Acceso usuarios
Roberta Ruggiero
How can Theatre exercise the power of generating inclusion? At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2017, three different shows dealt with the migratory flows through their practice, genre, and intentions. Dear home office: Still Pending, Old Stock: a refugee love story and An evening with an immigrant tackle the common theme of immigration through different theatrical genres in which the artistic practices of professional and social theatre all intend to generate a direct contribution to the process of inclusion of migrants. The paper focuses on the peculiarities of the three works, showing the existence of natural osmosis between the effectiveness of theatrical representation and the feeling of inclusionwithin the issue of emigration. Considering these heterogeneous experiences, the study highlights two ways in which theatre can favour inclusion.One that acts on the viewer through the testimonial strength of real stories and situations, and the other that involves the actor on stage. For the performers in Dear Home Office, which are non-professional actors and immigrants, inclusion is a direct effect of the theatrical practice; in Old stock, instead, the actors and musicians convey a message of inclusion through the narrative plot of the show. The Nigerian InuaEllams in An evening with an immigrant, shows, in his identity as a professional performer, an inclusion realized as a synthesis of the first two cases: the theatre is his occupation and, at the same time, a place to tell the story of his immigration.
