Janina Moninska
This article is an investigation of how Live Art performance can add insight into attempts to include the ‘real’, in this context the social reality of migration and the refugee. Based on a reflective analysis of the performance of Mustafa Y vs. Secretary of State, the article proposes that Live Art exists in between professional and social theatre. Immersive Live Art performances were structured around the legal process of asylum, one that trespasses across the boundary of documentary and fictional performance practice. The purpose, however, was not to get the ‘participant’ audiences to change whatever may be their political view. Engaging with Jacques Rancière on the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, they were an investigation of how Live Art can alter the structures of seeing and challenge notions of national identity and political rights, arguably adding to a process of creating more inclusivity for asylum seekers and refugees.