Performance and Migration

Emma Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000429145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This third volume in the 4x45 series addresses some of the most current and urgent performance work in contemporary theatre practice. As people from all backgrounds and cultures criss-cross the globe with an ever-growing series of pushes and pulls guiding their movements, this book explores contemporary artists who have responded to various forms of migration in their theatre, performance and multimedia work.

The volume comprises two lectures and two curated conversations with theatre-makers and artists. Danish scholar of contemporary visual culture, Anne Ring Petersen, brings artistic and political aspects of 'postmigration' to the fore in an essay on the innovations of Shermin Langhoff at Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstraße, and the decolonial work of Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. The racialised and gendered exclusions associated with navigating 'the industry' for non-white female and non-white non-binary artists are interrogated in Melbourne-based theatre scholar Paul Rae's interview with two Australian performers of Indian heritage, Sonya Suares and Raina Peterson. UK playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson of Good Chance Theatre discuss their work in dialogue, and with their colleague, Iranian animator and illustrator Majid Adin. Emma Cox's essay on Irish artist Richard Mosse's video installation, Incoming, discusses thermographic 'heat signatures' as a means of seeing migrants and the imperative of envisioning global climate change.

An accessible and forward-thinking exploration of one of contemporary performance's most pressing influences, 4x45 | Performance and Migration is a unique resource for scholars, students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies and Human Geography.

1

Migratory aesthetics and postmigrant performance

Anne Ring Petersen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003199755-1

Link | https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education/collections/digital-theatre/migratory-aesthetics-and-postmigrant-performance-a-lecture-by

As early as the 1990s, sociologist Stephen Castles and political scientist Mark J. Miller (Castles and Miller [1993] 2009) proposed that we live in ‘the age of migration’. This perception has become widely accepted among scholars around the world. Recent global developments have infused a new sense of urgency into Castles and Miller’s observation. Work-related migration and forced migration, especially as a result of ongoing wars, civil conflicts and ecological crises, have probably never been more extensive than today. As a result, mass migration and its consequences have become political issues of great concern. In some of the most recent studies of migration, migratory movement is no longer perceived as an abnormality or exception, but rather as an integral part of society and as a naturalised part of everyday life that has influenced – and will continue to influence – most societies around the globe. In recent years, a new term has been introduced to capture this change of perception: postmigration.

The starting point of this lecture is debates on postmigration and culture. These primarily concern thinking and cultural production in Germany and Denmark, but they have a much wider global resonance, because they are part of the texture of response in Europe to the global migration scenario. In this lecture, I will talk about the impact of migration and postmigration on contemporary art, theatre and performance, and how issues related to migration and postcolonial critique surface in works of art and in theatre productions. In other words, I will not focus on the performing arts as an isolated field, but take an interdisciplinary approach. The ways in which issues and histories of migration are addressed in performance have many similarities with the way in which migration is reflected on in other art forms, so it makes good sense to cross the boundaries between the arts – as many practitioners do themselves. Because I take an interdisciplinary approach, my understanding of ‘performance’ and my use of the term must be a broad and flexible one: I will use the term to refer to specific works of performance art and to the performance of actors, as well as considering the ‘performative’, which is understood as the generative and participatory aspect of the spectator’s interaction with the work.

Recent years have seen a significant rise in the numbers of migrants and refugees. In 2017, the United Nations estimated that there are now about 258 million transnational migrants in the world ‒ an increase of almost 50% since 2000. The number of international migrants includes 26 million refugees and asylum seekers, or about 10% of the total (UN 2017). Due to this increasing mobility, existing challenges related to security, rights and integration will only grow and intensify in the future. Notably, receiving countries will have to deal with lasting changes and face significant political, social and cultural challenges. Recent flows of refugees and wider patterns of migration have pushed questions of integration, cultural encounters and cultural values, as well as questions of citizenship and the sharing of democratic values, to the top of the political agenda within receiving countries. The humanities ‒ including studies in culture and the arts ‒ can contribute significant insights, because the struggles over culture, identity, representation and (imagined) community at the core of these challenges are precisely their critical and conceptual priorities. And, importantly, these struggles are often engaged and responded to with poignancy in the arts.

It has become increasingly evident that those who study culture and the arts also need to engage with the fact that ‘togetherness in difference’ has become a common state of affairs (Ang 2001, 17), because this condition has also affected artistic practices and thus also works of art. To engage with cultural encounters and differences as they present themselves in works of art, we need new frameworks for understanding art. I think that postmigrant and postcolonial perspectives can provide us with some useful frameworks, so I will look at contemporary performance art and theatre from these two perspectives. The following discussion has five parts. First, I will consider the concept of postmigration and its historical origin in so-called ‘postmigrant theatre’. Second, I will introduce an analytical concept that is useful in studies of art and performance: ‘migratory aesthetics’. Third, I will briefly introduce my approach to postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, their similarities and differences, because these are crucial to the artist that I discuss. Fourth, I will consider a work by the Copenhagen-based multi-media artist Jeannette Ehlers. Taking her performance Whip It Good from 2013 as my example, I wish to demonstrate how postmigrant and postcolonial perspectives can interact in a productive way in a performance such as this one. Finally, I will contextualise Ehlers’ performance by briefly considering her first theatre production, Into the Dark from 2017.

The origin of the term ‘postmigrant’ in postmigrant theatre

In this analysis, it is not my purpose to focus directly on practices of migration, i.e. the very act of migration and the actual movements of people, nor on the ways in which these movements are represented and reflected on in the arts. Rather, I focus on the social and cultural processes and struggles that come after migration. In contemporary globalised societies there is a constant coming and going of people, which means that the process of cultural mixing is an ongoing one. In continental Europe, the realisation that European societies have been profoundly changed by postcolonial and labour migration into Europe after the Second World War is a recent one, and in some countries only a nascent one. Countless politicians have sought to win votes by being tough on immigration and by promising to stem the tide of refugees. At the same time, the reputation of multicultural policies has been severely tainted.

Historically, there have been two different approaches to multicultural policies. One is the assimilationist approach, which sees multicultural society as a ‘melting pot’. The melting pot is a metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, as different types of people blend into one, typically according to a supposed shared ‘national identity’. The other approach sees cultural diversity and difference as positive things. It is a relativist approach that perceives society as a ‘salad bowl’ where different cultures coexist but remain distinct in some aspects. However, this kind of multiculturalism that seeks to maintain the distinctiveness of minority ethnic communities tends to place a particular burden on cultural producers: their works are often expected to express a specific national, ethnic or religious group identity. As a result, stereotyped ethnic labels are often assigned to cultural producers and their work.

The postmigrant approach offers ways of sidestepping some of these challenges of multiculturalism and ethnic labelling. In German social sciences and cultural studies, the concept of das Postmigrantische – or, in English, ‘the postmigratory’ or ‘postmigration’ ‒ has been introduced as an explanatory framework that captures the conflictual dynamics of globalised societies such as European ones. They differ from multicultural ‘immigrant nations’ such as the US, Canada and Australia in that immigration is not central to national self-perception but in many cases perceived as a threat to national identity and culture. Consequently, even descendants of migrants can be perceived as racialised ‘Others’, as those who do not truly belong to the imagined community of the nation.

German social scientist Naika Foroutan has called European societies ‘postmigrant societies’ to indicate that they are in the process of realising that ‘the nation’ is a culturally diverse and not a homogeneous community, and that established values, hierarchies and national self-perceptions need to be re-negotiated because of the profound changes that the pluralisation of society has brought about. Accordingly, Foroutan et al. (2015) aptly describe postmigrant society as a ‘society of negotiation’. Postmigration is thus a new concept and a new discourse that seeks to shift the perspective on migration, culture and society. Interestingly, the critical use of the term originated in artistic circles in Berlin, notably in theatre. Shermin Langhoff is often credited as the person who first introduced the term around 2004‒2006. She also provided the idea with an institutional framework: in 2008, Langhoff co-founded and became the artistic director of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre ‒ a small independent theatre in the multicultural area of Kreuzberg in Berlin.

Crazy Blood: a postmigrant theatre production

In this section I use the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre’s most successful production, Verrücktes Blut – in English, Crazy Blood – to illustrate some key ideas associated with postmigration. This play, by Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, premiered in 2011. It effectively subverts the stereotyped identities often ascribed to ethnic minorities, particularly to racialised and Islamified bodies, both in society at large and in the world of theatre and film. Crazy Blood has generally been received by critics and audiences as engaging debates on integration and intercultural encounters in an intelligent and humorous way (Schramm 2015, 95–98). The play is set in a contemporary German classroom. It portrays a teacher’s failed attempt to teach Friedrich Schiller’s play The Robbers from 1781 to a class of teenagers, the majority of whom have a so-called migration background. The class is chaotic, the students are disinterested and spend most of their time using their smart phones, and they swear at each other and at their teacher. Suddenly a loaded gun appears from one of the students’ bags. Instead of confiscating it, the desperate teacher Sonia uses the gun to hold the class hostage for a lesson on Schiller and the idea of aesthetic education. She forces the students to rehearse The Robbers – a play that addresses questions of honour, family and individuality and is relevant to the lives of these teenagers. Gun in hand, she finally achieves her goal: to make her students perform Schiller’s play and, with the help of a coercive kind of ‘education’, to contribute to developing their attitudes and personalities.

The irony of the plot is difficult to overlook, as the play subverts the stereotypes of disobedient youngsters from minority ethnic groups by exaggerating them. Yet, the fact that Sonia enforces this ‘education’ by taking the students hostage arguably calls into question Sonia’s own way of practicing the ‘enlightened’ values that she – and the national school system – seeks to convey to students. As postmigration researcher and literary scholar Moritz Schramm has pointed out, the teacher’s use of a gun to coerce students into participation reveals the underlying structures of power and coercion in education and integration. Crazy Blood thus suggests that education and integration are not processes of free participation, but social dynamics based on power relations and oppression (Schramm 2015, 98).

The play also puts front and centre the question of identity, particularly the interrelations between authenticity and theatrical performance in the formation of identity. In the first scene, for example, the actors arrive on stage in their ordinary clothes and begin to put on their teenage costumes ‒ jeans, baseball-caps, sneakers. The boundary between authentic and performed identity is thus effectively blurred as they undergo the symbolic transformation into disobedient teenagers, i.e. the roles they perform, right in front of the audience and not before they go on stage.

Postmigrant theatre: institutionalisation

The Ballhaus Naunynstraße was the first theatre to actively position itself as ‘postmigrant’. Since its founding in 2008, the theatre has been instrumental in bringing the idea of postmigration into the public realm (Stewart 2017, 56). It is important to stress that the term was introduced as a self-chosen descriptor. Lizzie Stewart, a scholar of theatre and migration studies, has noted that the success of the Ballhaus theatre’s productions and self-labelling strategy has made the term postmigrant emerge as one of the potential alternatives to the sociological categorisation of ‘people with a migration background’.

In Germany, theatre productions by practitioners of colour have usually been categorised as so-called ‘migrant theatre’, an exclusionary term that implies that productions by directors and actors of migrant descent are not considered a part of ‘German’ theatre, but as something external and alien to German culture (Petersen and Schramm 2017, 4–5). As an act of defiance and a gesture of cultural critique, Langhoff and her circle began to label their work ‘postmigrant theatre’ to claim the recognition they deserved and to stress that their work is also part of German culture. In 2013, after some successful years at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Langhoff moved to the leadership of the established, state-funded Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin. Since then, the Gorki Theatre has been voted ‘Theatre of the Year’ in Germany twice (2014, 2016), a gesture of public recognition that testifies to the innovative and empowering effect of postmigrant theatre (Schramm et al. 2019, 3–4).

As the artistic director of the Ballhaus theatre, Langhoff appears to have used the term as an act of defiant self-labelling, but also, as Stewart (2017, 57) has pointed out, as a means of establishing a strong profile for her theatre in the competitive Berlin theatre market. Langhoff used the word postmigrant as what she described as a ‘term for doing battle with’ (quoted in Stewart 2017, 57). This suggests that the term is more important for the work it can do than as a descriptor for a particular genre of theatre or category of people. The work that the term postmigrant theatre can do is twofold. Firstly, it has questioned existing knowledge frameworks: it has spurred critical reflection on prejudice and discrimination against migrants. Secondly, it has shifted these frameworks: it has inspired new perspectives and stories, particularly stories told by practitioners who are racialised or labelled ‘migrants’. Langhoff herself has stressed this asset of the Ballhaus theatre’s productions:

For us postmigrant means that we critically question the production and reception of stories about migration and about migrants which have been available up to now and that we view and produce these stories anew, inviting a new reception.

(quoted in Stewart 2017, 57)

Although the artist Jeannette Ehlers has not explicitly linked her work to the idea of postmigration, but rather, to the postcolonial and the decolonial, I contend that Langhoff’s words also capture what is at stake in Ehlers’ artistic practice, as one who seeks to critically examine the historical archive and create new ways of telling stories that invite a new reception.

The German discourse on postmigration

Before I turn to Ehlers’ practice, I wish to proffer some further theoretical remarks. One of the assets of the concept of postmigration is the performative work that it can do, i.e. its ability to initiate a process of questioning and reinvention. This is evident from its academic trajectory: the idea gathered meaning and was elaborated theoretically around 2010, as it moved from a theatre practice informed by theory into the theoretical discussions of the social sciences and the humanities. The term postmigrant had been used for a long time in medicine and the social sciences as a relatively neutral descriptor for ‘descendants of migrants’. Langhoff and her team at the Ballhaus theatre injected the term with a new political meaning. They deliberately used it to provoke the dominant public and media discourses on migration and to question the common perception of the migrant as ‘the Other’, that is to say, the migrant is perceived as a ‘foreign body’ that is not recognised as belonging to the imagined community of the nation. Today, the term postmigration is also associated with an analytical perspective on a social condition characterised by mobility and diversity. As an analytical perspective, postmigration engages with the struggles, societal transformations and processes of identifications taking place after migration – while recognising that migration is obviously still going on.

One of the most vociferously contested arenas in postmigrant societies concerns identity. Identity is also a classic subject in performance, theatre and the visual arts. A postmigrant perspective invites us to think about identity and belonging in dynamic and complex ways. It inspires us to move away from old notions of national and individual identity as uniform and static, as well as from simplistic ideas of belonging as being an attachment to one culture and one nation only. Instead, we must adopt an understanding of identity and belonging as open-ended processes of shifting identifications. We also need, the postmigrant perspective insists, to pay attention to the complex or intersectional nature of identification, i.e. to develop an awareness of how multiple forms of identification and discrimination are interlinked and bear down on individuals in different ways.

Migratory aesthetics

I would like to stress the relative newness of the postmigrant perspective within the arts: presently, there is no clearly defined toolbox for postmigrant cultural analysis, so we have to devise and test the concepts and approaches we use as we go along. In this regard, the postmigrant perspective differs from the, by now well-established, postcolonial perspective. Therefore, I would like to introduce a concept from art theory that I think can help us develop and clarify a postmigrant perspective in performance studies: migratory aesthetics.

Cultural theorist and video artist M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Migratory aesthetics and postmigrant performance
• 2 Being second generation: Australian-Indian performers Raina Peterson and Sonya Suares in dialogue
• 3 Good Chance Theatre: margins and main stages
• 4 The heat signatures of refugee transit: Incoming by Richard Mosse
• Works cited