Le Dernier Cartoucherie: refuge and the performance of care

Abstract

In 2003, the Paris-based theatre company Théâtre du Soleil launched Le Dernier Caravansérail: Odyssées, a collaborative creation based on stories that company members had collected from refugees at the Sangatte refugee camp outside Calais, among other locations. Scenes of moral reasoning dotted the six-hour spectacle, calling to mind the international media frenzy that followed the short lifetime (1999–2003) of the camp: if Sangatte was the ultimate embodiment of French compassion toward those in need, why did many resist confinement and hope to escape? By way of a closer look at the Sangatte scenes in Caravansérail, this paper asks several questions: How did the company engage the recent turn toward ‘humanitarian’ effort in French immigration policy in its depiction of the refugee experience? What were the structures of care and compassion with which the performance itself approached its subjects? And finally, how was performance practice, with its sensitivity to questions of affect and corporeality, taken to complicate the forms that human care can take?

Keywords:

• Theéâtre du Soleil
• humanitarianism
• performance of care
• refuge
• Sangatte

Notes

1. The ‘Pasqua Laws’ of 1993, authored by Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, are cited by many, including Mnouchkine (2005, 60) as responsible for the homogenisation of immigration by increasing the requirements for residency in France.

2. The ethics behind this choice are made clear in Cixous's contribution to the programme notes that accompany the play and film, where she asks the reader what it might mean to translate the pain of another into her own words.

3. This distinction is often unclear in the filmed version. Are we watching actors portraying refugees living in the Cartoucherie? Or are we watching the refugees themselves, who were indeed housed at the factory for some time, writing letters to their loved ones?

4. ‘I am sure that the French people would be more welcoming if they were certain that nobody, a stranger or a French person, could disobey these principles, which are fundamental, non-negotiable, and I would say, transcultural’ (the translation is my own).