No Woman’s Land - Walking as a Dramaturgical Device in Performance of Maternal Migration

The practice research project No Woman’s Land NWL (2015-2017) explored the historical performance walk as a methodology to develop a dramaturgy of migration in reference to kinesthetic empathy. The project explored whether the re-tracing of the 220-mile walk undertaken by Rippel’s grandmother Lucia in 1945 from Brzeźnica Poland to Pulspforde, Germany could produce a change of the performer’s body through an “authentic” physical experience, marked by exhaustion and the somatic memory of endurance. The project explored a dramaturgy of migration, the maternal body and authenticity in performance through the inclusion of real (hi)stories and the embodied experience of a migratory walk. In Zoo Indigo’s performative response to the walk, No Woman’s Land (NWL 2016), the duo re-engaged with the experienced endurance. Throughout the piece the performers (and sometimes audience members), walked on treadmills through digital projections of past and present landscapes. This article discusses the performance walk as a methodology towards
a dramaturgy of migration, enabling an authentic representation of the migrant
mother through the staging of the exhausted female body, the interweaving of
documentary footage, and the real act of walking.