Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées): a case study of cosmopolitan space between borders

Narelle Sullivan

In 2005 the Melbourne International Arts Festival featured as part of its programme the celebrated French theatre company Le Théâtre du Soleil’s performance of Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées).  An epic, six-hour long production, the work, self-described as ‘a colossal fresco of the exiles that times of war produce’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3), sets out in vivid detail the plight of refugees around the world.  Translated as ‘the last caravan stop’, Le Dernier Caravansérail tracks voyagers, exiles, cast-out and forgotten fugitives, on their endless and desperate journeys.  The performance is presented in two parts: Le Fleuvre Cruel (The Cruel River) recounts the departures and the exoduses of these refugees; while the second part, Origines et Destins (Origins and Destinies) explores the reasons for their departures.  Propelled by the cumulative force of sixty-two individual vignettes comprising ‘a series of stories, fragments of people’s lives and snippets of destinies’, this ‘ocean of odysseys’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3) takes us back and forth, again and again, to a multitude of locations: a French refugee camp, a hut in Afghanistan, the coast of Calais, a train track in France, a village in Africa, a phone box in Moscow, a detention centre in Australia.  Constantly in motion, these disparate peoples travel along roads, crossing and threading through a multitude of natural and constructed borders with great difficulty.  A few – the most audacious and luckiest – arrive alive in Europe.  Many others decide to risk the long journey through India and south-east Asia to Indonesia, with the hope of crossing the Timor Sea to reach Australia.

Critical response to the production has ascribed much of its power to its ability to convey a sense of shared humanity: to vividly capture the global nature and complexity of the refugee experience, while also underpinning the narrative with haunting vignettes detailing personal stories, tiny fragments of life between borders (Cosic 2005, p. 16; Hallett 2005, p. 15; Thomson 2005, p. 16).  The company employs the poetics of theatre to interrogate the responsibilities of a world where disadvantaged people are marginalised and ignored.  Cosmopolitical in philosophy and technique, Théâtre du Soleil use a variety of theatrical approaches and devices through which to explore the plight of refugees throughout the world.  In this paper I explore how the company uses these theatrical modes in Le Dernier Caravansérail, and how they open up possible cosmopolitan spaces.

Prelude: background to le Théâtre du Soleil

One of the most celebrated companies in France, Théâtre du Soleil was founded in Paris in 1964 by a collective of artists including director Ariane Mnoushkine.  Combining socio-political activism with a collective sensibility, the company – through its theatre practice, influence and popularity in France and internationally – strives to ‘change the circumstances under which we live’ (Alliance Magazine 2005).  A practitioner of the theatre movement Interculturalism, Mnoushkine works with a team of sixty actors, technicians and designers from around the world, who between them speak twenty-two languages, and draws from international performance traditions and theatre techniques to achieve a transnational style of theatre.  The company has drawn from the legacies of seminal practitioners and theorists in European Modernism such as Bertolt Brecht, Jacques Copeau and Antonin Artaud, as well as adapting other techniques from a variety of Asian theatre traditions, classical tragedies and popular theatre forms, such as Commedia dell’arte and clowning. 

Théâtre du Soleil’s mantra is ‘theatre for the people’.  This has led to comparisons with classical Greek and Shakespearian theatre, art forms ‘which are … perceived as unifying their society by providing shared experiences which reach across class boundaries and by giving the social discourse a set of common reference points’ (Kiernander 1993, p. 6).  Throughout its forty-year history, the collective has worked with groups drawn from all levels of society, particularly the working class, in the research and development of their productions.  Through contact with trade unions and other organisations the collective has also invited those not normally engaged with the performing arts to watch and experience their performances.  Under the direction of Mnoushkine, the company has presented twenty-nine works that can be seen to connect contemporary theatre practices with historical theatre, and that continually push boundaries to find new theatrical forms that can confront controversial contemporary topics.

Bearing witness: naming the nameless in art

More than anything else I am suspicious of silence.  There is such a thing as respectful silence, there can be a silence which sings, but I’m suspicious of human silence.  In general, it’s a silence which represses (Hélène Cixous in Williams 1999, p. 158).

As the subtitle of Le Dernier Caravansérail, Odyssées, suggests, this production is inspired by Homer’s classic account of Odysseus’ epic struggle to return to his homeland of Ithica after twenty years absence.  During his long journey, Odysseus finds himself on the island of the Cyclopes, where he is captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus.  Planning to devour Odysseus, Polyphemus demands to know his name, to which Odysseus replies ‘Nobody’.  The fate of non-identity, of forced anonymity and displacement, is the destiny of many of today’s refugees.  Those that have been made ‘stateless’ are rendered invisible in the eyes of a modern world that defines identity and belonging ‘in terms of an allegiance to a nation state’ (Papastergiadis 2000, p. 2).  Sociologist Les Back (2003, p. 344) argues that ‘almost nothing is known of the thousands of people who die in desperate attempts to gain entry to freedom’s province’.  Amitara Kumar (2002, p. 230) writes of ‘secret passengers’, refugees who in desperation have stowed themselves away in the undercarriages of planes, and drop from the sky ‘like a stone’, into West London parking lots.  Joseph Pugliese (2003, p. 8) contemplates the fate of Habib Wahedy, an Afghan refugee whose lifeless body hung from powerlines over the Murray Bridge for twelve hours, repeatedly mistaken for a ‘dummy’.  Banished to the exterior boundaries of Australia, locked up in fortress-like detention centres with minimal access to the outside, refugees are subject to a ‘logic of invisibility’ (Pugliese 2003, p. 10) – if you do not exist then I am not an accomplice to your fate – and ‘the mud of criminalization’ (Back 2003, p. 343): you are ‘illegal’, ‘unlawful’, ‘alien’, a ‘terrorist’, therefore you do not deserve my compassion.

Not only are refugees subjected to the fate of ‘abject elimination from the social’ (Papastergiadis 2000, p. 68), their identity is re-invented and stereotyped by the media. They are ‘not just a subject that is selectively incorporated, or withheld from intimate social relations, but also the vilified and abused object upon which the ills of the social are concentrated’ (Papastergiadis 2000, p. 68).  In Borderline, Peter Mares (2002) cites numerous instances of media footage being restricted, controlled, and indeed masterminded by the Australian Government.  At the time of the Tampa incident, journalists were not allowed access to detention centres or permitted to interview refugees.  Access to footage and images of refugees on the Tampa was similarly restricted by the Government.  The media was instead fed information and packaged front page stories by Phillip Ruddock’s immigration department; the most salient results of their propaganda-style public relations campaign culminated in the fabricated ‘Children Overboard’ saga and the Herald Sun’s ‘Alien Scam’ article, in which Ruddock claimed that the ‘so called boat people are flying first class into Indonesia and Malaysia before boarding rickety vessels for Australia’ (Mares 2002, p. 32).  Media reports rarely placed Australia’s ‘refugee crisis’ into any international context, and rarely examined the political circumstances and persecution from which people around the world were fleeing.  Instead refugees, faceless, nameless, rendered mute and robbed of history, were reduced to handy stereotypes of ‘queue jumper’ and ‘parasite’: a never-ending mass of foreigners coming to steal our jobs and our welfare.

The seed of Le Dernier Caravansérail was planted when Mnoushkine conducted interviews with refugees at the French Red Cross shelter in the village of Sangatte situated in the seaside region of Calais, half a mile from the English Channel tunnel.  Initially established to provide refuge to the thousands of people fleeing from the war in Kosovo, the shelter had become a political sore point between the French and British Governments as it was seen as providing a launching point from which Afghan and Kurdish refugees, sometimes up to 1500 each day, could attempt to illegally cross the English Channel.  Mnoushkine comments:

I had read a number of things, but I wanted to understand for myself what this place was, and to meet the people there… I had no preconceived ideas about Sangatte before I went there, but after some hours, this place seemed to be the metaphor for the world.  The place seemed like a refuge for all of humanity. I saw immense kindness and dignity, but also maliciousness (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3).

She started to gather stories, ‘to bear witness’ to the stories of these people, ‘their lives, their journeys, their reasons for leaving, the roads travelled, their abandoned gardens’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3).

In 2002, Le Théâtre du Soleil was invited to Australia by the Sydney Festival to perform their production The Flood Drummers.  It was four months after the Tampa incident.  Mnoushkine initially threatened to boycott the Festival as a demonstration against the Howard Government’s refusal to help the 433 largely Afghani and Iraqi refugees stranded in Australian waters.  Instead, the company came to Australia and Mnoushkine spent many hours at the Villawood Detention Centre, where she collected stories from Iraqi, Iranian, Cambodian and Korean refugees.

While at Villawood Mnoushkine learnt of the plight of the Tampa refugees and, accompanied by other company members, followed their trail to New Zealand, and then onto Indonesia, spending time at a hostel housing 240 Afghani people.  She recorded over 100 hours of interviews, stressing to them that she was not a journalist and did not have any power to affect their visa status, but that she would make a theatrical production dedicated to their plight.  Rather than focusing on the political reasons for their flight, Mnoushkine would ask them to recount their individual stories, what they would tell their children one day.  She would ask them: ‘Who do you remember? Who have you met? Who did something good for you? Who did something bad? Who could have saved your life, but didn’t? Who could have saved your life, and did?’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3).

Mnoushkine returned to France and began the monumental task of trying to shape these stories into a theatrical work.  Unsure of what to do with the many hours of personal stories captured on tape, she entrusted them to her long time collaborator, feminist writer and intellectual Hélène Cixous, who created vignettes inspired and born from the personal narratives.  Mnoushkine also asked the company to begin a series of improvisations around what they thought the refugee experience would be like.  She asked them to imagine this in the most concrete way possible: why they left, the way in which they departed (car, truck, by foot?), the conversations they had, what their companions looked like.  Once the actors had intuitively fleshed out a particular experience, she then allowed them to listen to the accounts that ‘might confirm their intuition’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3).  Over the course of ten months, these scenarios were workshopped and considered, and finally whittled down to sixty-two scenes.

Mnoushkine explains: ‘At the origin of this adventure, there was the promise made to those whose stories are told here: to give them a voice. To bear witness to those who never leave a trace, whose cries and murmurs are never heard.  Those who are silenced always’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 4).  In Le Dernier Caravansérail fragments of letters of loss and yearning penned by the refugees are projected onto the back wall of the stage between acts.  Performed in over fifteen languages, Cixous says of the multilingual approach of the work: ‘This is an image of Babel.  It is a patchwork of languages.  It is the pieced together language of urgent communication, the language that crosses borders, that is used by border crossers’ (Craven 2005).  As well as giving voice back to those that have been silenced, Le Dernier Caravansérail offers a language through which spectators can begin to talk about the refugee problem.

In this work people whose existence we usually understand through governmental statistics and media stereotypes become human beings, individuals with personalities, hopes, dreams and troubles.  Although Mnoushkine’s canvas may be vast, she keeps our eye focused on the personal: the pair of lovers, the family, the brother and sister.  An elderly woman preparing to leave Moscow says goodbye to her homeless, drunken brother, slumped under a telephone booth; at his feet she leaves a small box containing his war medals.  In Paris a young woman calls home, reassuring her stricken parents that they have been well received in France and live on the Champs-Elysées.  A young man plunges his bare hand into a pot of boiling water to retrieve a potato for his starving female travelling companion.  When she does the same for him they realise they are in love.  A father embraces his daughter whom he thought killed, and she flinches, her back lacerated by whips inflicted by the Taliban.  The centrality of the individual provides us with the means to imagine (profoundly and with great agony) their plight: to move the refugee beyond the realm of the politicised in order to include them in the realm of the human.

New ways of seeing

In Le Dernier Caravanserail Mnoushkine asks us to examine the nature of our own indifference to the suffering of others, the part within ourselves that allows us to look from afar upon the misery of others, be overwhelmed by pity, and then turn away.  In order to encourage such critical examination, Théâtre du Soleil can be seen to employ modes of theatricality that are seemingly at odds with the production’s humanitarian core.  One such device is called Verfremdungseffekt, a term coined by the seminal German playwright Bertolt Brecht to describe a theatrical method that actively alienates the audience member from the illusory narrative world of the play.  This device, translated as the ‘alienation effect’ or ‘distancing effect’, was used by Brecht to allow the spectator an emotional distance in order to reflect critically and objectively on that which was being presented on stage, and encourage new perspectives on aspects of life that through our over familiarity with them, tend to be protected from critical examination.  Brecht was concerned not so much with empathy but with interference:

There is a great deal to man, we say; so a great deal can be made out of him.  He does not have to stay the way he is now, nor does he have to be seen only as he is now, but also as he might become. We must not start with him; we must start on him. This means, however, that I must not simply set myself in his place, but must set myself facing him… That is why the theatre must alienate what it shows (Brooker 1998, p. 66).

Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, inspired by the Russian literary critic and formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie or defamiliarisation, was used by the playwright to elevate the spectator from audience member to that of active participant by reminding them that the play they were watching was a representation of reality, and not reality itself.  In making the familiar strange, by presenting the commonplace in a different way, the theatre provokes within a spectator a degree of self-reflection and urges them out of complacency.

Théâtre du Soleil use Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt effectively to play with the notions of reality/non-reality.  Whereas traditional, naturalistic approaches to theatre try to conceal the actor behind the character, the company makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the actors are performing. From the point at which the audience enters the venue, the spectator is confronted by actors in full costume and stage make-up, serving drinks and meals, and mingling with others in the foyer.  Their dressing room is exposed to the public, and the actors use this space before, during and after the performance to prepare themselves in view of the audience.  All of the magic, tricks and artifices of theatre are on display: colourful costume racks, make-up jars, tins and brushes, wigs and fake beards, dressing tables strewn with letters, books, photographs.  The orchestra, normally hidden in the pit or off stage, is side of stage, separated but not hidden by a translucent curtain.  The stage lighting is kept bright during set changes, production crew are often visible throughout the performance and the actors dress whilst on stage.  In short, by purposely drawing attention to the constructed nature of the play, the company reminds the audience that their reality is an artifice, and therefore one that can be changed.  Mnoushkine explains that the company wants ‘to reinvent the rules of the game which reveal daily reality, showing it not to be familiar and immutable but astonishing and transformable’ (Kiernander 1993, p. 89).

In his essay ‘Falling From the Sky’, Les Back uses the example of the sixteenth-century Belgian artist Pieter Bruegel’s masterpiece Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to explore the indifference to the plight of those less fortunate.  Inspired by the German proverb, ‘no plough is stopped for the sake of a dying man’ (Stechow 1969, p. 55), Bruegel’s painting depicts an idyllic pastoral scene in which a ploughman is tending his field, a shepherd minding his flock, and a fisherman crouched down at the edge of the shore fixing his line.  All are oblivious to Icarus, whose plummet into the sea goes unnoticed.  Back (2003, p. 350) asks us to contemplate the nature of indifference, what he terms ‘action/inaction’: how something as exceptional as a boy falling from the sky can be regarded as unimportant, pushed to the subconscious or the exterior.

The proliferation of electronic media and telecommunications has meant that much of what is happening in the world is accessible to others.  Don McMaster (2001, p. 9) notes that ‘scenes of starving, emaciated and homeless people fleeing natural or human disasters are common on prime-time television news’.  As noted earlier, representations of refugees in the Australian media have as a whole been constructed to support current political policies.  Connections have been drawn between the media and human indifference, and what has been termed by David Williams (1999, p. xi) as ‘compassion fatigue’:

So many of our dominant cultural forms want us tranquil-ised, want us no longer to re-cognise ourselves; they colonise our imaginaries. Our critical faculties and our memories are failing… and yet we have rarely been more haunted by myths and ghosts.

McKenzie Wark (1994, p. 43) describes this condition as ‘telesthesia’, where perception at a distance, the illusion of proximity, results in ‘dislocated perception and action’.  Paul Virilio has explored the connection between perception and agency, examining the consequences of new camera-based technologies on the modern world.  Virilio notes a shift from a paradigm where ‘everything I see is in principle within my reach… marked on the map of the “I can”’, to an altered perception that ‘the bulk of what I see is, in fact and in principle, no longer within my reach’ (Virilio 1994, p. 7).  This rupture between perception and action, proximity and distance provides one explanation perhaps of our ability to avert our gaze in the face of human suffering, and avoid the responsibility inherent in action. 

‘Australia does not want you’: mobility / immobility of the exiled

In Le Dernier Caravansérail, the characters are pushed around on low wooden trolleys, propelled through the air as if floating.  Constantly on the move, their feet never touch the ground. Resonantly symbolic as it is practical, this device, which has its origins in Japanese and Greek theatre, provides a momentum of movement that is relentless and overwhelming.  Each platform that appears on stage is ‘like a fragment of the world’ (Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 3), and as the platforms appear one after the other, the many stories begin to take the form of a colossal, human fresco of restlessness, rootlessness and flight.  The questing Kurds, Chechens, Iranians, Russians and Afghanis are seemingly forever in transit, floating between homes and hoped-for refuges, and at the same time frozen in place, immobile, paralysed by their powerlessness to shape their destiny.  The platform device is also used to move props – trees roll past, as does a telephone booth in Paris, a home in Kabul, a health clinic in Sangatte – the myriad of small, tight and desolate resting points on the road.  The constant movement gives the audience a sense of the nightmarish, internal world of one constantly in flight.

For their Melbourne season, Théâtre du Soleil performed in the huge expanse of the Royal Exhibition Buildings.  Where possible, the company choose to perform in what they describe as ‘a free space’, an agora, a place in which people tell stories to others, and where people want to listen.  Within this expanse of space, self-contained worlds are framed by the use of small interiors, illuminated boxes wheeled from behind the curtains at the back of the stage.  These tiny sets – caravans, hovels, shelters, detention cabins – offer momentary windows into another world, their fleetingness reflecting the fragility of a homeless, stateless existence. The spectator becomes a voyeur, peering through the lighted windows, eavesdropping on fragments of conversation.  In these claustrophobic worlds on wheels, refugees are caged and immobile.

This exploration of mobility/ immobility lies at the heart of current debates about migrants and refugees.  In Le Dernier Caravansérail, mobility represents both desperation and hope. To be mobile is to be rootless, homeless.  Paradoxically, invested in it is also the dream of refuge, destination, a place to rest, freedom. Harald Kleinschmidt (2003, p. 11) argues that as long as belonging is defined by residentialism, then migrants and refugees will forever be cast as deviant, suspect.  Mobility, even if forced, is recast under the stern gaze of modernity as unnatural and abhorrent, something to be feared.  Manray Hsu (2005, p. 75) cites Zygmunt Bauman in arguing that current trends of globalisation render all boundaries ‘tenuous, frail and porous’.  We live in a ‘full world’, where one cannot be oblivious to the other (Hsu 2005, p. 75).  In Le Dernier Caravansérail, Mnoushkine presents us with a nightmarish vision of a world segmented into tightly controlled nation states with barbed wire borders, against which a relentless sea of displaced, desperate people try to gain entry, either by boat, plane or people smuggler, to find refuge.  What is undeniable is that refugees, despite all odds, will continue to cross through borders that are becoming increasingly ‘threadbare’ (Kleinschmidt 2003, passim).  This production shows us unequivocally what happens in a world where the security of borders is deemed sacrosanct, and the security of refugees inconsequential.

Mnoushkine is regarded as one of the most important contemporary theatre directors.  Through the use of transnational and often radical modes of performance she produces a theatre that is resolutely of the world, and continues to find new ways to grapple with some of the biggest issues of our time.  Le Dernier Caravansérail gives voice to those that have been silenced, bears witness to those who would otherwise disappear between borders. The production also offers us a language through which to talk, contemplate and imagine, a language which offers a way above and beyond the politicised, essentialist vernacular of the tabloid press.  Mnoushkine is careful to offer a humanity that is complex and contradictory: the sinister, leather clad people smuggler is also a father who sings lullabies to his young child via his mobile phone; not all refugees are simply presented as victims - many take advantage of others to make their way.  Most importantly, Théâtre du Soleil, in their vivid, sprawling and undeniably human depiction of the refugee experience, offer us a space in which to interrogate, discuss, debate and disagree, to engage with the complexity of the situation and ask the hard questions.  As Cixous notes, it provides a space in which we may ask ourselves, as well as ‘others’, finally:

‘What will become of us?’ ask those who have left their name, their family, their roots, very far behind.  They are called ‘refugees’, ‘stowaways’, ‘illegal aliens’, ‘migrants’. But amongst themselves, they have a noble name: ‘voyagers’. They brutally voyage in holds and trucks, threaded through borders, and pushed from port to coast and door to door by the poverty of contemporary hospitality, not knowing where or when the dangerous voyage will end.

They voyage endlessly and hopelessly but driven by belief. In place of religion, they have a naïve faith in the existence of a country inhabited by the democratic deities they have heard of: freedom, respect.  But where is this country? Where will they arrive? When will they arrive? Will they arrive?

And we, sitting in our relatively moderate countries, who are we? Their neighbours? Their witnesses? Their enemies? Their friends? Former voyagers who have forgotten? Or people for whom the voyage is lying in wait around the bend? (Cixouw in Théâtre du Soleil 2005, p. 7).

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