Don't Leave Me This Way (Performance Lecture)

Don’t Leave Me This Way

Decentralization and Multilingualism in Dramaturgies of Migration

The practice research project Don’t Leave Me This Way (2021) is a contemporary performance odyssey as Zoo Indigo theatre company search for their European identity from the shores of a Brexit-ridden Britain. In a series of trips across Europe the performers left their homes to retrace their cultural heritage in Ireland, Germany and Hungary, singing songs, learning folk dances, and drinking local beverages. The journey culminated in a politically charged multilingual performance, merging English with German and Hungarian language. The performers present personal anecdotes on migration, and dances and songs from their countries of origin to reclaim their heritage, while competing in a series of citizenship catwalks. The focus of the project was to critically explore the performativity of nationhood and the loss of cultural identity, and to investigate the role of music, movement and the mother tounge in the forming of cultural identity. The performance draws upon Judith Butler’s constructivist view of performativity, which ‘is thus not a singular “act”, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it requires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Butler 1993: 12). Thus, nationality is an “act” practiced through cultural repetition and rituals. The use of multilingualism furthermore functions to de-decentre and “to upset the position of dominant language” (Byczynski 2000: 33), further highlighting a cultural precarity in a Brexit-ridden Britain.
Don’t Leave Me This Way explores somatic practices and multilingualism, to destabilise and decentre language as a dominant tool of expression in performance. This approach contributes towards the democratisation of knowledge as it aims to destabilise English as the dominant language of performance and academic discourse. Zoo Indigo aim to explore methods to discuss the practice research in a similarly multilingual, non-verbal and participatory approach in the performance conversation at IFTR. The aim is to create a non-hierarchical articulation of research, where knowledge is in flux between participants, to create a de-centred and non-hierarchical “rhizomatic learning”, informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who define the rhizome as an ‘acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 21). The performance conversation will explore the possibilities of rhizomatic, somatic and democratic practice research exchanges in academia, to develop a ‘hopeful practice of laboratory exploration’ (Heron and Johnson 2017: 282).