It has given me huge optimism that complex human realities can still be done justice through art. Audience Feedback: Day 2
The opening aim of Migrations: Harbour Europe was to find key texts that addressed the theme of migration, avoiding the pitfall noted by Chimamanda Adichie of “falling for the single story, reducing complex human beings to a single narrative”.
Returning to this point of inspiration, in her TED talk, Adichie describes personal experiences of this single story, the single narrative:
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.
In much of the audience’s feedback, we saw that the original aim of this project allowed audiences to look beyond this single story that is so often commonly prevalent in general perception and media outlets related to migration.
Yes, certainly for me it was the individual characters and their lives/relationships rather than the media presentation of migrants/refugees ‘en masse’ as an anonymous group. Audience Feedback on what they enjoyed: Day 1
Through the diverse representations in these works and nuanced, contradictory and human narratives seen through the portrayal of the characters and their respective narrative arcs, these plays countered the concept of the singular stories and offered the opportunity for points of connectivity and understanding.
The complexity of the plays themselves. The visceral communication of trauma-related emotional reality. Audience Feedback on what they enjoyed: Day 2