Le Dernier Cartoucherie: refuge and the performance of care

Abstract

In 2003, the Paris-based theatre company Théâtre du Soleil launched Le Dernier Caravansérail: Odyssées, a collaborative creation based on stories that company members had collected from refugees at the Sangatte refugee camp outside Calais, among other locations. Scenes of moral reasoning dotted the six-hour spectacle, calling to mind the international media frenzy that followed the short lifetime (1999–2003) of the camp: if Sangatte was the ultimate embodiment of French compassion toward those in need, why did many resist confinement and hope to escape? By way of a closer look at the Sangatte scenes in Caravansérail, this paper asks several questions: How did the company engage the recent turn toward ‘humanitarian’ effort in French immigration policy in its depiction of the refugee experience? What were the structures of care and compassion with which the performance itself approached its subjects? And finally, how was performance practice, with its sensitivity to questions of affect and corporeality, taken to complicate the forms that human care can take?