Between Homeland and Exile: Witnessing the Homo Sacer at the Heart of Hotel Medea

Based on the Medea-myth, Zecora Ura Theatre’s and Para Active’s Brazilian-British co-production Hotel Medea (2010–2012) is an overnight promenade performance which actively involves the audience. It turns them into, alternatively, party guests, Medea’s children, her closest friends, soldiers, and the focus group of Jason’s political campaign. Medea herself, the archetypal refugee, represents the figure of the homo sacer, whom Giorgio Agamben describes as the one whose life is sacred, defined purely by her exclusion from the polis and stripped of all civil and human rights and of social and legal status. What is left is the bare life, the contact with which is taboo. The figure presents itself as an important parallel to the function of the scapegoat in tragedy and appears in contemporary theatre as a victim of war and conflict or as a person or group of people that have been legally ostracised from or have never been part of the community (such as asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, unlawful combatants, and displaced and stateless persons), by official decree turned into homines sacri. Agamben points out that Western politics is based on this simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of bare life into its legislation. Mostly, the bare life has remained invisible – the taboo status of the homo sacer demanding a shielding from the public eye. As the central political taboo on which, according to Agamben, Western society is founded, it has also remained the last taboo to be brought to the theatre. Drawing from Kelly Oliver’s theory of an ethics based on witnessing, on enabling the other to form a subject’s identity by not only allowing for a voice, but also by witnessing the other’s act of speech, the theatre might be seen as the art form best suited to enable “witnessing beyond recognition.” This essay discusses how Hotel Medea’s unique inclusion and physical engagement of the audience allows for both the witnessing of and responding to the homo sacer, for an experience that goes far beyond spectatorship and successfully enables the audience to establish a relationship with the politically and socially excluded that might overcome the exclusion.