The latest in our series of interviews with members of the Performance Research Hub steering committee.
Samantha Sebastian is Music Fellow and Tutor at Somerville College, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm in the early stages of a project called ‘Voicing Global Labour Migration: The Songworlds and Livelihoods of Overseas Filipino Workers’. The project is a multi-sited ethnography that involves collaborative research partnerships with civil sector organisations, including the Center for Migrant Advocacy. In the participatory research strand of project, I’m working with Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to think about the cultural dimensions of the migration regimes that affect them. There are well-established narratives that encourage labour out-migration from the Philippines and popular culture plays an important role, including songs, singing competitions, radio programmes, and karaoke. There are also very vocal protests to labour and human rights issues, protest songs but also the chanting and shouting that happens at marches. And yet in some of the employment sectors where they are highly represented and particularly vulnerable to labour exploitation, OFWs have been conditioned not to vocalise their own thoughts, feelings and needs. So, we’re thinking about the various ways voice shows up in these spaces.
Where do you see performance research or performance and research coming together across disciplines in Oxford?
Thinking through performance, it's inherently an interdisciplinary endeavour. There's performance that happens in these more formal and articulated forms, such as music, theatre, other “performing arts” and ritual, but then there's also the performance of various kinds of roles, behaviours, identities and relationships. The ‘Voicing Global Labour Migration’ project is an example, because there're all these tribute performances to Overseas Filipino Workers as bagong bayani (modern-day heroes), while at the same time OFWs perform certain kinds of sacrifice, service, and resilience daily, in the context of personal and familial relationships, employment, and nation. I’m a music researcher, but in making sense of the intersections and tensions between these two modes of performance, it’s been necessary to engage with the work of political scientists, geographers, psychologists, mobility studies, and of course the field of performance studies itself, which has always been interdisciplinary. Certainly, in the Performance Research Hub, I have a lot to learn from colleagues that study and produce theatre and film, visual art, literature, and languages.
What's your dream for the future of performance research in Oxford?
It’s great that there are many performance researchers in Oxford that are very involved with practitioners and are practitioners themselves. We have to make links outside academia and collaborate with those that are setting the agendas in their fields of performance. Hopefully Oxford can bring them into scholarly endeavours that they are excited by, that will not just support but also challenge and innovate their performance practice. Working with them should also advance and transform our research. As well as highly acclaimed artists and productions, I’m most interested in working with those that are setting agendas at the local, community level, and imagining what performance is and can be outside of the metrics of big-name recognition and ticket sales.
I just have one more question for you, which is hopefully a nice one to end on: would you tell us about a performance that's special to you?
In terms of performances I’ve been a part of, for a previous research project I co-facilitated an intercultural, multilingual lullaby choir. We shared many moments of connecting through performance and some of the most meaningful happened when we sang only for ourselves, rather than to an external audience. As an audience member and thinking especially about my interest in the voice’s many capacities, it was a formative experience when I saw Camille at Beck’s Bar as part of the 2009 Sydney Festival. It was a relatively intimate gig, and I was completely mesmerised by her vocal wizardry and the energy both on and off the stage. A very special performance.
Performance Research Hub
