Dramaturgy of Migration

Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre

Yana Meerzon, Katharina Pewny, Yana Meerzon, Katharina Pewny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351270243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre examines the function of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg in making a theatre performance situated at the crossroads of multiple theatre forms and performative devices.

This book explores how these forms and devices are employed, challenged, experimented with, and reflected upon in the work of migrant theatre by performance and dance artists. Meerzon and Pewny ask: What impact do peoples' movement between continents, countries, cultures, and languages have on the process of meaning production in plays about migration created by migrant artists? What dramaturgical devices do migrant artists employ when they work in the context of multilingual production, with the texts written in many languages, and when staging performances that target multicultural and multilingual theatregoers? And, finally, how do the new multilingual practices of theatre writing and performance meet and transform the existing practices of postdramatic dramaturgies? By considering these questions in a global context, the editors explore the overlapping complexities of migratory performances with both range and depth.

Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theatre, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgy of Migration expresses not only the practicalities of migratory performances but also the emotional responses of the artists who stage them.

1
Suppliant guests

Hikesia and the aporia of asylum

Christopher Balme

In her theatrical text Die Schutzbefohlenen, translated by Gitti Honegger as The Charges (Supplicants), Elfriede Jelinek alludes to the drama The Suppliant Maidens (Hiketes) by Aeschylus as an associative reference for her engagement with the fate of refugees, in particular a group of refugees who occupied/sought refuge in Vienna’s Votivkirche in 2011 and later the victims of the catastrophe of Lampedusa: “We have some branches here for peace, from the oil palm, no, we tore them off the olive tree” (Jelinek 1). Aeschylus’s text employs a complex of motifs which enjoy unfortunate topicality: the escape across the sea is referred to repeatedly in the chorus passages and is also mirrored in the madness plaguing the figure of Io, mother of the daughters of Danaus, who has been driven from Greece to Egypt whence her daughters flee again back to Greece to escape marriage to their cousins. Aeschylus’s drama also provides Jelinek with a second motif, which is not quite so evident. Jelinek’s usage of Die Schutzbefohlenen in her title refers to the usual German translation of Hiketes as “die Schutzflehenden”, those who plead for protection, an allusion to the Greek word hikesia, the ancient custom of hospitality and protection from persecution. This custom, or more precisely ritual, goes back to archaic times but attained in ancient Greece both ritual and legal form and thereby a degree of institutionalisation. By offering protection to a persecuted person outside his or her normal place of abode, hikesia can be regarded as a legal and ritual extension of hospitality. Supplicants, irrespective of origin and social standing—runaway slaves, debtors, criminals—were offered protection at certain sacred sites through a ritual. In the ancient law of asylum, sacred and secular law were inextricably intertwined.

This interpenetration of sacred and secular law seems to have made the theme of hikesia or the granting of asylum a recurrent and central question in ancient tragedy. Although we may think immediately of Antigone when discussing the clash of these two legal principles, the case of funereal rights is actually rather unusual. In 10 of the 33 surviving tragedies, hikesia and asylum play a central role. In two, we even have the word in the title: the plays entitled Hiketes by Aeschylus and Euripides share the same title but deal with completely different stories. In four tragedies, asylum seekers or supplicants play a role: apart from the already mentioned plays, we find The Children of Hercules by Euripides and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, where the title character seeks asylum at the shrine of the Erinyes, the Furies. In the Oresteia, there is also a direct reference to hikesia, when Orestes seeks protection at a temple after his bloody deed.

In the following, the task will be to examine the particular dramatic and theatrical conflict potential which appears to reside in the ritual of hikesia. The evident tension between sacred and secular law, which was already controversial in ancient times, can be traced to the present day and still features as a basis for contemporary theatrical and philosophical figurations of asylum and refugees. In the first part of the chapter, I will examine the concept of hikesia as it was understood in Greek and Roman times. This will be followed by a discussion of two dramas in which hikesia features prominently: The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus, perhaps the ur-tragedy of hikesia, and The Children of Hercules by Euripides, read through a production of the latter by the American director Peter Sellars. In each of the European and American cities in which the play was produced, Sellars integrated refugees and asylum seekers into the performance in order to confront the polis with supplicants on their own doorstep. These examples will then be integrated into some political and philosophical observations on the fundamental structure, perhaps aporia, of the hikesia question. The controversial status of this law/custom will be discussed with reference to Jacques Derrida’s essay on hospitality, which points out that both hospitality and hostility share a common root. This inner contradiction inherent in the notion of hospitality he encapsulates in the word hostipitalité (hostipitality). Then and now, political asylum places considerable pressure on the polity confronted with the dilemma of according strangers/refugees sanctuary.

Hikesia and asylum in the ancient world

Hikesia und asylia are two practices or institutions which individually and in combination provided protection from persecution. The former refers to a ritual, which a supplicant (hiketes) could carry out to obtain sanctuary. It seems that hikesia could be provided under two conditions. The supplicant had to carry an olive branch wrapped in wool and enter a holy place, a sanctuary, such as a temple or altar. As long as the supplicant retained direct contact with this place he or she was protected by law and by the relevant deity. Hikesia could also be performed if a person embraced the knee or touched the chin of another person.

If one understands hikesia as a ritual that must be performed to be efficacious, then the result is a changed status of the person in question: the person now finds him or herself in the state of asylos. This status is the prerequisite for the institution of asylum. The Greek word asylia (άσυλία) means inviolability or invulnerability and was used in several contexts: it guaranteed the safety of important persons, such as emissaries or messengers, but also athletes on the way to the Olympic Games and even actors who had to participate in the Dionysian festivals. In a second narrower meaning, asylia was understood as the right to protection from persecution. This in turn was connected to a particular place, the asylon, the aforesaid sanctuary or temple. The degree of protection, however, was not necessarily the same for all sacred places. For the Greeks, the controversial question was the degree to which asylia had a recognisable legal status. Some temples only had local recognition; others, such as certain temples of Athena and Poseidon, possessed transregional status. Whatever the status, there was general acceptance that at such sacred places, worldly laws had no purchase: the runaway slave, the debtor, or common criminal, all those who performed hikesia, were outside the domain of normal jurisdiction. It is this central moment of tension and conflict which motivated not only the Greek tragedians but also in its current manifestation as church asylum has remained efficacious and controversial until the present.¹

The ritual of hikesia had a number of theatrical aspects as it had both a spatial and a corporeal dimension. In her study Das Drama der Hikesie: Ritual und Rhetorik in Aischylos’ Hikesie, Susanne Gödde shows that the specific effect of hikesia was based on the fact that Greek religion was char-acterised by a pronounced consciousness for the sacred character of places, which stood in a particular relationship to the gods (27). Within such places, the supplicant was safe from persecution, because to enter such a space to remove, arrest, or even kill the hiketes would inevitably mean incurring the wrath of the local deity. The sacred space was defined by its demarcation from the everyday world by means of separating off a certain section from everyday space. The notion of sacrality, which implies also spatial delimitation, is contained in the etymology of the word “temple”. It goes back to the term templum (Greek τέμευο ς) and the root τ εμ, meaning “to cut” (Cassirer 100). The current practice of religious asylum is based on such an understanding of the templum which draws its legal justification from Roman law. It is more an ancient practice than a legal principle. As with current cases of church asylum, the goal of hikesia in ancient times was not only to obtain temporary protection but also often to gain access to the country or polis. This required, however, a second step – namely, application to the political leader of the polis (Gödde 28).

The second variation of the ritual is corporeal or gestural in nature and requires that the supplicant touch the supplicated person. This was performed most commonly by embracing the knees, but touching the chin was also possible. This form of special ritual embrace or touching provided a similar degree of protection. For example, in The Supplicant Women by Euripides, the women implore Theseus to grant them protection by referring directly to this ritual: “By thy beard, kind friend, glory of Hellas, I do beseech thee, as I clasp thy knees and hands in my misery” (195). The gesture of embracing the knees is something we associate today with a gesture of extreme submissiveness. That is implied by the word supplication, which derives in turn from the Latin supplicō or supplicium. The practice is well documented in iconographic sources, which suggests that in ancient times, hikesia was part of a generally comprehensible cultural and visual code.

Figure 1.1 Ajax abducting Cassandra who is embracing a statue of Athena. Red-figured calyx crater

Credit: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, 82923

A common iconographic motif is Cassandra’s abduction and rape by Ajax the Locrian, who has sought refuge in the Temple of Athena in Troy after the city’s conquest by the Greeks. In one representation (Figure 1.1), Ajax pursues Cassandra with sword in hand and seizes her even though she is embracing a statue of the goddess. According to the myth, the rape of Cassandra also constituted a desecration of the temple and resulted in various catastrophes for the Greeks during their return from Troy.

Another version of the myth (Figure 1.2) is represented on a red-figured crater from Paestum and which dates to around 350 BC. The image shows a similar situation, but the roles are reversed. It is Ajax who is embracing Athena and seeking sanctuary. On the right, a figure, probably a priest-ess, is trying to flee. The masks suggest that this is a theatrical representation, perhaps referring to a satyr play. The gesture of embrace, however, is unambiguous.

Figure 1.2 Ajax embracing statue of Athena. Red-figured volute crater

Credit: Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome, Inventory: 50279 (1. Inv.)

The configuration of holy place and performed gesture leads finally to the acceptance but not necessarily the incorporation of the supplicant into the new community. This next stage of the ritual distinguishes hikesia from other practices of hospitality, which by definition were only granted temporarily. In this final stage of hikesia lies the greatest potential for conflict because it implies a permanent incorporation into the polis, the granting of citizenship so to speak. Religious historian Jochen Derlien has drawn attention to this aspect of the practice with explicit reference to The Children of Hercules and to The Supplicant Maidens by Aeschylus: “Through the ritual of supplication (hikesia) as part of the hospitality performed at a local sanctuary, temporary asylum could be obtained and then subsequently permanent citizen status in a foreign state (μετοιkία/kατοιkία, metoikia/katoikia) (Eurip. Heraclidae; Aisch. Hiketides)” (865). The refugee could under certain circumstances become a metic, a resident alien, someone who is more than a foreigner (xenoi) but not a full member of the polis.²

In order to understand what conflict and tension such a practice potentially entailed, we shall now turn to two works whose stories provide the clearest exposition of hikesia as a model of dramatic conflict. In this recurrent motif of Greek tragedy, a political problem is played out that evidently posed an almost insoluble problem for the Greek body politic.

Hiketiden and Herakliden: on the limits of hospitality

In The Suppliant Maidens by Aeschylus, the 50 daughters of Danaus flee from Egypt with their father across the sea to Argos in order to escape forced marriage with their cousins. Arriving on the coast, they seek sanctuary at the birthplace of their mother, Io, who was transformed by Zeus into a cow. They enter a sacred grove near the city of Argos holding olive branches wrapped in wool. They form the chorus and reflect on their own actions:

T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Author biographies
• Introduction Dramaturgies of self: language, authorship, migration
• 1 Suppliant guests Hikesia and the aporia of asylum
• 2 We are who we are not Language, exile, and nostalgia for the self
• PART I On migration and self-translation
• PART II On inter- and intra-multilingualism of migration
• PART III On dramaturgy of globalised, transnational, and cosmopolitan encounters
• Index