Paper Short Abstract:

Four Tunisian actors navigated visa procedures to the Netherlands, which became the plot of a performance for the Dutch audience. This paper uses the rehearsal phase as a field of inquiry to explore how theatrical creation, while navigating a visa procedure, opens new possibilities for methodology and analysis of the ‘paper border'.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines theater as a method for studying the visa procedures of Tunisians to the Schengen area. Four Tunisian actors applied for visas to the Netherlands and created a theater production that depicted the challenges and dynamics of the visa procedure itself. This performative piece not only reflects the actors’ personal encounters with the bureaucratic apparatus but also serves as a collective ethnographic engagement with the material and embodied dimensions of the ‘paper border’.

The urgency to attend to the body emerges as a critical response to the documentation regime that defines contemporary borders. Drawing on performance ethnography, this research positions the body as an active site of knowing, challenging the hegemony of textual forms of data and knowledge. Rather than relying on language alone, the actors bring their bodily experiences of and around the visa procedure into the rehearsal space. The rehearsal space becomes a space for experimentation, where movement—not text—serves as the epistemological starting point. For instance, the actors engaged in tactile interactions with paper—holding it between toes, behind ears, on their stomachs—exploring its materiality and movement through space. These embodied engagements with paper highlight the intricate ways in which bodies, documents, and borders coalesce and intersect, offering new insights into the lived experience of bureaucratic systems.

In this paper, I use the rehearsal phase as a field of inquiry to examine how moments of theatrical creation, while simultaneously navigating a visa procedure, open new possibilities for both methodology and analysis in studying the ‘paper border.’