes ‘not merely an event-aesthetic response to the so-called refugee crisis but its ethical commitment target[ing] larger systematic issues of social exclusion and migratory nexuses’ (161). Unfortunately, much like the Chaucerian pilgrimage itself, Refugee Tales has not yet reached its destination: indefinite detention has not been abolished in the UK, and the draconian systems of interrogation and imprisonment of refugees have not changed. Still the journey continues, and its echo reverberates thanks to the increasing visibility of the project, augmented both in the real and virtual worlds. Thanks to the efforts of Anna Pincus, a founder and coordinator of Refugee Tales, who has worked for Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group for more than ten years, and other volunteers who organize visitations and mini-walks, the project prolongs this sense of coactive belonging created by the pilgrimage and offers the space of emotional shelter that asylum seekers need. Refugee Tales exemplifies how theatre and performative activities can enable affective citizenship based on a dialogue between differences. It can also identify an urgent ‘need for a lot of good will, dedication, readiness for compromise, mutual respect and a shared distaste for any form of human humiliation; and, of course, a firm determination to restore the lost balance between the value of security and that of ethical propriety’ (Bauman 2011, 71). Refugee Tales evokes the power of affect that exemplifies the politics and the aesthetics of cosmopolitan theatres. * * * The performances discussed in this chapter employ the architectonics of personal and collective endurance as a rite of passage and liminality, both as devices of thematic and metaphorical construction of storytelling and as a means of engaging the audience. They aspire to approximate their audiences’ experiences of watching a play to the unsettling practices of travelling, including spatial and temporal confusion; the feeling of being lost and at the same time excited; seeking new encounters with unfamiliar

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territories, customs, and cultural practices; and taking on the trial of walking as the physical labour of migration. However, no theatre performance, event, or installation can produce conditions of perception that can recreate the precarity of real travelling. Such an objective would be unethical and simply unattainable. Instead, the chosen performances aim to remind spectators of their own vulnerability, because a theatre performance is capable of staging, analysing, and dismantling the tropes and the metaphors of hate, xenophobia, and barbaric nationalism that define current neo-nationalist discourses and actions worldwide. The blatant nationalism that has emerged in the globalized, Trumpian world has unleashed many dangerously extremist phenomena. In fact, the fear and aggression against individual freedoms and human rights have arisen as a response to the uncontrolled mobility of migrating subjects. As this chapter shows, ‘live theatre remains a powerful site at which to establish and exchange notions of cultural taste, to set standards, and to model fashions, trends, and styles. […] Audiences are compelled to gather with others, to see people perform live, hoping, perhaps, for moments of transformation that might let them reconsider and change the world outside the theatre, from its macro to its micro arrangements’ (Dolan 2001, 455). Thus, theatre can directly address the dangers of the populist thinking. It can serve as a channel to evoke the memory of injustices and genocides. It can mobilize our sense of community both as a mode of existence and as a technique to sway the common perception of issues. It can also serve to mirror the multidimensional social, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic landscape that has been slowly emerging. The examples of theatre performances studied in this chapter were selected because of the political and artistic objectives they share: each of the chosen works uses community-building strategies to promote dialogue across differences. Such performative events demonstrate one more time that it is only by respecting the conditions necessary for the renewal of the humane community that wasted migrant lives can be restored, commemorated, and returned to the realm of the living. These conditions also invite the proverbial meeting of the spectator with their self.

Notes 1. Die Ringe des Saturn/The Rings of Saturn was produced by Schauspiel Köln; it was adapted and directed by Katie Mitchell, with set design and costumes by Lizzie Clachan, film by Grant Gee, video by Finn Ross, music by Paul Clark, lighting by Ulrik Gad, sound design by Gareth Fry and

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Adrienne Quartly, and dramaturgy by Jan Hein. The cast included Ruth Marie Kröger, Nikolaus Benda, Julia Wieninger, and Juro Mikus, with Julia Klomfass (sound), James Longford (piano), Ruth Sullivan (sound effects), and Frederike Bohr, Lily McLeish, and Stefan Nagel (camera). I saw this production presented at the Festival d’Avignon in the summer of 2012, in German with French subtitles. 2. The Jungle was written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, founders of the Good Chance Theatre Company. It was directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, with set and costume designs by Miriam Buether and Catherine Kodicek, lighting by Jon Clark, and sound by Paul Arditti. It features Raphael Acloque, Ammar Haj Ahmad, Aliya Ali, Mohammad Amiri, Bruk Kumelay, Alyssa Denise D’Souza, Elham Ehsas, Trevor Fox, Moein Ghobsheh, Michael Gould, Ansu Kabia, Alex Lawther, Jo McInnes, John Pfumojena, Rachel Redford, Rachid Sabitri, Mohamed Sarrar, Ben Turner, and Nahel Tzegai. The Jungle ran at the Young Vic, London, from December 7, 2017, to January 9, 2018; after that it transferred to the West End and ran there from June 16, 2018, to November 3, 2018. I attended this production in July of 2018 at the Playhouse Theatre. 3. The outreach project Refugee Tales was initiated by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group that for the last twenty five years has been actively involved in helping people in the UK immigrant detention centres. The annual walks took place in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. I joined the project in the summer of 2018. 4. Until her return to London’s National Theatre in April 2016 with the staging of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed, Mitchell had been experiencing a sort of ‘falling out’ with the British theatrical scene. Known for not sharing the British mainstream theatre’s admiration for Shakespeare, Mitchell came to be known as the ‘British theatre’s queen in exile’, because, despite her reputation as being one of the most imaginative directors in Britain today, she ‘has been largely directing in Germany and France, crisscrossing the continent by train, always working on five or six projects at once’ (Higgins 2016). On the controversy around Mitchell’s work, see Rebellato (2010). 5. Since this controversy is beyond the scope of this chapter, I recommend consulting the 2019 issue of the journal Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance (Volume 9, Number 1), which is dedicated to questions of ethics, performance aesthetics, and migration. 6. GDWG refers to ‘Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group’. As its website specifies, ‘there is no cost for former detainees to join the walks. Anyone who had a GDWG visitor can join three walks after release from detention’ (GDWG Walking Project).

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Sebald, W.G. 1999. The Rings of Saturn. Translated by Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. Stein, Gertrude. 1926. Composition as Explanation. The Dial; a Semi - Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information (1880–1929) (October 1): 0_015. http://search.proquest.com/docview/89687990/. Sutton, Isabel. 2013. W.G. Sebald’s Apocalyptic Vision: The World Will End in 2013. New Statesman America, June 4: 2013. The Jungle at the Playhouse Theatre. https://playhouse.londontheatres.co.uk/ the-jungle/. Todorovic, Dragan. 2016. The Migrant’s Tale. In Refugee Tales, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus, 1–12. Manchester: Comma Press. Travis, Alan. 2013. Immigration Bill: Theresa May Defends Plans to Create ‘Hostile Environment’. The Guardian, October 10. https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2013/oct/10/immigration-bill-theresa-may-hostile-environment. Trueman, Matt. 2017. London Theater Review: ‘The Jungle’. Variety, December 21. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. ———. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Turner, Cathy. 2014. Porous Dramaturgy and the Pedestrian. In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, ed. Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, 199–213. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. White, Gareth. 2012. On Immersive Theatre. Theatre Research International 37 (3): 221–235. Zich, Otakar. 2017. Principles of Theatrical Dramaturgy. In Theatre Theory Reader: Prague School Writings, ed. David Drozd, 34–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Distributed by Karolinum Press, Charles University.

CHAPTER 8

To Be a Cosmopolitan: Concluding Remarks

According to the UN International Migration Report (2017), the number of international migrants has currently reached more than 258 million. The term ‘migrants’ refers to persons ‘living in a country other than his or her country of birth’ (International Migration Report 2017, 3), including exiles, refugees, economic migrants, and displaced people. Whether we are willing to recognize it or not and whether or not we erect fences to keep out migrants or cage the children of migrants, in the twenty-first century, migration has become commonplace, to paraphrase Joseph Brodsky (1995). Today, as the 2020 UNHCR Global Trends Report demonstrates, due to ‘persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order’, there is almost 80 million people, who are refugees or internally displaced—the number that accounts for 1% of humanity (The UN Refugee Agency 2020). Radical changes in climate and global geopolitics have caused numerous regional conflicts which ensure that migration is not likely to stop. This monumental exodus of people is a psycho-physical experience, a legal predicament, and a historical condition that reaches beyond the ‘sorrow of estrangement’ evoked by the condition of exile (Said 2000, 137). The number 258 million has ontological, physical, economic, political, and symbolic significance. It erases individuality and turns human beings into ‘a faceless category that fails to capture the personal and political complexities of their individual journeys and their collective impact on our world’ (Depner 2018, 41). It turns migrants into what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman 2004, 73), because these © The Author(s) 2020 Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_8

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travellers—exiles, refugees, and asylum seekers—‘cannot be included in the modern economy as workers or consumers’ (73). This irregular movement of people transforms human beings into homines sacri persecuted by the state and its apparatus (Agamben 1998). Mass migration leads to dehumanization. People—the subjects and agents of their own destiny—become objects, nameless bodies moving across water and land; they become numbers and application files. In this situation, migrants emerge as national abjects (Tyler 2013, 9), defined within the ‘discursive strategy of the stereotype’ (Bhabha 1986, 18) and ‘the fabrication of a “false image” that becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practice’ (18). They also turn into ‘the legitimate targets of order-building’, the ‘surplus population’ that is ‘systematically ignored by states, because it consists of people whose position is a by-product of impersonal global processes’ (Spijkerboer 2017, 73). Today’s human flow is marked by the fundamental difference between migration as peoples’ passage ‘from but where to’, resulting in a ‘massive quasi-self-sustained and self-propelling influx of migrants’ (Bauman 2017, 15), and immigration as one’s move ‘from/to’, that is, the administratively controllable and psychologically manageable relocation of individuals (15). As a result, ‘we the urban dwellers find ourselves in a situation that requires us to develop the skills of living with difference daily, and in all probability permanently’ (16). These skills of recognizing, respecting, and living with difference demand a new attitude, a cosmopolitan life-view based on tolerance, respect, and curiosity towards the other. In our culture of fear, however, migrants, travellers, and strangers ‘provide a convenient—handy—outlet for our inborn fear of the unknown, the uncertain and the unpredictable. In chasing strangers away from our homes and streets, the frightening ghost of uncertainty is, if only for a brief moment, exorcised: the horrifying monster of insecurity is burnt in effigy’ (Bauman 2011, 60). We desperately need to learn and adopt the practices of human pluralism, in order to avoid the pitfalls of the culture of fear. These practices would not only serve to illustrate Ulrich Beck’s theory of new cosmopolitanism as ‘global interconnectivity’ between people and states (2011, 1348) but would also elucidate the increasing tensions between moving and settled populations and the emerging neo-nationalist, racist, and antimigration discourses and practices worldwide. This reality is marked by the ‘jarring contradiction between our already-close-to-cosmopolitan plight and virtual absence of a cosmopolitan awareness, mindset or attitude’ (Bauman 2017, 18). Stranger phobia reflects ‘the ubiquitous presence of strangers, constantly within sight and reach’ (Bauman 2011, 60). Politically, economically, and socially, ‘we are still left with instruments designed in the past to service the conditions of autonomy, independence

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and sovereignty [of the nation state]’ (Bauman 2017, 19). For this story to be changed, Bauman argues, the present political formations must radically transform themselves, since none of them ‘measures up to a genuinely “cosmopolitan” standard; all of them pair a “we” against a “them”’ (19). In the age of hypermodernity and globalization, in other words, the ‘“production line” of human waste’ has recast the old problem of migration as ‘unprecedentedly urgent’ (Bauman 2011, 5). It has elevated the need to make cosmopolitan thinking and life-­views not only a vital component of communal survival but even a major tactic of ‘our shared planetary survival’ (70). Humanities scholars and cosmopolitan artists are well-positioned to address these everyday philosophical, psychological, and social issues. They can speak directly to Pankaj Mishra’s call for greater precision in the matters of the soul (Mishra 2016). Specifically, performance arts, which operate in the realms of subjective emotions, liveness, affect, and participatory immersion and build theatrical communities of hope, can respond to this call, since these practices define the aesthetics of cosmopolitan theatre. They constitute performance’s gift to present-day history in a number of ways: by simultaneously addressing and triggering the audience’s collective memory and individual experiences and by offering new models of interpersonal and transnational communication. Cosmopolitan theatre, by telling stories of travelling and by confronting the bodies of the spectators with the bodies of the performers in the space/time immanence of a live performance, can turn a nameless migrant back into an individual, someone who possesses a personal history, memory, and agency. It can restore the face (in Levinas’s terms, 1998) to the victims of forced globalization. Cosmopolitan theatre can bring stories of migration to the homes of those who resist movement as danger and who practise mixophobia (‘a drive towards islands of similarity and sameness amidst the sea of variety and difference’) easily recognizable in the infamous power of the collective we (Bauman 2011, 63). It can help overcome the fear of the stranger and facilitate ‘a well-disposed and respectful dialogue between diasporas’ (71). It can also make its audiences aware that human migration is not a temporary crisis that can be dealt with on the territory of a single country or even a continent, but rather a phenomenon of global economies and transnational politics. The devices of cosmopolitan performance include the artist positioning the self or the subject of inquiry in a transnational perspective that simultaneously embraces local and global points of view and also staging the divided self of cosmopolitanism as parallax, a form of reflection and encounter of the self with the other. By assigning an active role to the

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spectator, who creates the meaning of a performance through the act of experiencing it and as its subject, cosmopolitan theatre produces a clash of emotional impulses, energy, physical reactions, and audio-visual information. In this environment, the spectator’s subjectivity is revealed through the power of performative transformation (Fischer-Lichte 2008), when the meaning of the production and its emotional, cultural, social, and political semiosis stem from the audience’s direct and highly personal (physical, tactile, kinetic, and sensorial) encounters with the material elements of performance. Often, these encounters take place at the intersections of cultural traditions and employ techniques of interweaving, which also generate ‘new differences’ (Fischer-Lichte 2009, 399). These differences can produce a paradigmatic influence on the societies involved: they can lead to audiences ‘experiencing the potential of culturally diverse and globalized societies’ (400). In this utopian project of reflecting and staging social cosmopolitanism, ‘the interweaving of cultures creates an innovative performance aesthetic, which establishes and gives shape to new collaborative policies in society. It probes the emergence, stabilization, and de-stabilization of cultural identity. Here, the aesthetic and the political merge’ (400). In cosmopolitan theatres, in other words, this idea of community of equal individuals who come together to experience performance becomes a rehearsal space for a post-migratory society of differences and divided selves. Theatre practices that engage with the dynamics of a group as a collective body often challenge the normative position of the audience and foreground our reception processes. Thus they can construct communities within the performance space of a play. Such communal performance experience can serve as an act of resistance, since it tends to foreground and emphasize strangeness. It can also stipulate that ‘the presence of the stranger should not inspire policies designed to homogenize the social but the creation of a public arena in which difference can be played out and harnessed as a productive force’ (Rumford 2013, 33). Thus, it becomes crucial to study how cosmopolitan theatre maps and constructs paradigms of cosmopolitan behaviour on stage as well as reflects those models back to its spectators. These practices test different scenarios of human interaction through arts and can offer new modes of social and interpersonal conduct. In his recent book Performing Statelessness in Europe (2018), Steve Wilmer examines the role played by theatre in seeking new methods and discourses through which to communicate the difficult nexus between migration and the state. Wilmer describes a variety of theatrical

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experiments that aim to re-humanize the figure of the refugee. Artists and activists, Wilmer states, have always been manipulating performances ‘to intervene in the political arena’ and ‘to offer insight and new perspectives’ on the political fiascos and legal cul-de-sacs that surround the state’s inability to address effectively the outcomes of global migration (Wilmer 2018, 2). Performance arts have already confronted and will ‘continue to challenge nationalistic and xenophobic attitudes, empower themselves by actions of solidarity in overcoming restrictive practices, provide support and pathways for the dispossessed, and inform audiences about their responsibility to find solutions’ (211). Theatre has a long history of resisting the authoritarian myths of homogeneity fostered by the nation states. Thus it can make its audiences become more aware of the abuse of human rights, as well as elicit sympathy (51). At the same time, Wilmer reminds us, when constructing the figure of the traveller on stage, one must pay special attention to its complexity, for it is often someone who has endured suffering and can be of high moral stature, but it is also someone who is not completely faultless (55–56). In its dramaturgical functions, this figure turns into the new tragic character of the age of global migration. In its dramaturgical genesis, I argue, it stems from the protagonist of Maxim Gorky’s œuvre: a proletarian from the lower depths, a character belonging to a new underclass and with a new social status, who at the turn of the twentieth century propelled new social problematics onto the world stage. Similarly, the figure of the traveller, specifically a refugee, emerges as the tragic character of the twenty-first century. This character echoes Arthur Miller’s ‘common man’: someone whose dramatic flaws and ordeals have been caused by the commodification of people. Miller compared this tragic figure of the common man to the biblical Job, who ‘could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission’ (1949). Simply by confronting the Gods, Miller’s common man gained tragic ‘stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world’ (1949). Cosmopolitan theatre echoes this model too, specifically when it envisions its own tragic character positioned between the Hegelian view of tragedy as a conflict between the individual and the state and the Nietzsche’s reading of it as a conflict within the self (Lehmann 2013, 94–95). The fashioning of this tragic character is directly linked to its performative construction, that is, how language, body, and the time/space of performance are negotiated on the stages of cosmopolitan theatre, and the ways it reflects our divided self. In other words, cosmopolitan theatre approximates the figure

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of the refugee to a tragic character, thereby endowing an object of human waste with new agency. By implementing the techniques of Brecht’s Lehrstücke or teaching plays, it can offer audiences new methodologies of solidarity and empathy (Wilmer 2018, 51–55). The objective of this book was to explore the artistic tactics of making performances of cosmopolitanism and to generate a discussion on how these performances can shape our understanding of history. As Arjun Appadurai has it: today ‘we need a liberal multitude’ of voices, viewpoints, and consciousness to create a dialogue of differences and to resist the regressive tendencies of rising nationalism and its outdated economic and cultural schemes (2017, 11). Cosmopolitanism is the type of consciousness that this historical condition demands. This volume presents an attempt to describe and examine the successes and the failures of this consciousness. It sees the attempts of contemporary theatre to stage cosmopolitanism as lessons in humility and ethics, as well as artistic endurance. At its core, cosmopolitan theatre features a person of divided subjectivity and consciousness. It recasts the paradigms of identity into paradigms of selfhood and subjectivity; and it illustrates the dominance of intuitive approaches in cosmopolitan modes of communication, in the artists’ desire to move away from the supremacy of the word (logos) on stage, linearity in storytelling, and illustration in performance. It engages with the fundamental components of performance, such as language, body, space, time, and community building, in order to emphasize theatre’s ability to tell the stories of our past, present, and future in the present continuous of the theatrical event. This event always relies upon the synergy of performance, with the actor turning into its hyper-historian, someone who can channel the energy of historical past and present to their audiences (Rokem 2000, 196–202). As global migration has now become the new norm, we—artists, scholars, ordinary citizens—have found ourselves ‘grappling with a distinct awareness of the limits of performance in the face of this most immediate and urgent of realities’ (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 141). This awareness emerges ‘alongside our understanding that forced migration is already caught within the domain of representation […]: we classify migration, we legislate migration, we prevent or enable migration, we produce narratives and images about migration, we devise military strategies that criminalize migration’ (141). At the same time, we realize that the body of a migrant remains un(re)presentable and uncontrollable. This realization raises questions about the futility, lost opportunity, and disappointment frequently associated with the political, social, or

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philosophical impact that performance art and activism aspire to produce, because in the society of spectacle, as Guy Debord has it, life is already ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation’ (2002, 1). Encountering political performance, the questions we often ask are: ‘What was it, exactly, that we were looking for performance to do, ethically, aesthetically and politically? What did we expect?’ (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 141). Some of us may even wonder further: what types of audiences does this political performance address and attract? And whom does the cosmopolitan theatre leave excluded? Does it preach to the converted, to the open-minded, and to those able to afford, financially and otherwise, such artistic encounter? What are the invisible or perhaps yet untapped economic and cultural means and structures that can allow cosmopolitan artists reach different individuals and spectating communities of migratory subjects? And what are the similarities and differences between cosmopolitan artists who tour international festivals and are supported by international foundations and global producers, and who have access to massive audiences, and those cosmopolitan artists who may share the same sensibilities and philosophical discourses but have less financial support and can reach more restricted groups of spectators? Is the democratization of theatrical viewing and participation possible, or does it still remain a utopian construct? This book has grappled with these issues too, for in times of global turbulence, nobody—neither a victim of flight nor a bystander—can remain indifferent to their own history and experience. One way or another, we are all forced to confront it. I opened this project with acknowledging my own privileged position of a Western academic, who has more or less open access to cosmopolitan theatre work and is willing and able to engage in a philosophical discussion of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’. But of course this position is not a given: many cosmopolitan artists themselves, not just their audiences, are often restricted in their movements and collaborations. Despite the obvious urgency of these important questions, however, the detailed answer is beyond the scope of this project. It remains necessary, at the same time, to draw more attention to the financial, political, and geographical structures and conditions that enable the production and circulation of this kind of work. Frequently produced in the global cities rather than in places where transnational movement and migration are demonized, mostly due to the absence of such lived realities, cosmopolitan theatre remains a political utopia aimed

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to resist the psychology of exclusion and to fight the stranger-danger mentality. I strongly believe, therefore, that the work of politically inclined artists who think monumentally, globally, and trans-historically can serve as an example of how we can start approaching the questions of individual rights and freedoms, among which the freedom of movement constitutes a fundamental human right and not a privilege. As Zygmunt Bauman insists, it is only dialogic interaction and respect that can return to strangers their humanity (2011, 70–71). Theatre and performance arts not only operate in the realms of immediacy and liveness; most importantly, their artistic apparatus is based on the art of communication. Both stage and audience are involved in the act of exchange. By juxtaposing performers’ bodies with the bodies of the spectators in a live performative event, theatre serves as a training ground for the relational sociality of cosmopolitanism. In a world where migration underscores the lack of communication, where ‘borderlines are drawn’, and suspicion and prejudices are fortified, ‘the “strangeness” of strangers […] acquire[s] even darker and more sinister tones’. It is only through dialogue or ‘fusion of horizons’ that we may find new recipes for human cohabitation (Bauman 2011, 71). Theatre offers such a possibility: it can teach us that being cosmopolitan means producing ‘no victims—only beneficiaries’ (71) of interpersonal encounter and transnationalism.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2017. Democracy Fatigue. In The Great Regression, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger, 1–12. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2017. Symptoms in Search of an Object and a Name. In The Great Regression, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger, 13–25. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2011. Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk. American Behavioral Scientist 55 (10): 1346–1361. Bhabha, Homi K. 1986. The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse. Screen 24 (6): 18–36. Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. The Condition We Call Exile. In On Grief and Reason: Essays, 22–35. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Cox, Emma, and Marilena Zaroulia. 2016. Mare Nostrum, or on Water Matters. Performance Research 21 (2): 141–149. Debord, Guy. 2002. The Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press. Depner, Wolfgnag. 2018. Mapping Migrant Patterns. Diplomat. International Canada 29 (2): 40–54. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. London: Routledge. ———. 2009. Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between. New Theatre Quarterly 25 (4, November): 391–401. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2013. A Future of Tragedy? Remarks on the Political and the Postdramatic. In Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance, ed. Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, and Steve Giles, 87–109. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, Arthur. 1949. Tragedy and the Common Man. New York Times, February 27. Mishra, Pankaj. 2016. Welcome to the Age of Anger. The Guardian, December 8. Rokem, Freddie. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Rumford, Chris. 2013. The Globalization of Strangeness. New York: Routledge. Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spijkerboer, Thomas. 2017. Wasted Lives: Borders and the Right to Life of People Crossing Them. Nordic Journal of International Law 86: 1–29. The UN Refugee Agency. 2020. Global Trends Report. https://www.unhcr. org/5ee200e37.pdf. Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations. 2017. International Migration Report. https://www.un.org/ en/development/desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2017_Highlights.pdf. Wilmer, Steve. 2018. Performing Statelessness in Europe. Palgrave.

Index1

A Abu al ‘ala al Ma’arri, 166, 167, 170, 172 Acculturation, 58, 135 Acting/not-acting continuum, 127 Aesthetic pleasure, 23 Aesthetic response, 23 Aesthetics of excess, 200, 211 Aesthetics of trust, 198 Affect, 13, 14, 23, 82, 125, 130, 149, 161, 238, 241, 252, 258, 264, 268, 277 Agamben, Giorgio, 12, 276 Alienation, 40, 80, 125, 144, 185, 211, 212, 267 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 8, 12, 13 Arendt, Hannah, 12 Authenticity, 17, 26, 79, 90, 94, 123, 127, 136, 164, 181, 182, 185, 186, 197, 198, 200–204, 215–217, 230, 265 Autobiographical solo performance, 24, 36, 41, 117, 121, 124, 128, 133, 150

Autologue, 128 Autotopography, 132 B Babayants, Art, 77, 96, 101–104, 106 Babel (Words), 156, 173–180, 189n4 Balconville, 77, 83–86, 109n1 Balme, Christopher, 21, 36, 79, 81, 86, 91, 94, 160 Barbaric speech, 81, 90 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 26, 27, 163, 257, 268, 275–277, 282 Beck, Ulrich, 7, 12, 13, 276 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 11, 146, 197, 247 Bhabha, Homi, 13, 79, 276 BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience, 199, 212–219, 231n2 The Blind Poet, 156, 165–173, 189n3

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Boenisch, Peter M., 4, 5, 145, 146, 180, 182, 184, 202–204, 230, 250 Brothers, Caroline, 205, 207, 208 Butler, Judith, 48, 136, 150, 258 C Cameron, Ken, 200, 219, 220, 222–228, 231n3, 231n6 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 37, 38, 40 The Canterbury Tales, 260, 265 Carlson, Marvin, 19, 21, 35–37, 41, 54, 69, 76, 78, 81, 90, 109n1, 184 Caruth, Cathy, 128 Cassiers, Guy, 156, 159, 162–165, 189n2 Charges (The Supplicants), 156, 160–162, 188n1 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 260–262, 265, 266 Cherkaoui, Sidi Larbi, 156, 174–178, 180, 189n4 Choinière, Olivier, 77, 96–100 Chorus play, 25, 150, 155–188 Chronotope, 130 chronotope of the road, 199, 205–212 Citizenship, 10, 13, 64, 97, 98, 100, 121, 128, 158, 242, 258 affective citizenship, 21, 230, 237–269 Common space, 14, 38, 39, 49, 101–109 Communitas community of hope, 21, 109, 237–269, 277 theatrical community/communitas, 20, 39, 238–240, 242–250, 277

utopian community/communitas, 237–241, 243, 244, 251, 255, 267 Cosmopolitanism cosmopolitan ecology, 16 cosmopolitan patriot, 13 cosmopolitan realism, 12 cosmopolitan subject (self), 4–15, 23, 39, 48, 58, 69, 81, 125, 139, 158 cosmopolitan theatre, 3, 5, 6, 13–23, 25–27, 35, 36, 79, 107, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 149, 197, 230, 237, 238, 240–243, 260, 267, 268, 277–281 critical cosmopolitanism, 15, 16, 18, 21, 169, 245 vernacular cosmopolitanism, 20, 35–69, 96, 198 Cosmoprolis, 155–188 Culture of fear, 122, 156, 159, 276 D Davis, Natasha, 118, 125–133, 136, 151n1 Décalage, 35–69 De Certeau, Michel, 179, 222, 260 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 9 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 63, 69, 160, 217, 250, 258 Digital double, 119, 144–147, 149 Dolan, Jill, 21–23, 39, 237, 269 Double wound, 128 Dramaturgy audience dramaturgy, 181, 202 dramaturgy of assembly, 251–259 dramaturgy of authenticity, 76, 94, 202 dramaturgy of care, 186 dramaturgy of reception, 187

 INDEX 

dramaturgy of walking, 20, 240, 243, 245, 264 relational dramaturgy, 5, 197, 201–204, 229, 230 E Edmunds, Candice, 199, 205, 206, 231n1, 231n4 Encounter, 3, 24, 25, 35, 75, 88–91, 118, 125, 158, 197, 237, 248, 277 theatrical encounter in body, 25 Energy feedback loop, 242 Estrangement, 14, 18, 27, 44–46, 63, 76, 90, 95, 103, 105, 106, 120, 125, 144, 158, 204, 211, 229, 244, 245, 247, 263, 275 Exile, 2, 6, 8, 10–13, 36, 48–55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 118, 120, 121, 125–128, 130–132, 149, 157, 201, 206, 238, 245, 248, 266, 270n4, 275, 276 Exilic city, 261 Experts of everyday, 156 F Fennario, David, 77, 83–86, 88 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 3, 8, 21, 139, 141, 238, 239, 242, 243, 251, 278 The Fish Eyes Trilogy, 118, 119, 133–142, 151n2 Flâneur, 10, 11, 244 Flight, 198, 199, 205–212 Foreigner, 9–11, 90, 99, 171, 173, 257 a melancholic foreigner, 99

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Foucault, Michel, 199, 200, 212–214, 223, 224 Freud, Sigmund, 128, 177 Fronteras Americanas, 36, 54–58, 65, 70n3 G Gale, Lorena, 36, 48–51, 53, 55, 56, 69n2, 70n7 Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, 240, 268, 270n3, 270n6 Gaze, 11, 18, 26, 46, 48, 49, 51, 98, 120–122, 124, 135, 136, 147, 155, 167, 168, 187, 197–230, 257 Gens du silence, 86, 87, 110n6 Globalization, 8, 13, 17, 24, 68, 83, 108, 184, 198, 244, 252, 277 Good Chance Theatre, 251, 270n2 Gormley, Antony, 174, 177–179, 189n4 Grensgeval (Borderline), 156, 159–165, 189n2 Group psychology, 177 H Herd, David, 240, 261, 263, 265–267 Heteroglossia, 35, 45, 46, 54, 58–64, 117 Hikesia, 160 Hinterland, 205, 230n1 Hospitality linguistic hospitality, 78, 84 linguistic (non)hospitality, 78–82, 88, 101, 103, 106 How iRan: Three Plays for iPod, 200, 219, 231n3 100% City: A Statistical Chain Reaction, 156, 181, 189n5

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INDEX

Hybridity, 19, 37, 53, 55, 108, 134, 175, 241 Hyper-historian, 201, 280 Hypermodernism, 1–3, 24, 117, 120, 198, 200, 247, 263, 277 I Ignorance, 66, 120, 158, 167 Imagined community, 5, 168, 241 Immersive theatre, 26, 213, 219, 243, 251 Immigration happy immigrant, 99 immigrant-speak, 91–96 immigrant theatre, 39–41, 83, 86, 91, 92 Implied receiver, 22, 23 Inflammation du verbe vivre, 119, 123, 142–150 In Sundry Languages, 77, 96, 101–109 Intercultural performance, 134 embodied interculturalism, 118, 133–142 intraculturalism, 118, 119 new interculturalism, 19, 119, 134, 135, 138 Internal Terrains, 118, 129–133, 151n1 Interweaving, 139, 141, 278 J Jalet, Damien, 156, 174–176, 178, 180, 189n4 Jelinek, Elfriede, 110n8, 156, 159–165, 188n1 Je me souviens, 36, 48–54, 69n2 The Jungle, 239, 244, 251–259, 270n2

K Kamishibai, 199, 212, 214–216 Kristeva, Julia, 9, 10, 19, 99, 184 Kundera, Milan, 120, 121 Kunst, Bojana, 1–3, 14, 16, 254 L Lacan, Jacques, 106, 120, 122, 144 La Trilogie des dragons, 77, 88–91, 109n2 Lehmann, Thies-Hans, 20, 21, 24, 106, 107, 121, 123–125, 127, 144, 146, 157, 160–162, 168, 180, 186, 279 Lehrstücke, 187, 256, 280 Lepage, Robert, 36, 41–44, 46–48, 51, 69n1, 77, 88–91, 109n2, 110n7 Liminality, 17–19, 55, 130, 135, 141, 150, 240, 266, 268 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 1, 6 M Maalouf, Amin, 171 Macaronic stage, 78 Majumdar, Anita, 118, 119, 133–142, 151n2 Micone, Marco, 86–88 Migration, 2, 3, 7, 13, 15, 16, 26, 28, 37, 39, 41, 48, 55, 57, 61, 67, 75–77, 79, 96, 108, 124–126, 129, 156, 157, 160–163, 165, 167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 187, 198–200, 204–207, 211–213, 216, 218, 219, 224, 225, 227–229, 231n5, 237–240, 243, 244, 251–254, 256, 258, 259, 266, 267, 269, 270n5, 275–282 Mitchell, Katie, 238, 239, 245–250, 269n1, 270n4 Modern mystery, 157, 158, 161

 INDEX 

Monolingualism, 39, 40, 54, 87, 102, 103 Mother Tongue (play), 77, 91–96, 109n3 Mother tongue (theoretical concept), 25, 35, 36, 39, 40, 47, 53, 54, 56, 58, 69, 77, 80, 86, 92, 94, 95, 99, 140, 149, 176, 177 Mouawad, Wajdi, 37, 65–68, 70n5, 70n8, 119, 123, 142–150 Mouffe, Chantal, 13 Multiculturalism, 24, 37–38, 77, 89, 91, 96, 101, 214, 219 Multilingualism internal multilingualism, 160 theatrical multilingualism, 35, 43, 58, 75, 76, 78–82, 87, 88, 91, 96, 101, 108, 109, 168 Murderous identity, 171 Murphy, Joe, 239, 251, 253, 256, 257, 270n2 N Narrative gap, 204, 210 Needcompany, 156, 165, 166 O One-to-one performances, 26, 200–204, 208, 216, 219, 224, 229, 230 P Panopticon, 199, 212–219 Parallax, 17, 57, 277 Participatory theatre, 21, 181, 187 Performance performance competence, 82, 105 performance text, 76, 82 performance walking, 243, 260

289

Pilgrimage, 206, 245, 247, 248, 250, 259–269 Pincus, Anna, 240, 268 Polyglotte, 77, 96–101, 103, 110n4 Polyglot theatre, 19, 36 Porous dramaturgy, 264 Post-Brechtian aesthetics, 3, 212, 244, 247, 267 Postdramatic performance, 20, 156, 158 Postdramatic text, 20, 159 Presence/ co-presence, 48, 50, 54, 57, 64, 69, 77, 85, 95, 101, 118, 122–125, 127, 132, 144, 146, 156, 160, 166, 170, 176, 181, 182, 186, 202, 213, 216, 219, 224, 226, 230, 238, 239, 243, 257, 265, 276, 278 Productive Obsession, 200, 219 Protokoll, Rimini, 156, 180–187, 189n5 Q Quan, Betty, 77, 91–96, 109n3 R Radicant, 8 Reality theatre, 180–181 Reception theory, 24 Reflexivity, 155, 158 Refugee children, 199, 205 Refugee Tales, 240, 244, 259–269, 270n3 Regimes of mobility, 2 Relational aesthetics, 20, 21, 201, 224, 229, 230 Rings of Saturn, 238, 239, 244–250 Robertson, Joe, 239, 251, 253, 256, 257, 270n2 Role reversal, 239, 251

290 

INDEX

S Said, Edward, 10, 11, 19, 22, 56, 135, 167, 275 Salcedo, Doris, 201, 202 Sebald, W. G., 15, 238, 239, 244–250 Secondary witness, 201, 266, 267 Self divided self, 1–28, 36, 40, 43, 45, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 69, 79, 108, 117–119, 121, 125–133, 148, 149, 174–181, 204, 219–230, 264, 277, 279 self as other, 4–6, 23, 25, 26, 48, 56, 69, 119–121, 124, 128, 136, 147, 180, 202, 204, 222, 244 Social abjection, 40, 252, 253, 257 Sœurs, 37, 65–69, 70n5, 71n9 Soleymanlou, Mani, 58–64, 70n4, 136, 152n6, 231n3 Space audience space, 200, 229, 242, 243 performance space, 51, 126, 131, 200, 219, 222, 226–228, 242–244, 251, 254, 278 theatre space, 20, 26, 61, 129, 200, 238, 242, 243 Stereotype, 37, 51, 55–57, 94, 104–106, 276 Stranger stranger-danger, 282 stranger-fetishism, 11, 25, 117–150, 185, 198 Subjectivity, 1, 2, 4–15, 17, 18, 20, 22–24, 26, 27, 36, 45, 48, 54, 58, 64, 69, 78, 79, 92, 93, 95, 108, 119, 120, 132, 137, 145, 155, 157, 179, 198, 226, 229, 278, 280 The Suppliants (play by Aeschylus), 99, 159, 160 (Syn)aesthetic playtext, 19, 68 (Syn)aesthetic reception, 68, 82, 96 Syncretic theatre, 21

T Theatre Replacement theatrical heterotopia, 220, 222–224 theatrical mapping, 220 theatrical synaesthesia, 206 theatrical syncretism, 79 theatrical transcription, 83–88 theatrical verisimilitude, 76, 77, 127, 205 Third space, 58 Todorovic, Dragan, 265–267 Topophilia, 261 Transformative aesthetics, 3, 238 Translation cultural translation, 80, 86–87 translation as outsidedness, 107 Translingualism, 139 Trois, 37, 58–65, 70n4 U Uncanny, 18, 20, 26, 47, 53, 104, 120, 122, 126, 133, 142, 144, 176, 206, 244 Utopian community, 237–241 Utopian performative, 23, 39 V Verdecchia, Guillermo, 36, 54–58, 70n3, 106, 136 Vernacular bilingualism, 83–88 Vinci, 36, 41, 43–48, 51, 69n1 Vox Motus Company, 198 W Wilmer, Steve, 160, 162, 278–280