Bojana, Jankovic (2023) Against hostile environments : migrant performances of Eastern European identities in England. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

Abstract

Imagined in post-2010 England, 'Eastern Europeans' are a personification of the ideology constructed Eastern Europe : uncivilized and dangerous, but adjacent to normative whiteness. This research is about England-based Eastern European artists who disprove or reinvent this normative identity through performance. My aim is to uncover artistic strategies that productively resist the Eastern European identity and to evidence how these practices are curtailed by theatre and performance infrastructure. Employing methods developed by Sara Ahmed, I show that Eastern Europeans are excluded from art funding but give a choice : to join normative whiteness or seek solidarities outside of a slippery white privilege. I consider Eastern European performance with this choice in mind, starting with work confined to the stage. Representational ownership within new writing and devising, attempted by Notnow Collective and Two Destination Language is, either annulled by theatre structures, or subsumed into normative whiteness. The performance work of Natasha Davis can, however, be seen as a structural intervention : I read her performances of a murky Eastern European identity through Edouard Glissant's opacity to show how she questions Eastern European slippery whiteness within a (post-)colonial reality. I next move to work that is more overtly invested in structural challenges. I assert Alicja Rogalska's collaborations with seasonal agricultural workers reposition 'low-skilled' labour as craft, while uncovering the limits of inclusion offered by mainstream theories of participation (Claire Bishop, Miwon Kwon) and cultural institutions which adopt them. I consider reformulations of Eastern Europeanness local to Birmingham, put forward by artist Tereza Buskova and Centrala Space, a gallery. I argue they respond to different lures of the local (Lucy Lippard) - the invitation of whiteness and the promise of a multicultural Birmingham. To interdisciplinary research on Eastern Europe, this study contributes an articulation of migrant Eastern European identity defined through slippery whiteness. Into the space of artistic research, I add a novel understanding of how migrancy is removed from art funding and artistic citizenship. To theatre and performance research, this work contributes the first investigation of Eastern European migrant art practices in England.