Theatre of the Real with Resettled Refugees

Abstract

Premiering in Sydney in 2013, and touring to London in 2015, The Baulkham Hill African Ladies Troupe is a testimonial play made by director Ros Horin in collaboration with four African women who came to Australia as refugees. This is the second time Horin has made theatre of the real with refugees -- the first was Through the Wire (2004) -- and as a result she changed her approach to recruitment, casting and creative development. She also adopted a more meta-theatrical mode of performance. Nonetheless, some of the genre's problems appear intractable, including an ethnographic structure that has refugees performing self-mimicry (Chow 2002) and reviewers admiring their dignity and authenticity.

Keywords:

• theatre of the real
• testimonial theatre
• refugees
• asylum seekers
• resettlement

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant DP160100272 Power and Performance: Revaluing Theatre in the 21st Century.

Notes

1 For further details, see the event record in AusStage (n.d.). To view a five-minute extract, see Horin and the Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe (2015).

2 See Wake (2013: 102–4) and Wilmer (2018: 73–96) for an overview of Australian and European case studies respectively.

3 The following two paragraphs condense a summary I have previously published in Wake (2013: 104–5).

4 In 2015, Imat Akelo-Opie replaced Toriro Mavondo. Both cast lists are available at Belvoir (2015).

5 See Bring A Nice Dress (2005), Justine Wilcox Bailey’s Conversations in a Brothel (2004) and Peta Brady’s Ugly Mugs (2014) – all of which deal with sex work – as well as Siobhan McHugh’s Minefields and Miniskirts (2004), which tells the stories of the almost 1,000 Australian women who participated in the Vietnam War.