Cañas, Tania, Ruth De Souza, Genevieve Grieves, and Danny Butt. “Performing Statelessness: Creative Conversations between First Peoples and Refugees” Global Performance Studies, vol. 5, nos. 1-2, 2022, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv5n1-2a104
How can we perform research in the wake of the profound injustices of settler colonial occupation? Performing Statelessness brought together communities subjugated and instrumentalised through settler colonialism to tackle this question through creative forms of the research ‘laboratory’ that centred embodied and everyday experiences. Eight artists and three co-facilitators[1] from First Peoples and refugee communities based in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia, joined a day-long lab at the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum in August 2019. This cross-disciplinary collaboration sought to understand statelessness from various perspectives, particularly communities experiencing it themselves. It took what Donna Haraway describes as a “view from the body” (196), incorporating Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s framework for research as a shift that subverts the colonial history of research in favour of performative contributions of self-determined representation (225).
Performing Statelessness created an experimental site to challenge the colonial terms of enunciation through community-led practice and embodied pluralities. The lab was a site to reinscribe the categorisations of stateless that “parcels out the world” in ways that determine belonging/non-belonging (Fanon 90). By shifting the parameters of the terms of enunciation, the intervention offered options that reject the framing of the epistemologically privileged zero point,[2] instead setting itself the task of delinking through acts of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo). However, rather than claiming that this work does the sole work of decolonial practice, we take heed from Indigenous scholars who suggest that in a settler colony, decolonisation would involve restitution through returning land and life to Indigenous peoples (Tuck and Yang). Instead, we suggest that our methodology was designed to interrupt standard, extractivist, historical colonial knowledge generation practices, offering ways to creatively push the parameters of categorisations by centring those subject to them.
Performance is a field studied and understood as existing within the everyday. As Susan Kozel notes, “economies perform, cars perform, computers perform, animals perform, actors perform, and all of us perform in our lives” (66). Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson specifically remind us that performance now occurs in more places than ever before, in spaces largely beyond traditional “performance” settings—digital archives, workshops, community centres and public spaces. Most recently, performances involved the use of Zoom and other mediated tools during the global Covid-19 pandemic. Within such settings, people are no longer merely audiences but rather “spectators, witnesses, observers, voyagers,” and there is now a “plethora of events that constitute performance” (3). This transition from the passive audience speaks to a vital shift in how performance and the performative can be understood and expanded through understandings of practice-as-research that are not preoccupied with what constitutes performance. Rather, they focus on how something might be understood through a performance framework and, therefore, as a collaboration without limit. Richard Schechner makes the foundational distinction between what performance is and what can be studied as performance. Summoning performance studies’ agility in linking the social, the performative, and the structural, Schechner surmises that “everything and anything can be studied ‘as’ performance” (49)—beyond traditional stage settings and community and applied theatre dynamics. Looking at statelessness as a performance framework enabled bodies to speak of the negotiation of daily border mechanics of settler-colonial power of the nation-state and its associated exclusionary border management strategies that deem some bodies disposable. Rather than working through fixed definitions of statelessness, Indigenous knowledge or refugee epistemologies, the Performing Statelessness Lab held open and interrogated these taken-for-granted concepts. We contend that the frame of statelessness has broader application beyond legal descriptions of human movement and that by being open, the Lab could take a broad creative approach to engaging with these questions.
The project Performing Statelessness drew on the work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Harsha Walia to reframe statelessness within discourses of dispossession and population management within settler colonial sites. This mobilised the concept of ‘statelessness’ to challenge the nation-state rather than ratify it. The concept of statelessness has been typically applied to refugee and asylum seeker communities seeking the protection of nations. Hannah Arendt described would-be citizens lacking “the right to have rights” in the state. In developing this project, we argued that Indigenous peoples also lack a ‘right to have rights’ of self-determination, given that the settler colonial project has suppressed customary forms of governance and sovereignty in Indigenous communities. From this perspective, the condition of statelessness can be understood as not only formal/legislative exclusion from the rights of citizenship but also an intellectual, social, and cultural condition that affects wellbeing, consciousness, and the capacity to pursue individual and collective freedom. Stateless peoples have been the focus of social research that aims to ameliorate the intergenerational effects of marginalisation and exclusion, and research projects into the condition of stateless peoples have proliferated in recent years (Vettraino and Jindal). Rather than superimposing the condition of statelessness on the refugee body—as is often the case in development and humanitarian discourses of citizenship—our work seeks to find a ‘state’ in a phenomenological rather than a governance framework, as a condition that refugees and First Peoples both experience as a shared dislocation of their state in the settler colony.
For First Nations and refugee practitioners, the logics of exclusion from European legacies of cultural nationalism, or what we might consider ‘statelessness,’ hold both shared and differential consciousnesses and consequences. On the one hand, the settler-colonial relation to First Nations’ cultural practices has a distinct history of eliminative strategies (including legal acts prohibiting the practice of culture in the early twentieth century), this followed by a logic of appropriation that supports settler-colonial grounding. Refugee communities are often excluded through performative demands, as instruments of nation-state building, or excluded altogether. Refugee practices have not been integral to national narratives of reconciliation. Still, settler-colonial cultural management considers the work of both First Nations and refugee practitioners as marginal to cultural reproduction. We sense that this shared positionality allows the potential of new solidarities and connections that directly challenge the continuing ‘state’ of white supremacy in the cultural sector. In this way, Performing Statelessness sought to work outside colonial terms of enunciation in relation to who is considered ‘out of place,’ or ‘stateless,’ through embodied discursive practices and epistemic disobedience (Mignolo).
Performing Statelessness thus brought together artists under the framework of ‘solidarities of displacement.’ This is understood as follows: while there have been a number of research projects involving refugee and asylum seeker responses to statelessness and many Indigenous-led performances producing a decolonised relationship to the nation-state that can be linked with statelessness, there are few creative interventions that bring these perspectives into the dialogue. This encounter between practicing artists who identify as having an asylum seeker, refugee, or First Peoples background explored culturally responsive methods in artistic research built upon reciprocity, relationship building, and ceremony. Gathering the invited artists together for conversation through a performance frame enabled hidden transcripts (Scott) to arise and be shared towards non-normative formations of discussion and collaboration.
As the principles of European democratic government rely on what Anderson has called the “imagined community” of the nation, we were interested in how the everyday practices of those excluded from the nation forge collective claims to creative participation in public life. In what diverse and complex ways does one navigate new forms of the individual–state relationship? How does statelessness intersect with other forms of exclusion, including affective sovereignties of white supremacy? How does a performative articulation of statelessness challenge liberal understandings of justice that manage access to citizenship through the racial logic of the colonial nation-state? Performance can be a modality of interrogating power and the social form across race (Inda), gender (Butler), and other borders that maintain the identity of social and national bodies (Guterman; Neil; Yépez). Lisa Malkki specifically figures the refugee as a series of normative (and performative) expectations. In a similar vein, Szczepanikova suggests that:
[In the] performance of refugeeness and relations of power NGOs have a unique role in constructing and maintaining refugee identities. They create spaces where certain performances of refugeeness are nurtured and enacted. These performances are guided by regulatory practices of NGO humanitarianism that provide refugees with scripts to be followed. They render some kinds of refugee behaviour possible and make others less acceptable. (46)
Following Conquergood, we adopted a performance lens to interrogate the discursive performativities of refugeeness as daily repetitions, and thus to gain an understanding of how one’s “performed identities speak back to structural forms of power” (7). Bronwyn Carlson points out how such performative modes of self-regulation serve as an extension of governmental policy under settler colonialism for First Peoples. Clearly, there are opportunities for these joint relations of exclusion from normative performativities to be shared across First Peoples and refugee perspectives. As differentially positioned researchers and artists working in relation to academic knowledge with its performative legacies of white supremacy, our challenge is how to enact research methodologies that do not disclaim the heritages of research as a form but avoid reproducing its exclusionary dynamics in our own operations (De Souza).
As Guterman notes, displacement debates often limit people within “dangerous binaries” and “ignore messy relations” that complicate citizen/non-citizen dynamics (3). However, theatre is not about “dramatizing opposing viewpoints” on refugee and asylum seeker issues but rather about expressing the struggle of daily existence within this tension. Performance as process can thus simultaneously hold multiple contradictions and complexities of lived lives and reconfigure understandings of statelessness through collaboration. Using techniques derived from community theatre and performance, the project tested comparative methodologies of collaborative expression among these two groups of stateless peoples: refugee/asylum seekers and First Peoples. Avoiding border monitors, Performing Statelessness sought to shift from performance as management to performance as possibility. As one artist-participant observed: “the idea of statelessness… for me when I hear it and try to understand it… it will require you to have an idea of what it means to be stateful”—criticising modes of citizenship where the state itself is understood as the dominant logic of enunciation.
An important feature of Performing Statelessness was the involvement of First Peoples and refugee-identifying practitioners at all levels of the project: from conception to methodological development, project organisation and evaluation, including the three facilitators. It sought to generate research that was responsive to the issues relevant to these communities and to create intrinsic value throughout. This project explicitly engaged with artists who work with themes pertinent to the concept of statelessness in their public, professional activity. In contrast with research where participants are ‘given’ a voice by the researchers, we expected participants to see their participation in the study as an extension of their public creative activities. Performing Statelessness sought to approach research as co-theorising the conditions of statelessness in a practical manner and materialise this in performed outcomes. It also attempted to enact meaningful and equitable collaboration between the University[3] and local organisations and communities outside the institution.
The artists brought a range of creative and community-organising backgrounds: slam poetry, illustration, singers, instrumentalists, and filmmakers. The artists were Ajak Kwai, Ez Eldin Deng, Kate ten Buuren, Uncle Robert Bundle, Rubii Red, Ruth Nyaruot Ruach, Tasnim Sammak, Dianne Jones, and wāni La Frere. The Lab was co-facilitated by Ruth De Souza, a researcher with expertise in cultural safety and co-design in health; Tania Cañas, a writer, theatremaker and performance scholar; and Genevieve Grieves, a Worimi curator, artist, educator, and filmmaker. As members of First Peoples, displaced, and racialised communities, the facilitators worked in a peer mode with the artists, bringing experience in working with members from both communities. Artistic research scholar Danny Butt supported the Lab, the Statelessness Hallmark Research Initiative at the University of Melbourne, and Arts Gen, an organisation that uses arts-based methodologies to challenge racial discrimination based in a large community health service in Melbourne.
The Performing Statelessness Lab’s format enabled artists to think and create outside discursive and material borders of statelessness, citizenship, belonging and place, offering a counter to the injustices of settler colonial occupation. Rather than calling the gathering a ‘workshop,’ we called it a ‘lab’ as we brought together existing artists and professionals from both communities. The Lab is a site for dialogue and exchange without the pressure of any particular outcome. The term Lab enabled us to frame the artists we working with, as already deeply working and thinking through the themes of the lab through their professional practice in public ways. We invited artists to rethink and rebody statelessness through their creative practice: “The body is a way of thinking, and intellectual work can be a creative practice” (Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes).
The Lab addressed the following questions:
Labs in creative practice are often used to describe active, generative sites used to play, create, and test out possibilities. Labs are both process and outcome, an opportunity to have a discussion within the community by participants, researchers, and facilitators directly experiencing and creating work around the issues of statelessness without the need to consider a final “audience.” In this way, the lab emulates a form of rehearsal space, especially in the early stages (Meromi 174).
The Performing Statelessness Lab began with a smoking ceremony by Wurundjeri Elders outside Bunjilaka, a First Nations-run space within Melbourne Museum. This process opened decolonial introductions, placing participants in relation to Country[4] and considered how the artist participants had been subjected to various nation-state border mechanisms. Image theatre was instigated by a provocation for artist-participants to reflect on everyday moments of statelessness. Boal describes image theatre as the first stage of “knowing the body: a series of exercises by which one gets to know one’s body, its limitations and possibilities, its social distortions and possibilities” (102). Artist-participants were asked to mould their own bodies into an image representing their moment of statelessness, either through description or more abstractly. Dialogic circles were co-constructed, where artist-participants formed groups with others whose images resonated with them. For example, one group observed that they had all migrated to Australia via New Zealand. Initially, the facilitators planned to reconvene the Indigenous and refugee background groups separately after lunch, so that each facilitator could check in with the two cohorts about unique issues that may have been triggered in the presence of the other group. However, all three facilitators found that having a large group was productive as they had already built rapport. The afternoon dialogues shared experiences of living through colonial violence, resituating ourselves within modes of resistance and communities of organisation within and between communities.
The performance lab functioned as a creative work with the intention of unsettling settler colonial modes of research on statelessness. Through the study of performance of/as research, we take the premise that creative work in itself is a form of research and generates meaningful outputs (Smith and Dean 5), as well as being a form of knowledge-making that is attuned to nuanced cultural understandings that precisely evade the coercive effects of ‘questioning’ in positivist research enquiry (Butt; Spivak). Performance offers a means by which “every day practices from a body” guide theory (Conquergood 7). For Conquergood, performance as methodology “opens the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory and practice”—an approach that can lead to new developments in information, research, and practice in both practitioner communities and the broader public (145). Embodied and dialogic techniques can be used to enable bodies, drawing from lived experience and observation from daily experiences of statelessness, into a performance space that promotes a critical analysis of power. As Diana Taylor describes it, the difference between the ‘scenarios’ of performance studies and case studies in empiricist methods is that scenarios offer “not what is but what if” (34). Following Inda, where identity can be considered unstable, identity as performance can be subverted and reconfigured.
The group explored the connection between the two subject positions of statelessness for First Peoples and refugee/asylum seeker communities. Conversational themes included: statelessness versus the idea of “statefulness”; anti-blackness and colonialism; and whiteness and border imperialism. Artists described a discrepancy in citizenship between the concept of access in a formal sense to structures of the nation and access in the sense of belonging or identity reserved for those identifying with the colonial performativities mandated by the state. The group acknowledged Performing Statelessness as a vital, urgent opportunity to foster solidarities across both groups and consider potential future collaborations. The group also expressed a strong interest in continuing the conversations and connections made into further collaborative research, as outlined by one participant artist:
I think moving forward, I’d love there to be more spaces like this [with] a lot of possibilities and as somebody who’s so consumed and fantasy and like possibilities and alter reality… Even if it’s just in pockets for a moment where we can just be, you know what I mean? We could just—even if it’s for like an hour… but it’s just our space where we could just be free to be who we are?
How can we perform research in the wake of the profound injustices of settler colonial occupation in Australia when settler colonial institutions have implemented the entire organisational infrastructure of research? Performing Statelessness was perhaps distinctive in how it reconsidered the ethics of creative practice research and representation techniques. Data analysis occurred in situ, in collaboration with the artist-participants. These methods are intended to be used in both further artistic research involving stateless communities and in the performance practices of the collaborators and participants involved. Performing Statelessness could be classed as ephemeral, yet it is anchored in practice and the everyday that always returns. The performance framework enables us to understand that borders exist in the everyday and forever, and not merely at the geospatial border of the nation-state. From the meeting between these two groups of artists, we learned more about power, navigational strategies, and communities of resistance.
In 1941, Paul Lazarsfeld distinguished “administrative research” as an instrumental mindset that sees communication as a tool from “critical research,” which develops a theory of the times and presupposes values that should underpin the process and outcomes of research (2). Critical analysis of research “on” refugees and Indigenous peoples has identified how the administrative framework enacts the founding violence of colonisation in its instrumentalisation of communities on behalf of institutions (Tuck and Yang 230). Our work in Performing Statelessness explored the potential of performance as a de-instrumentalising and anti-extractive modality within the research process, understanding that communities can be the source of their own theory, and the starting and ending point of value. If we, as artists and scholars, are to find new ways of addressing the profound colonial legacies of research, performing our own practices in ways commensurate with our collaborators will be vital. Performing Statelessness showed us not only that it is possible to translate such methodologies into performative methods of inquiry, but also that these approaches open new horizons for all involved.
Performing Statelessness was supported by a grant from the Statelessness Hallmark Research Initiative at the University of Melbourne, with research ethics approval from the University of Melbourne, ID 1953653
[1] As a team, we approach this work involving the lived experience of First Peoples and displaced and racialised communities in interdisciplinary and diverse ways within our collaboration. Tania Cañas is an artist-researcher who identifies with the forcibly displaced community and whose work looks at performance, decoloniality, borders, and displacement. Ruth De Souza is a settler of colour, nurse, academic and community-engaged researcher in gender, race, health, and digital technologies. Genevieve Grieves is an award-winning Indigenous artist, researcher, educator, curator, filmmaker, and oral historian. Danny Butt is a white settler whose practice focuses on interdisciplinarity and artistic research methods and who works with the Aotearoa-based collective Local Time.
[2] The ‘zero-point hubris’ described by Castro-Gómez as the colonial point of epistemic departure, observation and global organisation.
[3] We noted ‘the University’ to apply to the history of universities as institution.
[4] ‘Country’ here refers to understandings of place and belonging through First Nations frameworks rather than country as in nation-state.
Arts Gen. “Performing Statelessness.” 2020. https://artsgen.org/project/performing-statelessness/.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.
Bloom, Tendayi, Katherine Tonkiss, and Phillip Cole. Understanding Statelessness. Routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315200460
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal. Vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893
Butt, Danny. Artistic Research in the Future Academy. Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_631389
Cañas, Tania. “10 things you need to consider if you are an artist - not of the refugee and asylum seeker community - looking to work with our community.” Rise. http://riserefugee.org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-you-are-an-artist-not-of-the-refugee-and-asylum-seeker-community-looking-to-work-with-our-community/
Carlson, Bronwyn. The Politics of Identity: Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016.
Conquergood, Dwight. Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. University of Michigan Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4845471
DeSouza, Ruth. “Walking a Tightrope: Asian Health Research in New Zealand.” Diversity in Health & Social Care. Vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, pp.9-20.
———. “Motherhood, Migration and Methodology: Giving Voice to the Other.” The Qualitative Report. Vol. 9, no. 3, 2004, pp. 463–482. http://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol9/iss3/6/
Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2005.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, and Roberto Sifuentes. Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy. Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203830420
Guterman, Gad. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411006
Inda, Jonathan Xavier. “Performativity, Materiality, and the Racial Body.” Latino Studies Journal. Vol. 11, no. 3, 2000, pp. 74–99.
Jeffers, Alison. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354821
Kershaw, Baz, and Helen Nicholson. “Introduction: Doing Methods Creatively.” In Research Methods in Theatre and Performance, edited by Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, pp. 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748646081-003
Kozel, Susan. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. MIT Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262113106.001.0001
Lazarsfeld, Paul. “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. Vol. 9, pp. 2–16. https://doi.org/10.5840/zfs1941912
Malkki, Liisa. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 24, no. 1, 1995, pp. 95–523.
———. “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 11, no. 3, 1999, pp. 377–404. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050
McKittrick, Katherine, editor. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Duke University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375852
Meromi, Ohad, Pablo Helguera, Xaviera Simmons, and Paul David Young. “Turning Theatre into Art.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Vol. 34, no. 1, 2012, pp. 169–782. https://doi.org/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00083
Mignolo, Walter. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-colonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 26, no. 7–8, 2009, pp. 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275
———. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jqbw
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816692149.001.0001
Nield, Sophie. “On the Border as Theatrical Space: Appearance, Dis-Location and the Production of the Refugee.” In Contemporary Theatres in Europe, edited by Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, Routledge, 2006, pp.61-72. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203391297_chapter_4
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge, 2006.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1990.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “More on Power/Knowledge.” In Outside in the Teaching Machine. Routledge, 1993, pp. 25–52.
Smith, Hazel, and Roger Dean. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748636303
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999.
Szczepanikova, Anna. “Beyond ‘Helping’: Gender and Relations of Power in Non-Governmental Assistance to Refugees.” Journal of International Women’s Studies. Vol.11, no. 3, 2009, pp. 19–33.
Taylor, Diana. “Double Blind: The Torture Case.” Cultural Inquiry. Vol. 33, no. 4, 2007, pp. 710–733. https://doi.org/10.1086/521566
Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. East African Publishers, 1986.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2013. “R-Words: Refusing Research?” In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, edited by Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, Sage Publications, 2013, pp. 223–248. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611.n12
Vettraino, Elinor, Warren Linds, and Divya Jindal-Snape “Embodied Voices: Using Applied Theatre for Co-Creation with Marginalised Youth.” Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. Vol. 22, no. 1, 2017, pp. 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2017.1287348