Please note that the following conversation with Ailin includes references to demobilised child soldiers, bomb attacks, and accounts of immigration uncertainty, structural racism and xenophobia. Scroll to the bottom of this page for links to relevant support services.
Ailin is 39. She is a queer theatre director based in London and Colchester. Much of her work has involved making theatre with communities in conflict and post-conflict contexts. (You can learn more about her work by clicking here and here). As a freelancer and as a Japanese - American woman living in the UK, she has experienced many layers of prolonged uncertainty including the unstable living and income situations that sometimes accompany freelance work, navigating the immigration system, structural racism and xenophobia.
Ailin describes herself as an idealist born of hemp and patchouli and LSD who has encountered a lot of trauma personally and in society and is trying to put those pieces back together to find some sort of idealism rooted in reality, as opposed to naivety.
Is it our place to pull the show?
‘In 2009 I started a project working with two of my friends, Will Pinchin and Dorie Kinnear of Grafted Cede Theatre (click here to learn more about Grafted Cede Theatre) on an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The story is about a man who has had 10 years of war and has a 10 year journey to get home from the war and reconnect with his wife. At that time, all the media was focused on Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and PTSD. It felt like a natural fit. After that, I spent a year making theatre work in different conflict and post-conflict contexts. I went to Rwanda, Lebanon, Israel, Kashmir and in every location worked with ex-soldiers.’
‘One risk is people getting retraumatised. I was really young when I did these projects, and kind of wiser for it. I didn’t have this Western psycho-medical notion that I needed to have a therapist on hand. I worked in Rwanda working with demobilised child soldiers, some of them had escaped from fighting in the Congo within 2 weeks of the time that I was there working with them. When someone in the cohort said, “Ok, somebody is crying, so we are now going to dance and be a group,” I realised there was already a norm for how to handle the situation. So, I trusted that. Humility was the biggest tool I had. Other people have already been dealing with this and they have their own resources. I trusted those resources and stepped back and gave it space to happen.’
‘One of the most acute examples of the sorts of risks we faced was when I made a piece of street theatre in Lebanon with Syrian refugees with my friend Sabine Choucair of Clown Me In (click here to learn more about Clown Me In). Lebanon is 25% Syrian refugees, so there is a real tension between the local population and the Syrian refugees. In this performance, Syrian performers performed in public Lebanese civic areas and there would be a conversation around the discrimination that the Syrians were experiencing. In the middle of the town where this show was touring there was a bomb attack, which was attributed to a Syrian militant organisation. So, all of a sudden there was this intense tension. My collaborator Sabine and I had to go back to the performers and ask them whether they wanted to perform. It was a safeguarding issue. There was this whole thing about what is our job when the cast is there saying, “We want to do the show!” Do we pull the show? Is it our place to pull the show? The whole point of the show was that there were people trying to kill Syrian refugees and, if anything, this increased risk actually increased the necessity of the performance. In the end we decided that whatever decision was made, it had to be a collective decision. It can’t be us deciding for people, because people need to be able to decide for themselves what level of risk they are willing to take. It’s interesting because in a way, that’s not an ideological position that I might work with here in the UK, because there is so much emphasis on safeguarding, language and structure around limiting risk. But when I was working in these contexts, I felt as though I didn’t exist within those frameworks. I do here in the UK, because I have to. But they are fairly paternalistic frames when you think about it. What you gain in participant safety you can lose in participant agency. The risks I’ve dealt with elsewhere are so much higher!’ (To learn more about Ailin’s street theatre piece, The Caravan, click here).
At the end of the day,
everybody knows it’s just a play
‘Theatre provides people with space to relearn the positives of risk-taking. On one level, I think it’s the human community element. On another level, it’s just theatre. You’re playing at life. You’re playing with scenarios, but at the end of the day, everybody knows that it is just a play. That allows you to go to more risky, difficult places. I did this cross-community project in a post-conflict context. I was working with these two men who were at each other’s throats constantly. They happened to be from different sides of the conflict. So, when this is happening in a context where people are still getting killed, suddenly, “I don’t know if he likes me,” becomes, “I don’t know if he might put me in mortal danger.” So, the stakes get really amplified by the context. I took a risk and built in a moment in the play where one of the men comforted the other. They went through this several times because there were several shows. But It just happened on stage. That’s where the safety comes from. It’s that its framed and contained. I’m writing in a handful of moments of 3 seconds of compassion. If you come into that situation as a character, you come with more tools to get out of that situation. You’ve got tools at your disposal to go, “Well, this isn’t really me, this is just a character.” By the end of the project, the charge between them was still there, but it became more familial. The stakes got lower. They had self-regulated, so they stopped projecting murderous intent onto the other.’
In my experience,
it’s more the subtle,
durational stuff that
leads to real crisis
‘In Rwanda, there was a bus that I was meant to be on, but I was late. There was a grenade attack and 5 people on that bus died. It never felt terrifying because I was never close enough to it. I think that the thing that actually affected me during the project, the real precarity, was that while working in these difficult contexts, I was homeless - in the sense that, I’d show up somewhere and I’d have friends that I was staying with, but I didn’t have a base’.
‘I have lived a life that has on paper, contained a lot of the of the “sexy” sorts of precarity that people think of when they think about what risk is. But in my experience, it’s more the subtle, durational stuff that leads to real crisis. I find that tension really interesting, because the stuff that effects you internally can be so banal- (Ailin laughs). I find that really interesting.’
A limited visa with limited time
ticking away in the background
‘Being queer is a part of my identity that there hasn’t ever been much precarity in for me. In terms of my real experience of difference, I’d say I’ve experienced more precarity through the cross-cultural stuff to do with being a first-generation migrant twice; once from Japan, once from America to the UK, and then also being the daughter of a first-generation migrant. Fundamentally, real trauma happens when there are parts of yourself that are fighting. I’ve never been in conflict about being queer.’
‘I was 3 when I moved to America. I had to change my language. I lost my entire family context, in the sense that my Grandma and my cousins all disappeared. I was a student when I came to the UK. I had a job that agreed to sponsor my visa. But then they changed their infrastructure the year I graduated and wouldn’t be able to sponsor me anymore. They completely pulled the rug out from underneath me. My French girlfriend of 7 months at the time said, “Will you be my civil partnership.” So that’s what we did. It was quite slap dash. That relationship lasted 4 years and then we broke up. I can’t separate the immigration precarity out from the financial precarity of living as an artist, because I was doing art for free or paying money to do art at the beginning of my career. I never had the £3000 to pay for an immigration lawyer so there was this period of time when I was just collecting papers to use as proof of residency. From 2007 - 2015 I never had secure immigration status here, there was always a limited visa with limited time ticking away in the background. After my civil partnership broke up, my new girlfriend was British, and there was this thing of “Oh we will get married right? Because otherwise I’ll have to leave!” So, there was always this real pressure. It raises the stakes in your emotional relationships.’
‘I remember when I finally got my passport. I did it by stringing together years and years of residency permits. When the decision finally came back yes, I don’t think I realised how much pressure I had been in until it lifted. It had been 8 years of pressure and it had been increasing and increasing and then it released. The experience of durational precarity is weird because it’s almost like it doesn’t feel like precarity until its gone.’
This feeling of constant grasping
‘Durational precarity is this feeling of constant grasping, grasping for anything. You’re always reactive, so you can’t breathe, and make decisions in a long-term way. Then the other thing is that you just don’t know how to say “No” to anything. You have to say “Yes!” You have to react now! If a job comes up, there’s no luxury to ask yourself “Do I even want the job?” That just doesn’t exist. Durational precarity changes your relationship with control and agency. I wouldn’t say that its conscious because you always feel like you are in control. You don’t realise how reactive you’ve become.’
A really different feeling of belonging
‘After a decade of really struggling and scrabbling and thinking, “Wow, the theatre industry is really hard in the UK,” I went back to do a project in America. It was my first time back in America in my whole adult career. People loved me again. Of course, I have friends here in the UK who love me and part of it was just American culture, but it was just effusive. A really different feeling of belonging. It was a weird thing, because I suddenly had to grieve the fact that I hadn’t had a whole life of that because I had taken myself out of my context and out of my home.’
‘Applications have all these tick boxes- “Are you BAME?” “Are you Asian?” But I’ve never seen, “Are you a first-generation migrant?” When this group, “Migrants in Theatre” (a UK-wide movement addressing the lack of representation and misrepresentation of migrant artists in the UK. Click here to learn more) came together, all of a sudden I was like, “This is my spiritual home.” “This is my real experience of difference!” “This is the reason that I’ve got every single assistant director interview and I’ve never got an assistant directing job.” That’s not a coincidence. I never pieced that together until this year. Because “Are you a first-generation migrant” is not a tick box on applications. Retroactively, I’ve realised, that’s been my main experience of difference within the theatre industry. It’s meant that I’ve gone the subsidised, build-your-own-theatre-company route, rather than the institutions route.’
‘When you’re experiencing structural discrimination, you might physiologically feel it, but you can’t rationally articulate it. It’s not until you step back, have a bird’s eye view of your journey, that you see everything that you’ve missed. There’s anger but there’s also grief. Grieving the life you never had, grieving the awareness you didn’t have. All those times when you thought it was you, it was actually a f****d system. Processing that precarity retroactively is really painful.’
Links to Support Services
Mind
A national mental health charity which provides information and support.
Click here for their website
Phone number - 0300 123 3393
Text - 86463
Email - info@mind.org.uk
Samaritans
Samaritans run a free, 24-hour helpline to those struggling with their mental health.
Click here for their website
Phone number - 116 123
Right to Remain
Right to Remain works with communities, groups and organisations across the UK to provide information, resources, training and assistance to help people establish their right to remain in the UK.
Click here for their website
Refugee Council
The Refugee Council provide support to refugees from the moment they arrive in the UK and provide advice, practical support and help on integrating into new communities. They also offer mental health counselling.
Click here for their website
SARI
SARI (Stand Against Racism & Inequality) are a South West based community-oriented agency that provides support for victims of any type of hate crime including racist, faith-based, disablist, homophobic, transphobic, age-based or gender-based.
Click here for their website
