Channelling and Challenging the ‘imperative to tell’: Reflections on Negotiating Representations of Refugeeness from Practice-Based Performance Research

In 1999 Salverson asked how the participatory performance world could attend to the stories and experiences of those navigating the asylum system without reproducing configurations of power that compound individuals in simplistic terms as the ‘injured’ (51). Despite ‘work on the intersections between performance and asylum ha[ving] proliferated’ (Cox and Wake, Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis: Or, Performance and Forced Migration 10 Years on. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23(2): 137–147, 2018, 141) particularly over the last decade, this chapter argues that Salverson’s concerns around an ‘aesthetic of injury’ (1999, 35) remain one of the most pressing representational issues within the field of refugee arts and performance work. To do so it embarks upon an analysis of the ways in which the issue emerged within two Glasgow-based participatory performance projects that formed part of my practice-based doctoral studies fieldwork during 2017–18. This chapter is narrated from the position of Artist-Researcher and puts Salverson’s questions in conversation with Thompson’s critique of the ‘imperative to tell’ (Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 56) and Jeffers’ theoretical work on ‘bureaucratic performance’ and the emergence of the ‘endearing refugee’ (Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 44). These work as theoretical pillars through which to interrogate how staging suffering consistently arose and was negotiated with as a knotty, uncomfortable issue. As part of this analysis, the chapter reflects upon creative encounters that demonstrate how nuanced and careful practices can responsibily negotiate, and even dismantle, the call for aestheticised injury.