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A 2017 report from the European Union, How Culture and the Arts Can Promote Intercultural Dialogue in the Context of the Migratory and Refugee Crisis, specifies that in ongoing response to the immediate European ‘migratory and refugee crisis’, ‘Art and artists … have a particular role to play – as avant-garde, first movers, experimental “go-betweens” helping interpret refugees’ experiences for the rest of us.’1 Its authors also allege that in the present situation of crisis, ‘Experience shows that the arts and cultural projects in particular can create a level playing field to allow persons of different cultural backgrounds to interact, learn and experience on a par with each other.’2 Other recent EU reports which make similar claims include The Role of Culture and the Arts in the Integration of Refugees and Migrants3 and Report on the Role of Public Arts and Cultural Institutions in the Promotion of Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue.4
This EU turn towards the arts’ and culture's ability to enact intercultural dialogue as frontline response to the so-called European migratory and refugee crisis also coincides with two other major recent trends in theatre and performance studies over the last decade which also focus on migrant-centred performance practices. First, there has been the rise of a ‘new interculturalism’ – a term used by Ric Knowles, Royona Mitra, Lizzie Stewart and myself5 – to describe migrant and diasporic grass-roots performance practices occurring across cultural, racial and ethnic difference in urban centres including Toronto, London, Berlin and Dublin. Second, our field's critical turn towards theorizing what Knowles terms intercultural performance practices ‘from below’6 has taken part in tandem with a continuing explosion of creative performance work and research addressing migration and performance, particularly in European and Australian contexts. As Emma Cox and Caroline Wake identify in their 2018 special journal issue of RiDE on Envisioning Asylum, Engendering Crisis, studies of the relationship between ‘performance and forced migration’ have exploded within the past decade.7 The recent work of Cox, Wake, Alison Jeffers, Helen Nicholson, Jacqueline Lo, Emine Fișek, S. E. Wilmer, Gad Guterman and others, as well as the International Federation for Theatre Research's 2018 theme of ‘Theatre and Migration’, makes this shift evident.8...