The Art of Exile: Gesture, Movement, and Silence in the Thai-Myanmar Border-Zone

• In Event: Ethnographies of Migration and Displacement

Abstract

This paper theorizes how Tai artists in exile, who have fled military occupation in Myanmar to neighboring Thailand, aesthetically and performatively articulate a sense of nation through the performing arts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with exiled Tai political resistance movements and performers in Northern Thailand spanning from 2014-2017, I attend to the ways Tai dance, theatre, and performance function as embodied political praxis for forcibly displaced migrants. I outline three forms of expressivity at play among the Tai: gesture, movement, and silence. I look at gesture as a way of becoming political in the body – a way of moving toward and performing the body politic. Movement is the acting out of political consciousness through the body. Whereas the presence of ethnic minorities upsets the ordering of state governmentality, the Tai have found that the realm of the arts is rarely suppressed and therefore becomes a site of intense cultural production for those in exile. The silencing of this persecuted ethnic minority has spurred passionate individual and collective investments in the performing arts. Under conditions of fear and persecution, silence gives way to alternative articulations via dance, theatre, and the movement arts, practices that are often not read as overtly political activities. By analyzing Tai migrant’s acts of gesture, movement, and silence in the face of forced displacement, this paper emphasizes how art both challenges and reinforces nation-building projects. Through dance ethnography, extensive interviews, and training in the Tai theatre arts, this study sheds light on the central role the arts play during times of violent displacement and advances an embodied approach to the study of exile.

Author

• Tani H Sebro, Humboldt State University