Simon Ellis (left) and Rodney Afif in the emotively powerful Subclass 26A.
Devised and directed by Bagryana Popov
45downstairs until February 27
Bagryana Popov can hardly have known how timely this production of Subclass 26A was going to be, opening just as the shock-waves from the Cornelia Rau case are still reverberating.
The mistreatment of a mentally ill Australian citizen incarcerated in a detention facility seems a palpably obvious injustice, but Popov asks whether the purely political classification of individuals as "illegal" can justify precisely the same the treatment suffered by Rau.
This movement, dance and spoken-performance piece, accompanied by Elissa Goodrich on a variety of percussion instruments, shows us what is encountered on arrival, in detention and in the interviews undergone by asylum seekers. Performed in a stark white space with an economy of gesture and words, it is chilling and discomforting.
Most of the words are not invented, but read or spoken from official documents, such as the letter that accompanies the refusal of visa applications.
Like the bewildered asylum seekers, we must struggle to understand the reasons behind the cruelties of "rules" that are designed to disguise the real agendas. What emerges is a world that is as much a bureaucratic nightmare as anything in the writings of Franz Kafka.
What becomes clear is the shocking fact that crimes against humanity are being enacted in our name, less bloody and dramatically life-threatening than the terror these victims have fled, but terrifying to imagine being inflicted on ourselves.
And nothing justifies this treatment except the "otherness" of Iraqis, Afghans, Chinese or simply Muslims.
Each part of the process dehumanises, from the initial "sorting" on arrival at the detention centre, the petty rules and refusal to provide explanations once there, walls everywhere, the desperation of existing outside a known time-frame, to the deliberate confusion engendered in the interviews and their questions that seem to make no sense.
Truth struggles to be heard and madness becomes as inevitable a reaction as impotent rage.
The power of the piece is its creation of the sense of being trapped in this space with the performers. Simon Ellis, Natalie Cursio and Nadja Kostich, as camp officials and guards, reveal degrees of disaffection and damage to their own humanity. Majid Shokor, Rodney Afif and Ru Atma are their victims, treated guilty until proven innocent.
Let's hope some of those Australians who find no reason to criticise the treatment of asylum seekers see this powerful and moving piece.