Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019

This article is concerned with the example of Vienna's Volkstheater in asking how major European cultural institutions might affectively and effectively engage with the refugee crisis and asylum seeking especially following what has become known as the 'Long Summer of Migration' (2015). It discusses what we might describe as the 'Migration Trilogy' of pieces co-developed by Yael Ronen and the performer ensembles involved, namely, the plays Lost and Found, Niemandsland and Gutmenschen.

This article examines devices of comedy, laughter and dramatic humour as technologies of ethics when it comes to staging migration in contemporary theatre. Looking at a tragic farce Hunting Cockroaches (1985), written by the Polish theatre artist Janusz Głowacki during his American exile, and a domestic melodrama Kim's Convenience (2012), written by a Korean Canadian Ins Choi, this article examines comedy as a particular dramatic model that can challenge staging migrants as agentless and voiceless victims. It asks, what happens when theatre artists begin to use stereotype to stage the trauma of displacement? To what extent is comedy truly capable of rendering the complexity of migration? And how ethical can the comedic representation of a migrant be?

This article contemplates the work of UK-based artists' collective Peeling Onions with Granny (POWG). It explores the synergies between four mixed-media projects. These centre on inter-generational legacies of forced displacement. Each artist discussed was born in the United Kingdom in the 1960s/70s. However, during or shortly after the Second World War, our parents and/or grandparents fell victim to Soviet mass deportations from Poland and Latvia to Siberia. The article reflects on the ethical dimensions of our creative engagement with these legacies. It asks what, in a politically volatile 'pre-Brexit' climate, we as both practitioners and descendants of immigrants are bringing to the 'feast'.

This article examines how theatre and philosophy may critically contribute to discussing empathy towards otherness in the context of the ongoing massive surge of migration across the globe. Drawing on concepts from philosophical works by Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida, it investigates how different dramaturgical techniques and aesthetics – namely in Euripedes' Children of Heracles (c.430 BCE), Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon (2009) and Nikos Kazantzakis and Graça P. Corrêa's Christ Recrucified (1954/2018) – address ethical-affective percepts such as empathy and hospitality in a theatre dealing with migration experiences.

This article analyses the experience of creating Women of Power (2018) with a diverse group of refugees and asylum seekers in Leeds. Using the normative framework of a dialogic continuum of micro and macro dramaturgies to guide the analysis, the risks and tensions present in several forms of theatre facilitation are considered. The article examines the complexities of critical reflection and language in relation to creating theatre and draws on Nancy Fraser's analysis of social injustice to consider the position of the facilitator when working with migrant populations. The article contends that an effective way to create an engaging aesthetic and to work as 'redistributors' of privilege may be to offer sustainable, dramatic and pragmatic structures for participants to add their voices to.

In 2012 Alexandra D'Onofrio set up a series of theatre workshops as part of a larger research project using a variety of arts and creative techniques to carry out a methodological investigation into the interior and imaginative lifeworlds of migrants. A group of actors and researchers were joined by three young Egyptian migrants in a workshop using drama exercises to illuminate the ways in which they formed stories to narrate their lived experiences. This piece discusses the impact of distorted media discourses around migration and the ways in which audio-visual, performative and textual anthropological representations of migration can be used to highlight the political responsibility of bringing people's experiences, aspirations, contradictions and voices into the public realm.

The open-ended durational performance The Foreigner is a personal response to the migration question currently involving Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The work explores and questions notions of identity and territoriality, reality and virtuality, through the anonymity and vulnerability of the artist, and the active participation of the audience in the performance process. The artist's body worked as a mirror that reflected personal ideas, constructs, and emotions of the visitors, who experience and interpret the image of The Foreigner according to their personal histories and past experiences. The result is a multiplicity of perspectives on migration and beyond.

The Nimis Groupe are an international theatre collective made up of six Belgian and six French actors. Roxane Paire interviewed them in 2015 while they were working on a play entitled Ceux que j'ai rencontrés ne m'ont peut-être pas vu (Those that I've met probably did not see me). This piece focused on the legal mechanisms of asylum in the European Union and was performed by actors from the company who performed onstage alongside some of the migrants who had informed the research for the play. This intervention discusses the ethical implications of the European members of the company working alongside migrants who were not at that point legally recognized as citizens.

The Jungle (2018), by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, is a play that focuses on the experiences of the residents and volunteers of the refugee camp known as the Calais Jungle, where London audiences experienced a recreation of this camp in a West End theatre. This intervention discusses the ethics surrounding the theatrical recreation of such places which are associated with conflict and displacement. Considering the positionality of the audience and the creators of the play, as well as analysing its institutional framing, this piece examines the issues inherent within recreating places at a distance.