Performing Statelessness in Europe examines recent performative work by and about refugees and the dispossessed. Immigration has become one of the most contentious topics in Europe today. While the fall of the Berlin wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Schengen zone heralded a new dream of a free world, the period since 9/11 has confirmed that globalization has resulted in the free movement of goods but not of people. Barriers between nation-states have once more been erected and the borders of the European Union (EU) have become a fortress against migration. Ongoing wars in the Middle East and Africa, and poverty and authoritarian or unstable rule in Sub-Saharan African states have made many people flee. Fifteen million Syrians and Iraqis have been displaced. Moreover, the lawlessness in Libya (following the overthrow of Gaddafi by Western powers) has endangered refugees from Africa and the Middle East who have found themselves at the mercy of rival militias, smugglers, and slave traders.1 The number of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to get to Europe has steadily increased (with more than 5,000 dying in 2016), and the total of displaced people in the world has reached a record 65 million.2
The EU has failed in its attempt to agree on a coordinated approach to immigration. In her book Security Integration in Europe, Maiâa K. Davis Cross (2011, p. 5) provides some of the common reasons offered for EU countries failing to cooperate and share the responsibility to provide asylum:
For example, despite being in the Schengen zone, certain states (such as Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Poland and Sweden) reintroduced border controls in 2016 following a large influx of refugees in 2015.First, the many member states have vastly different languages, cultures, customs, and identities, all of which pose significant obstacles to shifting national and political allegiances to Brussels. Second, the member states have entrenched constitutional and judicial traditions that they are not willing to give up. Finally, and perhaps most commonly cited, EU member states do not seem to be able to work together when it comes to foreign and security policy, thus preventing the EU from projecting itself as a coherent international player.
Because the need for asylum has been increasing and the problem is not being solved by political means, artists have been using theatrical performance to intervene in the political arena to offer insight and new perspectives. Through specific examples and case studies, this book assesses strategies by creative artists to address matters relating to social justice. Chapter 2 considers adaptations of Greek tragedy that reflect traditional ethical values from ancient Greece that have been reemphasized recently by philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Modern versions of such plays as Aeschylusâ The Suppliants recall the ancient Greek duty to welcome a guest and provide hospitality. They confront the situation whereby the EU, rather than welcoming refugees, has generally tried to discourage or impede them, thereby gaining the reputation of âfortress Europeâ.
Many European countries have closed their borders, reinforced and extended their border defences, banned air and sea travel for those without visas,3 and introduced intimidating practices. Following the creation of the Schengen zone,4 the EU created the European Agency for Management of the External Borders (Frontex) to monitor its external borders. With a budget of many millions of euros, Frontex, based in Warsaw, oversees border control around the entire European Union. Rather than safeguarding the rights of refugees, it has focused its efforts on their interception and deportation (see Cross 2011, p. 58). For example, in 2006 Frontex launched Operation Hera to prevent migration from Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania to the Canary Islands. According to Frontex (2017), âThe route between Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco and the Spanish Canary Islands was once the busiest irregular entry point for the whole of Europe, peaking at 32,000 migrants arriving on the islands in 2006.â With the help of the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Finnish governments and âfollowing bilateral agreements between Spain and Senegal and Mauritania, including repatriation agreementsâ (Frontex 2017), Frontex used planes and boats and âthe installation of the SIVE maritime surveillance systemâ (Frontex 2017) to intercept boats leaving the African coast, reducing the number of migrants to a mere 170 by 2012. By blocking the Atlantic Ocean route to Europe, Frontex thereby forced refugees to cross North Africa by land and then to cross the Mediterranean Sea by boat. More recently, Frontex has concentrated on blocking the humanitarian route through the Balkans, and the routes from Turkey to Greece. This has resulted in more refugees trying to make the deadly journey from Libya to Italy. Like the women in Aeschylusâ Suppliants, refugees surviving the boat trip across the Mediterranean arrive in Europe to request protection. However, European leaders tend not to be as accommodating as King Pelasgos of Argos.
Modern versions of The Suppliants, such as Elfriede Jelinekâs Charges (Die Schutzbefohlenen), demonstrate the hardship encountered by refugees once they arrive in Europe to seek asylum from unsympathetic government officials. Jelinekâs version was inspired by events in Austria where a group of refugees took sanctuary in a central Viennese church and went on hunger strike, demanding better conditions. Jelinek uses Aeschylusâ play as little more than a pretext for critiquing governmental policies and nationalist attitudes towards refugees. Her play has become one of the most celebrated pieces to deal with refugee issues in German-speaking theatres, having been performed in more than ten separate productions between 2014 and 2016.
Chapter 3 discusses plays that encourage empathy and identification not only with refugees but also with those offering hospitality. Two specific examples, Donal OâKellyâs Asylum! Asylum! and Anders Lustgartenâs Lampedusa, depict fictional characters who have experienced extreme danger in their lives. In Asylum! Asylum! the protagonist is a refugee who has been tortured in his home village in Nigeria and tries unsuccessfully to obtain asylum in Ireland. In Lampedusa a refugee from Mali survives a boat trip to Lampedusa and waits desperately for his wife to arrive by the same route. Interestingly, European helpers become the pivotal figures in the plays as they undergo a transformation in their values with which the spectators are encouraged to identify. Amongst other productions, this chapter examines a production of Lampedusa in Malta that was particularly apposite given Maltaâs proximity to the island of Lampedusa. Asylum! Asylum! and Lampedusa demonstrate the damage done to individuals by the restrictive EU policies, but they indicate hope for a possible change in attitudes.
Chapter 4 reviews various types of documentary theatre that record actual events in the lives of individual refugees, relying mainly on interviews and verbatim speeches. Such plays try to create a sense of authenticity in their representations even when, as in Maxi Obexerâs Illegal Helpers (Illegale Helfer), the scenes, based on real people and events, have been slightly modified for dramatic purposes. Like Illegal Helpers, which focuses on helpers in the host country who act illegally to assist immigrants in danger of being deported, performances such as Tribunal 12 and Case of Farmaconisi resemble judicial inquiries to investigate how justice is denied in current legal procedures. Other types of documentary theatre include productions devised and performed by refugees who recount their past experiences and ambitions, using their own bodies as evidence, such as in Letters Home by the Refugee Club Impulse in Berlin and Dear Home Office by Phosphorus Theatre in London.
Chapter 5 takes the book in a somewhat different direction with an analysis of an unusual type of asylum where unwed Irish mothers were confined in institutions, deprived of their children and identities, and used as slave labour. The chapter indicates the resemblance of the unwed mothers to refugees in their unlimited detention and their reduction to a social status equivalent to what Giorgio Agamben calls âbare lifeâ. It also demonstrates how theatrical and filmic performances as well as journalistic research have shone a light on those who were rendered invisible to society and have served as a means to illuminate and denounce past practices. Films such as Philomena, with the Oscar-nominated Judy Dench in the role of Philomena Lee, and dramas such as the deeply disturbing Laundry, directed by Louise Lowe and performed in an immersive style in a former Dublin convent, have awakened the Irish public to a misguided practice (which finally ended in 1996) and prompted a protest movement demanding transparency and redress. As the Irish government has only begun to investigate the practices of these institutions and the extent of the unmarked graves of the mothers and their babies throughout the country, it is too early to predict the results of this inquiry.
Chapter 6 examines plays that polarize characters and reveal the problem of statelessness in greater relief. Rancièreâs concept of dissensus is deployed here to explore how Yael Ronen, for example, devises dialectical material for characters with opposing viewpoints and backgrounds in her productions of Third Generation: a Work in Progress and The Situation, and how Caryl Churchill divides the audience in her controversial play Seven Jewish Children. The chapter also discloses a tactic of cross-identification in such pieces as Robert Schneiderâs Dirt and Amos Elkanaâs The Journey Home to create a dissensus in which the central characters, based on real people, identify problematically with another group in society, decentring the basis of national, religious and ethnic identities. In the case of Dirt, an Iraqi illegal immigrant named Sad identifies with the racist values of German nationalists. In The Journey Home, the Arab protagonist converts to Judaism to raise a Jewish family, but when his country of Palestine becomes divided, he converts back to Islam to raise a Muslim family. By creating dissensus and cross-identification, these plays pose social and political problems for the spectators to consider.
Chapter 7 employs subversive identification as a strategy to exaggerate and decry nationalist policies. Performance artists NSK, Janez JanĹĄa, Christoph Schlingensief, and the Centre for Political Beauty have provided startling images to call attention to the authoritarian role of the nation-state. Despite avowedly emphasizing European over national identity in order to reduce nationalism and nationalist policies, the EU has done little ...