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4. Creating New Spaces of Politics: Nanay: A Testimonial Play
- University of Minnesota Press
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At an event organized in 2004 to bring together Filipino families who had participated in our research on family separation, an older participant turned to me and said: “I would like to ask you. After doing this research, what are you going to do with it?” He and his wife earlier had spoken at length and with great honesty about their marital conflict after twelve years of separation while she worked as a domestic worker in Vancouver and he cared for their children in the Philippines. I said we would use our research to write academic papers and to lobby government for changes to Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP). He pressed: “It won’t be put on the shelf to gather dust? I mean, there must be some action.” Within the year, he died of a stroke; the finality of his death made my promise both more pressing and less believable. After all, our previous twelve years of research and critique had produced no discernable changes in policy or public opinion. And so, when Caleb Johnston and Alex Ferguson , two Vancouver theater artists, approached us in 2006 to use our research transcripts to create a testimonial play,1 we leapt at the chance to work in an entirely new way with interviews carried out over the previous twelve years with domestic workers, their families, nanny agents, and Canadian employers. Testimonial or documentary theater offered an opportunity to bring our research not just to policy makers but to a wider public, to create a broader debate around the Live-In Caregiver Program and the challenges of care in Canadian society. It was an opportunity to turn our testimonial archive of feeling into repertoire, to create a distinctive theatrical time-place in which to circulate our scholarly knowledge in embodied , performative, and challenging ways.2 The Philippine Women Centre of BC, Caleb, Alex, and I began by identifying transcripts that seemed rich enough to sustain a monologue, because the interview was detailed, a person emerged off the page, or their experiences brought an important perspective to the issue. In February 2007, we worked for a week with three professional actors at Vancouver’s • CHAPTER 4 • Creating New Spaces of Politics: Nanay: A Testimonial Play • 99 • PlaywrightCentreeditingthemostpromisinginterviewmaterialintomonologues , experimenting with staging and the possibility of creating dialogues or scenes out of a composite of interviews.3 Very little of this material was used in the end, but documentation of the four or five scenes worked up during this workshop convinced the PuSh International Performance Festival in Vancouver to include our play in their 2009 program. Our work began again in the spring of 2008 when Caleb and I and a member of the PWC (now designated as writers) began to work with a dramaturge, Martin Kinch. Alex (now the director) took us (along with five professional actors, a stage manager, a scenographer, an additional set designer, lighting and costume designers, and three Filipino youth apprentices) through atwo-weekdevelopmentworkshopinJulyofthatyear,fromwhichemerged Nanay: A Testimonial Play. Pitching the play on a local radio station before it opened in February 2009, Alex and I were asked: “It’s the middle of winter. It’s going to be cold. It’s going to be wet. It’s going to be dreary. Don’t people want to go to the theater to have a good time? Why should people see this production ?”4 We reassured listeners about the intensity of emotional engagement they would experience while attending our play (using phrases such as “compelling,” “engaging,” “stories that draw you in,” “heartbreaking”). We evidently were successful in achieving the desired effect because at the end of the PuSh festival the Children’s Choice Awards, determined by twelve children from a Vancouver-area elementary school, declared our playthe“Saddest”oftheseventeenplayspresentedatthefestivalthatyear.5 ThroughNanay,weaimtopullaudiencestotheissue—includingCanadians who have been oblivious to it—and to affect them through speech, bodily sensation, objects, movement, and touching details from individuals ’lives.AsKathleenStewartwritesof“theseintimateimpactsof[affective] forces in circulation”: “They’re not exactly ‘personal’ but they sure can pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go.” They can produce “hard lines of connection and disconnection and lighter, momentary affinities and difference. Little worlds proliferate around everything and anything at all.”6 Even so, as Lauren Berlant cautions, the “affective turn emerges within the long neoliberal moment of the attrition of the social,” and deep emotionalresponses ,affectivetransformations,andmomentaryconnectionscan beareplacementforratherthanasteptowardsustainedsocialengagement.7 AsonecrankyaudiencememberputitonaNanayfeedbackquestionnaire: 100 CREATING NEW SPACES OF POLITICS [34.207.178.236] Project MUSE (2024...