Reframing the document(ary): exploring asylum policies on stage

ABSTRACT

Ensuing from the concept of Documentality (Steyerl), this paper proposes to reframe documentary practices in refugee theatre. This is based on the observation that documentary theatre during the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015 extensively negotiated the role of documents within bureaucratic performances (Jeffers). Following the notion of the document as a powerful tool of governance, this article revisits Bertolt Brecht’s ponderings about the performative ambivalence of the passport and critically discusses Peter Weiss’ ideal of an objective and juridical documentary theatre. Finally, it analyses the verbatim play ‘Asylum Dialogues’ and the documentary performance ‘Ultima Ratio’ within the framework of Documentality.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentality
• documentary
• theatre
• asylum
• Germany

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Friederike Oberkrome is a doctoral researcher at the CRC 1171 Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. She works in a research project on ‘Emotion and relationality in forms of (post-)migrant theatre’ and her PhD-Thesis deals with documentary explorations of migration on German stages. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies.

Notes

1 For an extensive list of initiatives, see the list compiled by the online journal nachtkritik.de (2015). https://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11497. Accessed February 22, 2018.

2 “document, n.” OED Online. January 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56328?rskey=vOSIGL&result=1&isAdvanced=false. Accessed February 22, 2018.

3 Written in 1941 in Finnish exile, the Refugee Conversations have been read as a document of Brecht’s own life situation as a refugee. Because of the striking resemblances to his own biography, the book was partly even received as a fictive soliloquy. Especially, the figure of the physicist Ziffel coincides with but also differs from Brecht’s biography. Koopmann 2013, 249f.

4 All translations of Brecht’s Refugee Conversations are by the author.

5 “passport, n.1”. OED Online. January 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/138557?rskey=mR86Bb&result=1&isAdvanced=false. Accessed February 22, 2018.

6 The Heimathafen Neukölln is a small, not governmentally funded theatre space in Berlin-Neukölln that engages primarily with topics relevant to its diverse neighborhood. As both performances thus took place within the same institutional framework, their aesthetic differences were even more striking for me.

7 https://heimathafen-neukoelln.de/spielplan?url=AsylDialoge. Accessed November 4, 2017.

8 https://heimathafen-neukoelln.de/spielplan?url=UltimaRatio. Accessed November 4, 2017.

9 http://buehne-fuer-menschenrechte.de. Accessed November 4, 2017.

10 Translation by the author. For the German original version see https://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10844:ultima-ratio&catid=586:heimathafen-neukoelln-berlin&Itemid=100190. Accessed November 4, 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CRC 1171 Affective Societies).