“There are millions of stories of forced displacement and not one of them are the same” but maybe this one could have been told better.
Feel Me integrates physical theatre, projection and music to explore empathy through the lens of discussions and depictions of forced displacement. The play innovatively incorporates audience interaction via mobile phones, making an astute observation on our culture’s (often detrimental) over-reliance on phones for connection, communication and information.
Unfortunately as the play moves into discussing forced displacement this insightful perceptiveness dwindles. Feel Me is a self-proclaimed ‘interrogation of empathy’ but instead felt more declarative, perhaps better suited to younger school children newly encountering the concepts of empathy and refugees, instead of the recommended audience of 13+. Tracking the audience’s empathetic development by asking how connected we felt to forced displacement at the beginning and end of the play is, in theory, an innovative idea. However, in practice, embodying refugees in a collective, faceless, mostly wordless way didn’t do much work to connect the audience to the horrific process of forced displacement in any kind of personal way. It felt overly sanitised, with no real acknowledgment of the current atrocities forcing people from their homes or even mention of the word refugee, just the intellectualised, impersonal term ‘forced displacement’. Feel Me grounds their abstract storytelling with a few statistics, and whilst this would be a great educational tool for schools, it didn’t feel strong enough for an older audience.
At times, Feel Me veers into tonally deaf territory, with an uncomfortable combination of video game esque elements within the acted-out process of forced displacement. The audience votes on what shoes the actors wear as they become refugees and, as the play progresses, the characters march and jump on beat to change the background scenery, mimicking the journey from escaping their homes. It was very reminiscent of a video game loading screen and whilst this could be a strategy of engaging a young child with a serious subject matter, it felt in poor taste and out of touch.
There were many moments were the tone and artistic intent were difficult to read, in particular a strange analogy that seemed to be depicting forced displacement through a dancing toothbrush, string, a house of books and raining jigsaw pieces. Whilst it may not have been the intention, this scene provoked peals of laughter from the majority white audience which felt very dystopian considering the reality of over a hundred million people forced to flee their homes each year. Fleshing out more ambiguous moments like this would definitely strengthen the play, and prevent the uneasy feeling I felt upon leaving the theatre.
The play is as its strongest in its moments of humorous satire. It pokes fun at the right-wing media’s ridiculous and blatantly untrue stories written to demonise refugees and they effectively use comedy to encourage the audience to question the agendas being pushed in the narratives presented by mainstream media. They touch on important points, like the impossible and unfair nature of the immigration system but then completely abandon it in a flurry of erratic movement sequences that undermine the potency of the political statement they could have made.
Ultimately, Feel Me, would benefit from stronger storytelling if its intended audience are people who have even a rudimentary awareness of empathy or forced displacement. Apart from statistics, the atrocities of forced displacement are skirted around, lost in a blur of white privilege as the audience dresses up and chooses the narrative of the nameless, collective refugee that actually has no bearing on how the play unfolds. I think further grounding the play in reality would do their innovative, multimedia approach justice and create a much more impactful piece of theatre.