Migratory Choreography and Spaces of Resistance

As the current refugee disaster exploded, it became clear to me that Republika couldn’t merely tell my own personal story, but had to embrace all others in the same situation—everyone fleeing from one life to another. Edhem Jesenković, Dansehallerne (2016)

The disastrous predicament of the many displaced persons fleeing war and terror in Syria in 2015 raised a heated debate in the Nordic countries around the acute need for humanitarian aid on the one hand and for raised security measures on the other. Hence, when the Swedish hosts of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) Semi-finals announced the intermission’s stage performance with the following words: “Right now Europe is facing one of its most difficult challenges in a very long time,”¹ they did not refer to the counting of votes to determine the ten finalists. Rather, they referred to their introduction to The Grey People (2016), a choreographic entr’acte on the theme of what had become known as Europe’s refugee crisis.

In the six-and-a-half-minute-long dance piece that followed, the nineteen dancers on stage moved through images all too familiar from photos accompanying the news coverage of the ongoing migration from Syria. In one scene, the choreographic formations resemble groups of refugees travelling on foot en route to an unknown future. In another, following a scene of dancers performing the undulating movements of a turbulent sea, a child is seen face down on the ground in a restaging of the iconic photo of the corpse of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi from Syria washed up on a beach in Turkey. Grey is the color of the costumes as well as the uniformly made-up faces of the dancers. As the choreography culminates, the ordeals of forced migration are alluded to in hectic dance moves before the dancers wash the grey off their faces in order to emerge as individuals, step off the stage and into the welcoming arms of the Stockholm audience.

While committed to bringing European broadcasting audiences together around light entertainment, ESC has, moreover, a history of being a stage on which the changing realities of Europe are played out (Fricker and Gluhovic 2013, 3). The programming of The Grey People in the semifinals in Stockholm, where it was performed before a live audience of sixteen thousand and tele-broadcasted to millions, proves that 2016 was no exception. Before the show, several of those involved in the production commented on the decision to present a choreography on the politically charged theme of refugees. The Swedish choreographer Fredrik Benke Rydman provided a context for the humanitarian message by pointing to the historical background of ESC in the war-torn Europe of the mid-1950s.² The producer argued that The Grey People was a necessary reflection of the challenges facing Europe and the urgent need for hope and warmth in interpersonal relations.³ Last but not least, one of the hosts tied the relevance of the theme to his regret over the recent decision of the Swedish government in 2016 to tighten border controls and to deport eighty thousand asylum seekers.⁴

These comments position The Grey People as a dance piece created in response to the ongoing political discourse. Performed by a group of dancers proficient in the street dance style of Benke Rydman, the piece propounded a universalized migrant experience. With the exception of the child, the individual human being was portrayed as part of an anonymous mass until acknowledged by the community into which they had landed. In terms of dramaturgical structure, the choreography moved through the archetypical narratives of a theater of migration, described by theater scholar Emma Cox as “the separation, the journey, the encounter with others, the longing for home and sometimes the nostos (homecoming or return)” (2014, 9; italics and parenthesis in original). Only in the case at hand, the homecoming was represented in the affirmative event of being welcomed by fellow human beings in the new country of their arrival.

In the following, I turn to two choreographic examples that were similarly created in response to...