MIGRANT SHAKESPEARE
Naz Yeni & Seyyar Kumpanya

‘It has long been understood across cultures and across civilizations that none of us are who we appear to be to our immediate family and friends and that it is only in a far away place that we begin to discover other selves, other possibilities that lie within us.’ (Cox 2014, p. ix)

The above is an observation by Peter Sellers in the foreword to Theatre & Migration.

Yet, it is almost without fail that these ‘nomads, travelers, searchers’ find themselves out of place. This experience seems to be felt as a certain kind of displacement, one that could also be considered as an act of being off balance. By moving across borders the act of migration interrupts the equilibrium of normality. 

Within our society migrants, foreigners, outsiders such as us are rarely accepted into the world of Shakespeare in order to perform the high art of the bard with our somewhat defective language skills. We would like to challenge this perception and reclaim the famous words of the great poet by migrating them to contexts alien to their original intentions. Through this act of distancing, we hope to give the works of the celebrated dramatist a life inside the alternate universe of the migrant experience. By doing so we would like to embrace the irony of the roles, which have been allocated to us within the society we live in and hold a mirror to the trappings of the system we have been struggling to break. 

NAZ YENI is a theatre-maker, movement practitioner, academic researcher and a university lecturer. She trained classically as an actor in Hacettepe University Ankara State Conservatoire (1990-1994, Turkey) and Birmingham School of Speech and Drama (1994-1995, UK). Her acting credits include Lady Macbeth for Creation Theatre Company (Oxford) and chorus for City of Birmingham Touring Opera. Her MA was in applied linguistics (King’s College London) and her MEd was in drama education (Cambridge University). Her PhD research in Anglia Ruskin University is on theatre stylistics. Her directing credits include Turkish State Theatres and Arcola Theatre’s Creative Disruptions Festival (London). She is also interested in applied drama and dance within wellbeing and health contexts. In the last few years, she has been involved in a number of ‘all-women ensembles’ as well as becoming the artistic director of Seyyar Kumpanya (a theatre company formed by migrant performers in London). Her directing interests are adaptations, story-telling, physical and visual theatre, devising, verbatim, site-specific and immersive performances.

SEYYAR KUMPANYA (‘mobile company’) is a theatre ensemble formed by migrant artists aiming to create work for and by their communities. In their performance-making they favour to highlight the continuity between a classical approach to staging and a contemporary aesthetic.