Scripting (Im)Migration

In The Aeneid by Olivier Kemeid, translated by Maureen Labonté, the classic tale of searching for a new home is reimagined into an urgent modern-day refugee story.

Settling Africville by George Elliott Clarke is a dedication to the African American refugees of the War of 1812 that settled in Nova Scotia.

The Tashme Project: The Living Archives, a documentary-style play, carefully pieces together the experiences of Japanese Canadians who were in the internment camps in the 1940s.

Foreign Tongue: The Musical represents the mark that accents place on immigrants.

In My Name is Dakhel Faraj, the true story of a refugee of the Iraq war is presented in English, English Sign Language, and Arabic.

And In Sundry Languages is a collection of multilingual skits on immigrant experiences.

Yana Meerzon is a professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa. Her books include A Path of the Character: Michael Chekhov's Inspired Acting and Theatre Semiotics (2005) and Performing Exile—Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (2012). She also co-edited Performance, Exile and “America”; Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations; History, Memory, Performance; and The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov. She was the editor of special issues of Theatre Research in Canada on theatre and immigration and Modern Drama on migration and multilingualism. Her current project is on performance and cosmopolitanism.