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Overview
In a world where exiled populations continue to grow, the role of art to document and engage with these experiences will continue to be essential, and this diverse book offers an important model for understanding the rich body of work being created today.
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, Performing Exile. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License and is part of Knowledge Unlatched.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783208197 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 215 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Judith Rudakoff is professor of theater at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Judith Rudakoff has worked as a developmental dramaturg with emerging and established
playwrights and artists throughout Canada, and in Cuba, Denmark, South Africa, England,
and the United States. Her books include Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies (2017); Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here? (2015); TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work (2012); Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy (2002, co-editor Lynn M. Thomson); Questionable Activities: Canadian Theatre Artists in Conversation with Canadian Theatre Students (2000); Fair Play: Conversations with Canadian Women Playwrights (1989, co-editor Rita Much). Her articles have appeared in many journals, including The Drama Review (TDR), TheatreForum, Theatre Topics, and Canadian Theatre Review. She is the creator of The Four Elements and Elemental Lomograms, transcultural tools for initiating live performance, written work, and visual art. She was the first Canadian honoured with the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy for her work on South Asian choreographer Lata Pada’s multidisciplinary work, Revealed by Fire (2001). In 1999, she was the first foreigner designated an Honourary Member of Cuba’s acclaimed Teatro Escambray. Dr. Rudakoff is a member of Playwrights Guild of Canada, and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She is Professor of Theatre at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I. Introduction
Judith Rudakoff
Over the past decade, most of my dramaturgy practice has focused on creating tools to encourage people to tell their own stories. Along the way, I've encountered people whose place of origin is no longer accessible to them because of political, social, economic, religious, and other barriers. Encouraging, facilitating, and developing self-reflexive artistic material with participants such as youth-at-risk, refugee or immigrant communities, those marginalized due to gender, ability, age, in fact any displaced or dislocated individuals, has been both challenging and fulfiling.
Art, I suggest, is a weapon in the war against cultural obliteration. Further, narratives that emanate from personal experience, when shared with a wide public, can inspire others to do the same, and as a result, to validate and value their own stories.
When I work as a developmental dramaturg, one of the questions I ask the primary creator on any project is "what is your creative obsession?" I then define creative obsession as the theme or idea that permeates everything an artist generates. Over the years, I have realized that my own creative obsession is finding home, which I identify as a place or condition of safety, freedom, belonging, and agency which might be found within a community, a union of two or more people, or a movement.
I do not claim a direct link to the experience of first generation exile. I position myself as a witness, and, in some cases (where friends are involved), as an ally to survivors of the upheaval, the rootlessness, the resettling, and the recalibrating that comes with adapting to living in exile.
To clarify my own position within this project, and as context for the centrality of finding home in my creative work, here then are some specific thoughts on my relationship to exile.
Diaspora, Family, and Exile
I am not a refugee, asylum seeker, or immigrant. I was born in Canada and have built my life here. My parents were also born in Canada, in Montréal, Québec, where they resided until they died. I grew up in a middle class neighbourhood, went to a private parochial middle school, a well-funded public high school, and graduated with degrees from three Canadian universities before working as a dramaturg in Canadian theatre. I have taught playwriting, dramaturgy, and contemporary Canadian theatre for three decades at a Canadian university.
Let's scrutinize that idyllic snapshot of privilege and belonging.
My family history is a patchwork of grudgingly told anecdotes marred by paucity of detail.
The following facts comprise most of what I know of my antecedents.
My parents were the children of Jewish immigrants to Canada. My maternal grandfather arrived at the Port of Montréal via New York's Ellis Island in 1921 from Zareby Koscielne, the shtetl ("small village" in Yiddish) in Poland where the family lived. All I know about my family's life in this shtetl is that each time there was a local dispute about occupied territories, the control of the village alternated between Russia and Poland. My maternal grandmother, who worked as a bar maid at a local tavern (this is one of the very few personal details she shared with me about her life in Poland), had to switch language of daily use frequently, speaking either Russian or Polish to serve the current clientele, which was mainly comprised of soldiers.
When they left Eastern Europe to avoid the worsening socio-political situation, only part of my grandmother's family could afford passage. My brother and I don't know how many siblings were left behind or if they survived the subsequent local pogromsand more far-reaching wars. My grandparents refused to talk about those who stayed. Those siblings who immigrated to North America were split up by the authorities at Ellis Island: one brother remained in New York City; one was accepted nowhere but Buenos Aires, Argentina because (we were told by my mother, but I have no definitive proof) of his declared communist leanings; one sister went to St Louis, Missouri; and my grandmother was settled in Montréal.
My paternal grandfather arrived in Montréal from Russia by ship in 1908, and was joined by his wife and two sons on September 30, 1910 via the SS Tunisia that sailed from Liverpool, England. I know these facts through the research efforts of retired Ottawa business owner, John Diener, who contacted me initially as part of his own genealogical research, when he identified my paternal grandmother in one of his family photographs.
My paternal grandparents' original point of departure with their two sons was the shtetl of Dashev, in what was then Russia, and now is located within the Ukraine. Three more sons, including my father, were born in Canada. There was possibly also a daughter, who died young.
I know nothing more about my history and have no way of tracing any of the paternal family back farther than my great grandfather, as our surname, Rudakoff, was likely that of the Russian landowner on whose land my family members lived and worked. They were Jews and therefore officially known only by the landowner's surname. Another possible derivation of our surname is that because a number of our family members had red hair, the Yiddish language nickname for the family might have been roite kopp or redhead. In an attempt to make the name more local or familiar to the authorities, the Russian transliteration could have been Rudakov, a recognizable Russian surname.
I have one brother. After my parents died, he cleaned out the storage locker of their apartment in Montréal. Most of what he found was junk (my father, a child of the Great Depression, was a lifelong hoarder): dozens of pairs of black socks, hundreds of tiny plastic boxes of mints, expired tubes of toothpaste. He also discovered five large, dusty boxes filled with mouldy, disorganized, unlabelled photographs, some of which date back to the 1800s. We cannot identify the majority of the people in the photographs. This is our legacy.
Whenever we approached our grandparents with questions about our past, they understandably refused to engage in conversation. That was the past, filled with despair. They wanted to live in the present, where life was better. There was no way to cajole them into sharing more than brief and fragmented memories with us. Our parents would not speak of our family history either, partly because they too knew little other than the names of our relatives. Also part of our legacy is my mother's hastily scrawled chronology of our maternal ancestry, with a few notes on people's marital status and one or two references to occupation, jotted down grudgingly at the urging of my brother. My mother's note includes the sentence "I have pictures in locker to match up all the relatives," but despite our repeated offers to catalogue the photographic archive with her help, she declined to undertake the project.
My brother and I are, therefore, effectively cut off from our history. We have no sense of where we came from (other than the names of the two shtetls that were the point of departure for our grandparents), a confusing list of possibly misspelled relatives' names, and our grandparents' dates of arrival in Canada.
If you are a child of diaspora, and if your ancestral country of origin was hostile (or itself an adopted homeland), are you living in exile? Yes, to be sure, but without any nostalgic longing to return. My ancestors left Russia and Poland to avoid the threat of attack on the basis of their Jewishness. They were not Poles, but Polish Jews. They were not Russians, but Russian Jews. As for my immediate family, we were Canadians to be sure, but in our home province of Québec, we were not pure laine (pure wool), a term used in Québec to designate "true" Québécois who can trace their lineage back to the original French settlers.
Though I had an intensive culturally specific education, I was never a Zionist. Israel never represented home to me.
Home, for some living in exile, is not a place, but rather is represented by people, traditions, and beliefs. In some unfortunate cases, out of a need to reinvent and establish home, an obsession emerges to preserve anything that helps solidify a sense of sameness, which becomes equated with safety. This need can create deplorable by-products: xenophobia and racism.
My first significant experience outside the so-called Golden Ghetto where I grew up (Côte Saint Luc, a predominantly Jewish, middle class suburb of Montréal) occurred when I entered CEGEP at the age of seventeen. My orthodox family was openly hostile towards my widening circle of friends from different backgrounds, and many confrontations ensued. My protestations that the world was larger than our little enclave were dismissed. As I moved farther outside my family's range of control and experience, tensions mounted. At university, my multi-ethnic, culturally diverse group of peers alarmed them. I was not permitted to bring non-Jewish friends into the house. I was instructed to date only within my own culture. While I had no control over the former, I wholeheartedly rejected the latter.
My last surviving grandparent, my maternal grandmother, disowned me when I declared that I was going to marry outside our faith. In a misguided attempt to preserve and protect familiar security, she exiled me. My parents threatened to do the same, but reluctantly accepted my partner of choice, though they never truly welcomed my spouse into the family. My brother, still living at home at the time of my marriage, related my mother's frequent description of her relationship to her problematic daughter, "I can't chew her up and I can't spit her out." This sounds more poetic in Yiddish, but the meaning is clear: I was now relegated to life on the border of belonging and not belonging to my immediate family.
Clearly my family's dysfunction and the impact of their actions on my life can (or should) in no way be compared to the suffering of exiles the world over. I had the power and privilege to make my life into what I wanted it to be. I had freedom of choice. I disengaged from my family. I could live (and, subsequently, work) according to my own goals and inclusive beliefs. And so I did.
Curatorial Criteria and Process
The chapters in this book examine the performances of artists living in exile who did not, for the most part, have the privilege that I have had. Many have experienced the full impact of Othering, displacement, disenfranchising. For them, artistic endeavours focus on the location of home, reimagined, restored, reclaimed, or even rejected.
While the contributors to this collection may differ in their definition of, perspective on, relationship to, and experience of exile, they all offer committed and probing engagement with exilic performance that emanates from a wide variety of geographical locations. Further, they represent the worlds of scholarship and art by discussing work in styles that range from in depth critical and theoretical analysis to autoethnographic exploration through documentation of performance. The nature of exile as a psychological condition provides another lens, expanding the concept to include those who have been displaced but have the ability to return to their homeland; those who left their homeland freely, but harbour a nostalgic longing for an imagined place; those whose ancestors' diasporic route has located them in a place where even after generations, they are (or identify as) foreign bodies; and those who, as Indigenous people, have been marginalized by acts of settler colonialism that create exilic conditions in the homeland by redefining rights and privileges, and assuming and imposing power.
To establish a context for the terminology applied in the individual chapters, I have included what I am calling a Theoretical Primer on Exile, contributed by (in addition to her chapter in the collection) theatre scholar Dr. Yana Meerzon, who has published widely on the topic of exilic performance. In this essay, Meerzon engages with key terms and concepts, and delves into distinctions between such labels as exile, refugee, immigrant, and asylum seeker.
The initial call for proposals for this book invited the international community of scholars and artists to contribute chapters that would focus on live performance either about living in exile, or created by artists living in exile. The type of artistic work I encouraged potential contributors to examine included, but was not limited to:
• creation and presentation of performances that reflect the artist's or artist collective's expectation and experience in a new country following forced displacement
• the blending of new with established performance work into original mash-ups that address the cultural clash between country of origin and country of residence
• radical adaptations of plays from an established canon created from the point of view of the exiled artist/s
The abundance of abstracts I received emanated from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and represented performance by artists who identified as being from Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Netherlands, Palestine, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Syria, and the United States. Most of the submissions interpreted exile as a socio-political imposition.
The curating process was challenging. My selection criteria were based on the following principles:
• blending autoethnographic and external perspectives on research and analysis
• including contributors and subject matter that reflect a diversity of international cultural and geographic affiliations
• providing a mixture of established and emerging voices
Given the strength and diversity of the submissions, I could easily have filled two volumes, and the essays that I ultimately selected are meant to provide a sounding of voices rather than a comprehensive examination of exilic performance.
The Contributors
The chapters of this book represent documentation and analysis of the work of artists for whom the notion of "foreign bodies" resonates. Some are living far from their country of origin because life-threatening political oppression required them to flee (Cañas, Manole). Others left their homeland as economic refugees, seeking stability and a better standard of living (Stamatiou). Some who immigrated to a new country are able to return home at will (García-Martín), while for others the journey is complicated and, at times, impossible (Manzor). For those who can (and have) returned home as visitors, their land of origin is often encountered as a site of nostalgic remembering, a place which has altered beyond recognition (Shimon, Zarif). Some are the children of refuge-seeking exiles and asylum seekers, living on the border between their ancestral homeland and their parents' adopted home (Hwang, Meerzon). For others, the fluid identity of belonging and not belonging to one or more countries has created a new relationship with the notion of foreignness (Muftic, Marchevska). Some are subject to the atrocity of colonial exile, living in an ancestral homeland altered by generations of settler imperialism (Atluri).
Lillian Manzor focuses on the ways in which theatre in Spanish in Miami, Florida enacts the reconciliation process between Cuban exiles and their American home, and how adaptations can lead audiences to question their role in the so-called American Dream, as well as the nostalgic view of home and homeland. Manzor analyzes the socio-cultural and historic context of Un mundo de cristal (2015), a loose adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie by Cuban-born, Miami-based director/playwright Alberto Sarraín.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. A Theoretical Primer on Exile: On the Paradigms of Banishment, Displacement, and Free Choice
III. The Essays
Chapter 1: Theatre, Reconciliation, and the American Dream in Greater Cuba
Chapter 2: Three Angry Australians: A Reflexive Approach
Chapter 3: Exilic Solo Performances: Staging Body in a Movement/Logos Continuum
Chapter 4: Foreign Bodies in the Performance Art of Jorge Rojas: Cultural Encounters from Ritual to Satire
Chapter 5: Lingering Cultural Memory and Hyphenated Exile
Chapter 6: Carrying My Grandmother’s Drum: Dancing the Home Within
Chapter 7: Blood Red: Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil of Exile
Chapter 8: Yaffa Mish Yaffa (Yaffa Is No Longer Yaffa) From Diaspora to Homeland: Returning to Yaffa by Boat
Chapter 9: Belonging and Absence: Resisting the Division
Chapter 10: Caryatid Unplugged: A Cabaret on Performing and Negotiating Belonging and Otherness in Exile
Chapter 11: Exile Builds Performance: A Critical Analysis of Performing Satirical Images across Cultures through Media
Chapter 12: Resignifying Multilingualism in Accented Canadian Theatre