The double-edged sword of storytelling

Abstract

This article considers the ethical dimension of performative practice with refugees and migrants, positioning storytelling as a double-edged sword that can either elevate or stigmatise the storyteller. The discussion is inspired by 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, a manifesto written by Cañas, Refugee Survivor and Ex-Detainee (RISE) art director. First, the paper introduces the RISE manifesto and its significance to contemporary practice and research. Second, it discusses relevant literature, looking at the construct of aesthetic distance (Erikson, 2011), safe space as creative space (Hutton, 2008) and aesthetic form as double (Courtney, 1995) in drama. The core of the paper reports the analysis of nine interviews, conducted with professional artists, teachers and practitioners working in the context of forced migration. Data points to the interconnectedness between participants and facilitator, in terms of self-expression, creativity, vulnerability and agency. In this regard, the authors reframe vulnerability as an active, creative, liminal space essential to foster an ethical imagination. This kind of creative vulnerability, key to practitioners’ ethical imagination in performative work, can act as a segue into the symbolic, metaphorical mode of drama.

Drama for dialogue of civilizations: Performance as storytelling in the adult ESOL classroom

“…She explicitly considered her positionality, contrasting the philosophical notions of subjectivity and objectivity, and articulating a philosophy in which we play an agentive role in our own self‐construction, a positionality that transcends borders and played out in her writing and performance. In this process, students exercised agency in determining which aspects of themselves they would perform, creating space for aesthetic distancing and the presentation of a nuanced self in performance (Cañas, 2015; Piazzoli & Kir Cullen, 2021).…”

“…The program's voluntary nature meant learners exercised agency at the basic level of participation, meaning each student‐actor was interested and willing to engage in public performance. This, along with open prompts and facilitator modeling, promoted aesthetic distancing (Piazzoli & Kir Cullen, 2021), allowing the performance to reflect a nuanced view of the student‐actors rather than essentializing their positioning as merely immigrants, refugees, or language learners. Monologues and improvisations reflected students' lived experiences, but did not directly reproduce stories of migration or trauma for the public (Cañas, 2015; Piazzoli & Kir Cullen, 2021) and positioned student‐actors as transnational performers rather than as marginalized community members.…”

“…Applied theater scholars have questioned the ethics of asking members of marginalized communities to publicly perform their own stories, particularly when facilitators or researchers do not identify as members of participants' communities. Piazzoli and Kir Cullen (2021) drew from Cañas's (2015) Refugee Survivor and Ex‐Detainee (RISE) manifesto to problematize the ethics of performative pedagogies with refugees and migrants, positioning storytelling as capable of elevating or stigmatizing the storyteller (p. 1). Cañas's (2015) manifesto cautions those not of a refugee/asylum seeking background to consider several cautions before working with refugees, stating, “our struggle is not an opportunity, or our bodies a currency, by which to build your career” (n. p.), and reminding us:

“We are not your next interesting arts project.

…”

“…Piazzoli and Kir Cullen (2021) analyzed qualitative interview data from language educator‐theater artists working with refugees, migrants, and asylum‐seeking communities through the lens of the RISE manifesto and provided a review of research literature that problematizes performative storytelling, which we do not reproduce here, but encourage readers to explore. Their research demonstrated that reliving stories on stage can be painful to asylum seekers, having the potential to reduce student‐performers' identities to a single narrative.…”

“…Scholars of language education have discussed how drama allows learners to explore the relationship between the self and society (e.g., Cahnmann‐Taylor & McGovern, 2021; Medina & Campano, 2006), promotes intercultural understanding (e.g., Byram & Fleming, 1998; Deardorff, 2020), and offers a host of other affordances for language learning (see, e.g., Belliveau & Kim, 2013; McGovern, 2017; Schewe, 2013). However, scholars have also raised concerns regarding the ethical risks of engaging multilingual learners in performative storytelling, noting that such projects can run the risk of tokenizing and disempowering learners (Cañas, 2015; Piazzoli & Kir Cullen, 2021). This qualitative case study explores performative storytelling within the context of an after‐school drama program for adult English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners at the Immigrant Learning Center (ILC), a nonprofit language school in the northeastern United States.…”