Refugee theatre

This conversation traces the creation of Todos Festival, one of the most important international socially engaged multi-arts festivals in Southern Europe. In dialogue with artistic director, Madalena Victorino, the festival will be portrayed as a space for encounter and performative exploration of difference, linking marginalised migrant and minority communities to Lisbon’s theatre scape and cultural ecology. We discuss modalities of transfiguring difficult (local) realities into performance on the interface between centres and peripheries.

Shakespeare has often offered orientation and even emotional refuge both to people in crisis and to those contemplating it. Shakespeare has also been performed by and for refugees. The Western canon has been given various forms of moral authority, including the authority to address crisis. Shakespeare in particular has been deployed for socially and politically reparative purposes. The efficacy of the purported reparation differs among these performances. As empowering and positive as these productions and academic initiatives can be, our present volume considers the moment dialectically, including the less comfortable question of whether some of these "reparative" projects for refugees might unconsciously exploit the refugee crisis as a trendy topic to serve mere palliation or even academic advancement rather than communities in need. :::: Parallel, political uses of Shakespeare for socially progressive causes have also emerged in Latin America, which is why the present volume features a second thematic section, edited by Tom Bishop and Alexa Alice Joubin. The five articles in our special section take the pulse of the vibrant artistic and scholarly creativity in the field since that time by examining the presence of Shakespeare variously on page and stage in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, and the Caribbean. :::: The two sections on refuge and on Latin America speak to each other in their nuanced reframing of concepts such as the local and the global as well as antipathy and political uses of Shakespeare. An ethical concern around “outsourcing” social work to Shakespeare also informs both sections, raising questions about the use of canonical texts as much to reassure the privileged as to advance the interest of the oppressed. ::: https://www.routledge.com/The-Shakespearean-International-Yearbook-19-Special-Section-Shakespeare/Bishop-Joubin/p/book/9781032130385

Starting from the notion of 'post-democracy' elaborated by Colin Crouch, which indicates an increasing tendency towards the deterioration of democratic principles and the narrowing of the public sphere, this book explores how, in the Dutch context, this process is influenced by theatre and performance practice, art policy and governmental action. It points out that, within discourses of post-democracy, aspects of depoliticisation are commonly assessed through theatrical concepts such as spectacle, play, game and theatre. At the same time, this work argues by an analysis of three performances, 'Wijksafari Utrecht' by Adelheid Roosen, a political protest by Quinsy Gario, and 'Labyrinth' by the refugee group 'We are Here Cooperative', that there might be a role for theatre in this age of depoliticisation. It proposes to scrutinise, based on the writings of Samuel Weber, a paradox of theatre. Namely, while concepts of theatre are applied to convey disapproval of government and politics, theatre has a possible emancipatory character to dispute the given order.