ABSTRACT

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.

 

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

Dramaturgies of self: language, authorship, migration

chapter 1|14 pages

Suppliant guests

Hikesia and the aporia of asylum

chapter 2|10 pages

We are who we are not

Language, exile, and nostalgia for the self

part I|38 pages

On migration and self-translation

chapter 4|12 pages

Acting as the act of translation

Domesticating and foreignising strategies as part of the actor’s performance in the Irish-Polish production of Bubble Revolution

chapter 5|11 pages

Heteroglossia in theatre of engagement

The case of Khasakkinte Ithihasam

part II|31 pages

On inter- and intra-multilingualism of migration

chapter 7|7 pages

On multilinguality, decolonisation and postmigrant theatre

A conversation between Azadeh Sharifi and Laura Paetau

chapter 8|10 pages

Representing the migrant body and performing displacement

Contemporary Indian feminist interventionist ecology

part III|39 pages

On dramaturgy of globalised, transnational, and cosmopolitan encounters

chapter 10|13 pages

I am a war, my voice is a weapon

Language as identity in monodramas by South African youth

chapter 11|7 pages

From Chinese local history to another memory

An interview with Folk Memory Project on their workshop with African refugees

chapter 12|10 pages

Migration and the performance of colonial obscenity

Jean-Luc Raharimanana’s construction of a theatre poetics

chapter 13|7 pages

Resisting the monolingual lens

Queer phenomenology and stage multilingualism