Performing Exile

Description

Bringing together a range of perspectives to examine the full impact of political, socio-economic or psychological experiences of exile, Performing Exile presents an inclusive mix of voices from varied cultural and geographic affiliations. The collected essays in this book focus on live performances that were inspired by living in exile. Chapters blend close critical analysis and ethnography to document and interrogate performances and the contexts that inform them.

 

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.

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 

 

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• ART
• Migration
• Performance
• General
• Dance
• Activism
• General officer
• Performance art
• Theatre
• Performing Arts
• Theater
• Social Activists

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208197
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Eleanor Rathbone
Cover photograph: Judith Rudakoff
Author photograph: Christopher Gentile
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Katie Evans
Editorial assistant: Elise A. LaCroix
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-817-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-818-0
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-819-7
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
I. Introduction
Judith Rudakoff
II. A Theoretical Primer on Exile
On the Paradigms of Banishment, Displacement, and Free Choice
Yana Meerzon
III. The Essays
Chapter 1: Theatre, Reconciliation, and the American Dream in Greater Cuba
Lillian Manzor
Chapter 2: Three Angry Australians: A Reflexive Approach
Tania Cañas
Chapter 3: Exilic Solo Performances: Staging Body in a Movement/Logos 75 Continuum
Yana Meerzon
Chapter 4: Foreign Bodies in the Performance Art of Jorge Rojas: Cultural 93 Encounters from Ritual to Satire
Elena García-Martín
Chapter 5: Lingering Cultural Memory and Hyphenated Exile
Seunghyun Hwang
Chapter 6: Carrying My Grandmother’s Drum: Dancing the Home Within
Sashar Zarif
Chapter 7: Blood Red: Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil of Exile
Tara Atluri
Chapter 8: Yaffa Mish Yaffa (Yaffa Is No Longer Yaffa) 161 From Diaspora to Homeland: Returning to Yaffa by Boat
Yamit Shimon
Chapter 9: Belonging and Absence: Resisting the Division
Elena Marchevska
Chapter 10: Caryatid Unplugged: A Cabaret on Performing and Negotiating 195 Belonging and Otherness in Exile
Evi Stamatiou
Chapter 11: Exile Builds Performance: A Critical Analysis of Performing 217 Satirical Images across Cultures through Media
Sanjin Muftic´
Chapter 12: Resignifying Multilingualism in Accented Canadian Theatre
Diana Manole
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their thoughtful comments on early versions of the Introduction to this book: Jennifer H. Capraru, Serena Dessen, Brian Fawcett, Diane Roberts, Alan Rudakoff QC, and Myles Warren. I must also acknowledge the geneology research provided by John Diener, the important contributions of editorial assistant Elise A. LaCroix, the input from Professor Walid El Khachab (York University), and from Professor Kamal Al-Solaylee (Ryerson University), and the guidance and support of Intellect Books personnel, particularly Katie Evans. As well, I offer my gratitude and respect to the contributing artists and scholars who made this book possible.
I. Introduction
Judith Rudakoff
O ver the past decade, most of my dramaturgy practice has focused on creating tools to encourage people to tell their own stories. 1 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. 2
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.

Figure 1: My maternal grandmother (second from left), in the local tavern where she worked. Photo credit:Unknown.
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 pogroms 3 and 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. 4
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. 5
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. 6
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