An Invitation from the Displaced: Refuge Restaged in The Jungle and As Far as My Fingertips Take Me

Abstract

Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, produced and developed by Good Chance, are twenty-first-century productions that foreground the medial affordances of performance art and drama to foreground Western audiences’ relationships and responses to refugees. I propose a taxonomy of the strategies used in these two works as a model for analyzing theatre and performance about refugees. These strategies are classified in terms of the responses they seek to elicit from the audience, and my analysis explores some of the tactics used to achieve these goals. Remedial strategies counter harmful stereotypes about refugees; transformative strategies challenge and reshape basic conceptions of self, other, nation, and citizenship; and ethotic strategies reorient the audience to consider their relationship with refugees, particularly with respect to their disparate identity positions, mutual responsibility, and interdependence. Fingertips and The Jungle are substantially different artworks but are able to achieve similar results by utilizing the different affordances of their respective mediums. Thus, the taxonomy of strategies provides a more systematic and precise way of analyzing how refugee drama and performance achieve their goals. It avoids being overly prescriptive in how these goals should be achieved and instead recognizes how exploiting different tactics and medial affordances can advocate for refugees and other migrants.