Laughter and civil repair: A stage-audience encounter

Abstract

A world in movement is visible in the arena of the performing arts. Since the “long summer of migration” (also known as the 2015 “refugee crisis”), the field of performing arts for a young audience in Sweden has shown a growing interest in staging migration while elaborating new artistic strategies and modes of participation. Migrant/non-white youth share the stage-audience encounter with a white audience born in Sweden, while meeting and interacting with content, including the staging of identities, belonging, and experiences of being “other.” But knowledge about the meanings of these stage-audience encounters is lacking. This article aims to visualize and analyze the potential of repair processes through laughter in the stage-audience encounter of one specific play: Tre Streck. This analysis enables consideration of the main emotions in a civil repair process that addresses recognition gaps. The paper builds on ethnographic research and interviews and takes a theoretically informed approach, making it possible to analyze how individual audience members' emotions and self-understandings are linked to staged experiences. A theoretical contribution is suggested that involves developing civil sphere theory by conceptualizing the need to be sensitive to existential repair in micro-studies of civil repair processes.