Playing inclusion. The performing Arts in the Time of Migrations: Thinking, Creating and Acting Inclusion. "Comunicazioni sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies" 2019 XLI (1)

The issue of migrations, owing to its strong cultural relevance, offers a preferential outline of the post-dramatic, performative and social polyvalence of contemporary theatricality and transversally reveals a widespread, albeit frequently not concerted, engagement to act at local level in pursuit of an inclusive society. Playing Inclusion. The Performing Arts in the Time of Migrations: Thinking, Creating and Acting Inclusion is a collection of essays written by theatrologists, sociologists, psychologists, artists, performers, social theatre experts and facilitators, who describe and analyse with their different points of view and methodologies some experiences where performative arts and practices enact reflexive, creative and active processes aimed at taking care of the complex migratory phenomenon. What is at stake is not so much an assessment of which approach or methodology is more successful, but an evaluation of the impact that a chorality of artistic, cultural and social processes achieves thanks to its plural nature, which works in different ways for and with the individual and collective subjects. We are calling upon a twofold emancipation: on the one side, we should leave behind any boundary between disciplines and within them; on the other side, we should “challenge the opposition between viewing and acting”, because these experiences demonstrate to us that the categorisations that distinguish and set “saying, seeing and doing” one against the other, “belong to the structure of domination and subjection” (Rancière, 2009) . In this sense, we have adopted an intercultural (Gimenez 2017) research approach in its widest sense, with a clear purpose to enhance the value of the diversity of perspectives, the plurality of subjects and methodologies, the complexity of actions and projects, the sheer heterogeneity of processes and products. We want to value them in order to be able to perceive the ways in which interactions among these different approaches can create a network of complex, local and participated, artistic and performative answers. It is apparent, first and foremost, that we are not facing an organised system, nor a stable network, but we are dealing with a situation which is not yet recognised, neither by outside operators nor by the cultural agents themselves, who often find it problematic to endorse each other overcoming their differences and peculiarities. However, we find that these experiences, taken as a whole, go a long way to supplement the public institutional measures as well as the interventions of the services aimed at the promotion of processes of diffused governance, where the subjects take on a direct responsibility for the inclusion processes