Think theatre is just for Broadway? Scheherazade Initiatives sees it as the key to the refugee crisis

At Scheherazade, we choose to see wholeness, not lack. A refugee is, above all, a legal status. Simply that. It is not a statement on someone’s ‘quality’ as a human being. The problem with talking about working with refugees is that it reduces a group of disparate human beings, each with their own unique gifts, to a ‘problem to be solved’, rather than an opportunity to be harnessed, allowing each individual within that group to define themselves in myriad different ways, each unique to themselves.

And this is why participation in the arts are so important. At Scheherazade, we use theatre to empower refugees with the skills to build their new lives. Creative practice is at the heart of what we do. To create is something that is intrinsic to each one of us. Our creative capacity is not weakened by difficulty, on the contrary, it is often strengthened and enhanced in the challenges that life throws at us. This is why I have always had huge hope in ‘populations who move’ — especially those that have had to exhibit extraordinary resilience and determination to escape unimaginably difficult circumstances and risk their lives to build a new life. The capacity to dream and imagine, the interior resources needed to make great changes, and to let go everything one has known to date is at the heart of the refugee crisis — and is the heart of creative practice too and the work we do at Scheherazade.

We have seen in our work with over 30,000 migrant and displaced people, that when you start by seeing each individual in their full potential, you allow their innate creativity to blossom and they feel the respect, equality and self-esteem necessary to take their rightful place as both contributors and beneficiaries of society.

In the case of Dong Fen, a migrant woman from Yunnan province in southern China, participation in one of the very first workshops we ran in Beijing has unfolded to mean that she now spearheads our work as General Manager of Hua Dan, our first organisation, delivering workshops to not only migrant workers but also corporate CEOs in our innovative Corporate Social Responsibility programmes too. The salary she earns as a professional theatre facilitator has enabled her to buy her family a new home and afforded her the social mobility to lift herself out of poverty and join China’s burgeoning middle class.