{"id":125,"date":"2016-10-31T19:18:25","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T19:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/?p=125"},"modified":"2023-06-03T08:10:36","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T08:10:36","slug":"authenticity-and-otherness-reflecting-statelessness-in-german-postmigrant-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/14\/authenticity-and-otherness-reflecting-statelessness-in-german-postmigrant-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Authenticity and Otherness: Reflecting Statelessness in German Postmigrant Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonas Tinius<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

But can the untranslatable be voiced at all? How to articulate the leftover inexpressibles of translation? Is it perhaps to be glimpsed in a back-to-front crazy word, an image’s shimmer, the flick of a gesture, the intimacies of voice, in listening to its silences\u2014an attentiveness that opens onto an erotics and ethics of the other beyond its untranslatability? (Maharaj 1994)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Framing<\/h6>\n

Theatres are among of the most vibrant public institutions that have instigated discussions on issues of diversity and difference in Germany in recent decades. Already in the 1980s, public municipal institutions, such as the Theater an der Ruhr in M\u00fclheim or the Ballhaus Naunynstra\u00dfe in Berlin have initiated critical artistic collaborations with migrants from Europe and beyond. Shermin Langhoff, former director of the Ballhaus Naunynstra\u00dfe, now director at the Maxim Gorki theatre in Berlin, has been instrumental in advancing the notion of a so-called \u201cpost-migrant theatre,\u201d by which she refers to a theatre that problematizes an already diversified plural and cosmopolitan society (see Langhoff 2012). More recently, she announced the establishment of an \u201cExile Ensemble,\u201d addressing explicitly the need to take statelessness seriously in German public theatre and to provide new forms of training for exiled artists and actors (see Langhoff and Laudenbach 2016).<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s extensive public funding for municipal or federal theatres often allows these institutions to work on projects over longer periods of time than smaller independent groups. As public institutions, German municipal theatres often work closely with public authorities and councils, allowing\u2014at least in theory\u2014for more direct lines of communication and influence on policy-making or issues such as social housing and integration strategies. Theatres are thus, on the one hand, venues for artistic creation and aesthetic experience, but also key sites for the construction of critical political expertise and theoretical interventions in public discourse on migration and otherness.<\/p>\n

Beyond the sustained social critique and important institutional space that German public theatres offer, contemporary German theatre and the free performing arts have been engaging in a number of aesthetically and theoretically significant ways with migration and diversity in Germany today. In 1980, for example, the Italian \u00e9migr\u00e9 director Roberto Ciulli, his dramaturg Helmut Sch\u00e4fer and the stage designer Gralf-Edzard Habben founded a unique city-theatre in the Ruhr Valley city of M\u00fclheim: the Theater an der Ruhr. As a public-private partnership institution, the theatre allowed its director to set up a pioneering series of international exchanges and collaborations designed to create a \u201cbastard theatre\u201d without national boundaries and for artists ostracized from their own countries. Already in the early 1980s, Ciulli and the theatre travelled to and hosted marginalized artists from precarious regions of the world, giving refuge to politically persecuted groups, such as the Roma Teatro Pralipe<\/em>, which fled Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s before the Yugoslav wars. As Shermin Langhoff (2016) described it in a recent interview, theatres such as the Theater an der Ruhr or the projects conducted by Ariane Mnouchkine at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Soleil stand in a tradition of being \u201cplaces of exile\u201d (Exilorte) that host those that have fled (their) nations. As part of their International Theaterlandscapes<\/em> series, the Theater an der Ruhr has over the last thirty years not only integrated the refugee Roma theatre group; it also became the first Western theatre to visit Iran after the 1979 Revolution, leading to intense collaborations and exchanges between artists in Iran and Germany.<\/p>\n

\"'Ciulli
Ciulli gave me this photo when I asked him for a portrait of him for a publication. Source: Theater an der Ruhr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
International Theaterlandscapes<\/h6>\n

One particularly noteworthy episode regarding theatre and statelessness in the international project history of the Theater an der Ruhr is their involvement with a Roma theatre group that fled from pre-war Yugoslavia. In September 1983, only three years after the establishment of the Theater an der Ruhr, the ensemble was invited to the Seventeenth International Theaterfestival in Belgrade (BITEF), where they won their first international prizes. Their ensemble already had strong connections to Yugoslavia, since a revered actress, Gordana Kossanovic\u0301, had joined the ensemble in 1981 and played the lead roles in the Theater\u2019s first play, Lulu<\/em>, that same year, despite \u201cnot speaking a single word of German\u201d (Ciulli, personal communication). This first international recognition, writes theatre scholar Frank Raddatz in a thirtieth-anniversary Festschrift <\/em>on the Theater, <\/em>\u201cgave them the necessary backing when it was still a hotly contested institution in Germany\u201d (2006, 88). In 1984, the city of M\u00fclheim renewed their funding for the newly established theatre and, in 1985, it was invited to Athens with their adaptation of Sophocles\u2019 Electra <\/em>to partake in the first European Capital of Culture campaign. Their performance impressed one particularly important audience member: former actress and then first female Minister for Culture of Greece, Melina Merco\u00fari. Following the performance, on 10 December 1985, she wrote to the then West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to recommend the Theater an der Ruhr for further international funding.[1]<\/sup><\/a> That same month, in 1985, the Theater became the first West German ensemble to tour through Yugoslavia, showing their plays in Belgrade, Subotica and Zagreb, outside of pre-existing festival structures.<\/p>\n

Three months after this trip, an intense letter exchange filled the folders\u00a0in the archives of the Theatre Studies Collection of the University of Cologne, where I conducted research on this topic in 2014. Ciulli reacted to Merco\u00fari\u2019s letter and wrote to Foreign Minister Genscher, describing his theatre\u2019s experiences while travelling through Yugoslavia.[2]<\/sup><\/a> He suggests how his vision of a new form of international theatre exchange could synthesize the theoretical and practical problems of political art. International festivals are a good start for political activities, Ciulli writes, but what would really be needed are new structures to enable continual collaboration. He broadens the scope of his letter\u2014\u201cIt seems to us that this proposal could become a firm building block of a unified European cultural politics\u201d\u2014linking back to a discourse on theatre as a cosmopolitan practice (or even a \u201cbastardo\u201d theatre) that Ciulli and his founding colleagues have been proposing for decades (Tinius forthcoming), before focusing on his own institution. \u201cThe unique structure of our own new theatre and our unorthodox connections to diverse artists in Europe,\u201d Ciulli concludes, \u201cis made <\/em>for the organization of thematically connected seminars, lasting co-operations, and urgently necessary dialogue between hitherto unconnected groups regions, and theatre-makers.\u201d A small team composed of authors, directors, dramaturgs and academics, he explains, should accompany them to participate in audience discussions and seminars on international theatre with local representatives of the theatre scene in each country. This, he writes, is what he and the Theater an der Ruhr understand as the synthesis of theoretical and practical theatrical labor.<\/p>\n

Although this letter exemplifies Ciulli\u2019s competence and courage to move between the artistic and the political spheres, he did not wait on political patronage from Germany. When Ciulli formulated these thoughts, in spring 1986, he had already begun a dialogue with artists and politicians from Yugoslavia, without any German state intermediary. He had also already organized a joint tour through the FRG and West Berlin. This cooperation between German and Yugoslav theatres kicked off with a spring festival, in May 1986, in the park of the Theater an der Ruhr, in M\u00fclheim, intended for Roma and Sinti families in the Ruhr valley who had taken refuge in Germany from ethnic violence in their home countries.[3]<\/sup><\/a> During all those months, in early 1986, Ciulli corresponded directly with the Foreign Minister of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which collapsed in 1992 with the Yugoslav wars). The minister appreciated Ciulli\u2019s efforts. Since many Yugoslav artists aspire to connect with German theatres to escape discrimination and poverty, he wrote, the government promised to help.<\/p>\n

Between February and April 1986, with minimal financial means, Ciulli invited two professional theatre groups from Yugoslavia to M\u00fclheim and went on tour in various repertory theatres around Germany\u2014among others in the Ballhaus Naunynstra\u00dfe<\/em>, in Berlin-Kreuzberg, which has now become a well-known performance venue for post-migrant theatre. In preparation for these guest-plays, a critical letter was sent from the civic education (Volksbildung<\/em>) department of the Kreuzberg arts council (Kunstamt<\/em>) to the German foreign office, addressed to Foreign Minister Genscher with a carbon copy going to Ciulli. This letter stated that the Kreuzberg arts council, \u201cas a cultural institution in the multinational borough Kreuzberg,\u201d has a serious interest in organizing theatre for migrants. Usually, however, \u201clocal residents from Yugoslavia, despite being the second-largest minority in the borough, were only ever provided with \u2018folkloristic acts.\u2019\u201d The efforts of the Theater an der Ruhr to bring professional theatre from Yugoslavia were therefore commended by the Kreuzberg arts council as a laudable project that deserved recognition.<\/p>\n

\"'Roberto
Roberto Ciulli and the author during an interview about the Theaterlandscapes project. Source: Alexander Wewerka<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During this tour, one of the invited Yugoslav groups, the Roma theatre Pralipe from Skopje, staged various performances of Soske <\/em>(\u201cWhy?\u201d), a play about the history of violence in the Romanes language. The tour culminated with the Roma Spring Festival, which included a public debate on contemporary political theatre in Yugoslavia, organised in M\u00fclheim and attended by over 500 Roma families and interest groups from the region.<\/p>\n

For the Theater an der Ruhr and its ensemble, these initial collaborations and efforts to bring Yugoslavian theatre to Germany were all part of their First International Theaterlandscape. From the very beginning, Ciulli and his ensemble understood theatre as a way to act politically by facilitating artistic encounters. Their work was pioneering and was soon noticed among the cultural politicians in the state and on a national level. In the light of escalating tensions in Yugoslavia, the cultural ministry in D\u00fcsseldorf urged the Foreign Office in Bonn to further their support for the international work of the Theater an der Ruhr: their activities were described as \u201ca reinvigoration of German-Yugoslavian cultural dialogues in times of need that should become an official state-recognized cooperation.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In 1991, Ciulli invited the Teatro Roma Pralipe from the Macedonian capital Skopje to M\u00fclheim for a second time to continue their collaboration. That same year, Macedonia declared independence and Albanian nationalists further destabilized the situation for Roma. Both theatres agreed that it would be too dangerous for the Roma ensemble to return to Macedonia and, as a consequence, established a unique structural partnership: the Roma theatre was integrated into the Theater an der Ruhr and their plays became part of the Theater\u2019s repertory. Already in November 1992, they initiated the project \u201cCulture Against Violence: Movement of a Different Germany\u201d and toured through fifteen German cities\u2014among them epicentres of right-wing extremism\u2014with the provocative slogan \u201cThe gypsies are back!\u201d. After each performance of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s Blood Wedding <\/em>in Romanes (Ratvale Bijava<\/em>), they organized a seminar to discuss \u201cforeignness\u201d and xenophobia in schools, theatres and cultural centres (see Kermani 2001). One critic wrote in his review of a performance in Chemnitz, East Germany: \u201cThese Roma don\u2019t want asylum; they want to be heard. They want to play theatre, in their own language, which the audience doesn\u2019t know. And we still understand them\u201d (Detje 1992, 57).<\/p>\n

In 1998, the Roma theatre won the prestigious Lorca Prize of the acclaimed International Theatre Institute (ITI), in Berlin. By this point, the Theater an der Ruhr had created an infrastructure and an environment that facilitated sustainable encounters between German and non-German artists. Though no cooperation on this scale took place again, the Roma structural integration became a model for all future projects. From the late 1980s until today, the Theater would become a new home for those Yugoslav actors that had left their country.<\/p>\n

Ruhrorter: \u201cRefugee Theatre\u201d at the Theater an der Ruhr<\/h6>\n

More recently, in addition to its function as a mostly public city theatre producing postdramatical restagings of the classics (including B\u00fcchner, Beckett, O\u2019Neill, Schiller, Shakespeare, etc.), the Theater an der Ruhr collaborated with Kurdish theatre groups and initiated a local project on Syrian refugees called Caf\u00e9 Aleppo<\/em>.[5]<\/sup><\/a> This political work has not only affected the institutional structure (requiring more flexibility for guests and international visitors), it also created a particular ethical and aesthetic style of theatrical production that negotiates the political implications of collaborations with stateless or refugee actors and artists. Alongside their frequent organization of public fora on refugees and statelessness in M\u00fclheim, Ciulli and his international technical and artistic ensemble have created a \u201ctheatre of images\u201d (Innes and Shevtsova 2013) that translates its critical cosmopolitan theatre philosophy into a stage language that I have analyzed and discussed further elsewhere (see Tinius 2015a). There is one particular group that has emerged in and out of the theatre, however, that merits particular attention in the context of an engagement with statelessness and the current refugee influx in Germany.<\/p>\n

On the fringes of mainstream newspaper reviews and major theatre festivals, and in the economically and socially desolate post-industrial Ruhr Valley, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, a provocative new refugee theatre collective has been engaging with the issue of migration and difference for the last four years. The project is attached to the Theater an der Ruhr and institutionally as well as artistically supported by it. This project, called \u201cRuhrorter\u201d (literally, \u201cplaces\/people along the Ruhr\u201d), was founded by the director Adem K\u00f6stereli, the founder of freelance performance collective cobratheater.cobra, Wanja van Suntum, and now also includes directors Dijana Brnic and Maximilan Brands, as well as the designer Julia Rautenhaus and the author Alexander Weinstock.<\/p>\n

Initially conceived of as a single theatre project hosted by the public city-theatre of M\u00fclheim, the Theater an der Ruhr, it soon established itself as a semi-independent theatre and arts collective. Since 2012, it has collaborated with the Theater an der Ruhr and successfully attained significant municipal and state funds for a three-year trilogy of plays, installations and artistic interventions in site-specific locations in the city of M\u00fclheim\u2014a former refugee camp in the industrial harbour, in 2014, and a former women\u2019s prison, in 2015. It is currently on its way to completing its fourth consecutive year of theatre and participatory art installations, taking place in an abandoned commercial store in the empty high street of M\u00fclheim an der Ruhr, drawing the attention of politicians and local residents. The project is regarded as continuing the longstanding attention to a transnational understanding of art at the Theater an der Ruhr, articulated in different iterations by the founders of the institution. The notion that theatre speaks primarily to artists, intellectuals and interested members of the public\u2014 and not to national canons, curricula or political agendas\u2014motivated the political work of Ruhrorter as well as that of the Theater an der Ruhr. In frequent conversations or visits to rehearsals, the founders of the Theater an der Ruhr as well as its ensemble recognised the aesthetic and ethical agenda of the Ruhrorter project: both the Theater an der Ruhr and Ruhrorter share the view that one should conduct theatre with refugees by working through common understandings of bodily experience, corporeal movements and aesthetic reflection rather than recounting authenticating tragic stories of national wars or serving an agenda of national cultural integration according to the German notion of national guiding principles (nationale Leitkultur<\/em>), which still pervades political rhetoric, art funding and school curricula in Germany.<\/p>\n

I accompanied the Ruhrorter project for nearly a year during my doctoral fieldwork on theatre in the region before joining the collective as an external academic collaborator and observer upon completion of my thesis. Since 2013, I have been invited to partake and write about their rehearsals, funding processes and to host public events. It was intriguing for me that the artists of the Ruhrorter collective and the creative directors at the Theater an der Ruhr decided that my perspective on the refugee trilogy should feature in the project, too. They suggested that I could become involved, not as an artist but as an anthropologist. My initial concerns about becoming too entangled in the project were countered by them: \u201cNo, no,\u201d they insisted, \u201cit is precisely your presence as <\/em>anthropologist that will make this collaboration interesting\u2014your observation and critical distance to what we do underlines our commitment to reflexivity.\u201d Eventually, I became part of the funding applications as an \u201caccompanying anthropologist.\u201d I did not object, since it was a rather apt description of what I was doing and since I anticipated that this would yield interesting insight into the exchange and collaboration of artistic and anthropological expertise on this project (see also Tinius 2015b). This form of artistic research collaboration is similar to other developments in museum studies (see Macdonald and Basu, Exhibition Experiments<\/em>, 2007), STS (see Niew\u00f6hner 2016), and ties in with recent discussions on the relation between the anthropologist and the artist as informant\/interlocutor\/collaborator (see Sansi, Art, Anthropology and the Gift<\/em> 2014).<\/p>\n

Ruhrorter is distinct among the various artistic initiatives dealing with refugees and diversity in Germany in its emphasis on art, ambivalence and fiction, and its rejection of the idea that it might \u201crepresent\u201d the \u201cauthentic\u201d plight of the participants and their experience as refugees. Instead of merely documenting and re-creating the experience of the asylum seekers that partake in the project, the Ruhrorter group challenges the notion of an authentic actor-character in its performances and installations. Actors and participants are not invited to \u201cplay themselves\u201d or to \u201cshare their stories,\u201d but the project facilitates months-long rehearsal processes in which participants \u201clearn to unlearn\u201d the often internalized roles they have come to assume. Roles taken by participants are often negotiated over months of improvisation and would not be, for example, a Roma street musician, but work through scenes and encounters between otherwise ambivalent and anonymous figures: a couple, a mother and a son, a ghost or a postman.<\/p>\n

\"photo-3\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Front
Front and back of flyer for the project\u2019s 2015 theatre and installation Und die Nacht meines Anfangs<\/em> (\u2018And the night of my beginning\u2019) in M\u00fclheim\u2019s former women\u2019s prison. Photograph by Franziska G\u00f6tzen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The project rehearsals\u2014which never begin with a play script, but rather take shared experiences as their associative starting points for improvisation\u2014 became both a space for collective interaction and a form of practice whose aim was imaginative reflection on what it meant to be a creative subject in<\/em> society, rather than a subject to<\/em> society. This aesthetic approach to theatre making with marginalised and vulnerable subjects aims to explore how long-term artistic reflections on experiences of otherness can bring about both individual and collective change; not through action, but by creating the possibility for imagination of the otherwise. By creating a space for alternative imaginations of the status quo, and by embracing difference and pluralism, the concept of performance problematizes <\/em>negotiation and process, rather than propagating fixity and identity.<\/p>\n

\"A
A scene during the 2015 interactive performance installation in the former cells of M\u00fclheim\u2019s women\u2019s prison.
Photograph by Franziska G\u00f6tzen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This project\u2019s emphasis on theatre as a public forum for reflection on diversity and otherness continues the artistic mission of its host institution, the Theater an der Ruhr. For the last thirty years, it has sought to instigate a public discourse on the role of the \u201cstranger,\u201d the \u201cother,\u201d not as peripheral figures of society, but as constitutive of German and, indeed, European countries. Its many multilingual productions with actors and groups from different parts of the world\u2014most recently with the Turkish ensemble Kumbaraci50<\/em>\u2014try to provide a corrective to the idea that any one migrant, refugee or otherwise member of a society can be \u201cauthentically\u201d known. Its practice underlines and explores the potential of retaining traces of untranslatability. The Theater an der Ruhr and the Ruhrorter group provide a glimpse into some of the possibilities of engaging otherness and difference in current discourses on migrants and refugees through a critique of authenticity in art.<\/p>\n

Studying Migrant Theatre after the Nation<\/h6>\n

How might this project illuminate wider issues about the negotiation of otherness, migration and authenticity in Germany, or Europe, at this point of supposed \u201ccrisis\u201d? In fact, few reports on migration across Europe and the Mediterranean go without variously invoking a current \u201cmigrant\u201d or \u201crefugee crisis.\u201d As a short-hand for the mass-movement of people into European national territories, such terms risk cloaking an important underlying issue of authenticity and otherness. This \u201ccrisis,\u201d decried by politicians and pundits alike, it should be noted, is as much a European and German identity crisis\u2014that is to say, a crisis of national self-understanding\u2014as it is any other form of crisis. Since the 1990s, critical migration studies have undergone a fundamental shift away from notions of diversity that assume, as the opening quotation states, \u201cthe immediate visibility of all elements of multicultural community to one another.\u201d As the anthropologists Manuela Bojad\u017eijev and Regina R\u00f6mhild note in their 2014 article \u201cWhat comes after the \u2018transnational turn\u2019?\u201d [Was kommt nach dem \u00bbtransnational turn\u00ab?], to classify migrants and social diversity along lines of ethnicity, nationality, gender creates a problematic \u201cmigrantology\u201d (\u201cMigrantologie,\u201d 10).<\/p>\n

The migrantological approach criticised by Bojad\u017eijev and R\u00f6mhild neglects the variously complex background of migration and migrants. Writing about diversity in Britain since the 1980s, anthropologist Steven Vertovec uses the term \u201csuper-diversity\u201d to refer to the \u201cdynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants\u201d (2007, 1024). Second, such problematic \u201cmigrantological\u201d approaches that classify diversity according to what I would describe as an authenticating of otherness\u2014only something classified is authentically other\u2014begin <\/em>from an assumption of a host-identity<\/em> rather than from a perspective of difference that recognizes the complex and shifting historical essentialization of European national identities. Perhaps, as Bojad\u017eijev and R\u00f6mhild suggest, we ought to \u201cdemigrantise\u201d migration research and instead \u201cmigrantise\u201d social research (2014, 11).<\/p>\n

Anticipating the theoretical advances in contemporary scholarship, the theatres presented in this article have been working on alternative notions and approaches to understanding subjectivity and subject-formation \u201cafter the nation.\u201d Shermin Langhoff\u2019s project of creating an \u201cExile Ensemble\u201d at the Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin, for example, uses the term exile rather than refugee to create a historical link between artists fleeing from Syria in 2016 and, say, Brecht, Benjamin or Thomas Mann, who also lived in exile but did not enter history books as \u201cGerman refugees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"During
During rehearsals for the 2016 Ruhrorter performance. Source: Franziska G\u00f6tzen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Theater an der Ruhr, over its thirty-five-year long history of collaborations and co-productions with artists from precarious regions of the world, has conceptualised theatre as a form of transnational zone of exchange that functions through aesthetic criteria and not national or ethnic ones. Diversity and difference, then, becomes not an issue of irreversible identity, but of constitutive belonging: how do I create a sense of self, of home, of relocation, in another country and language\u2014but by using my body, voice and gestures? These sorts of questions have been driving its collaborations with artists from Syria, the former Silk Road, Iran, Turkey or Chile. Motivated by a drive to speak to those artists who felt alienated in their own countries by nationalist rhetoric\u2014Turkey\u2019s current crackdown on the autonomy of intellectuals is a sad recurrence of the urgency of such projects, the Theater an der Ruhr aimed to cultivate an aesthetic cosmopolitanism. As its founding director Roberto Ciulli put it in an interview: the real audiences of a cosmopolitan, post-national theatre are those people who, alienated by nationalist rhetoric, felt like strangers in their own countries.<\/p>\n

The role of a theatre that speaks their language is, in such a situation, to beget bastards. . . . We have to take people\u2019s fear of losing a national identity. The dissolution of unambiguous national and cultural identities is something positive. This is a dynamic process, which should not arouse anxieties. (Ciulli 2001, 88f)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The project-cum-collective Ruhrorter, an outcome of the closely knit tradition of the Theater an der Ruhr, continues this engagement with refugees and exiled artists through its postnational, non-documentary approach to theatre. Since 2012, Ruhrorter has been working on research-based, site-specific performances and interactive installations, which problematize migration and the experience of relocation in a foreign language and country as an ongoing and not at all foreign experience. Through explorations of themes like detachment, boredom and waiting, or playful forays into the complexity of family and love-relations in times of loss and separation, it has advanced a different way to think about diversity and difference beyond the nation-state: one not defined by fixed markers of difference, such as ethnicity, nationality or faith, but through common human experiences during times of transition. As a consequence, its theatrical aesthetic of what I have described as \u201cdialectical fiction\u201d (Tinius 2016) develops an alternative to art that authenticates the stateless other\u2014the refugee, stranger or foreigner\u2014through tales of self-narration. The authenticity of the other is not presented as the only way to access the experience of migration; instead, forms of commonality between the observer and the performer are created through images and scenes that rupture one\u2019s expectations. As K\u00f6stereli, the founding director of Ruhrorter, put it during a public roundtable on the arts and migration,<\/p>\n

if you see one of our plays because you expect a moralising tale about refugees, then you will very soon be disappointed and puzzled: but this puzzlement creates a very important rupture, ideally even a moment of reflection on what you as a viewer expect from theatre. Such ruptures of your ways of seeing (Sehgewohnheiten<\/em>) constitute theatrical experience as we wish to advance it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Video<\/strong><\/p>\n