ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws on care aesthetics to consider the potential located in theatre-making to both reveal and enact relations of care in humanitarian settings. This chapter conceptualises theatre as an aesthetic practice that creates opportunities for a political ethics of care through the way that it transforms and presents ‘voice’ – the ability to speak and be heard – as relational and embodied. While traditional ‘apolitical’ practices of humanitarianism ‘depoliticize’ subjects, the author argues that theatre can be an act of repoliticisation through a care aesthetic, where hierarchies and boundaries – particularly of mind and body – are blurred, and voice is achieved through the fostering of mutually attentive practices of listening. To illustrate the differences between ‘traditional’ humanitarian ‘care’ and a relational care aesthetic, the author uses the example of the temporary and now demolished Theatre of Hope in the Jungle, the unofficial ‘refugee camp’ in Calais in 2015–2016. This chapter further conceptualises care within humanitarian theatre spaces as a tension – one which challenges professionalised, standardised, often commercialised humanitarianism while also containing the potential to reproduce and even deepen hierarchies of power.
