Refugees + Resettlement in the United States
CREATED AND DIRECTED BY:
Lee Sunday Evans
DATE:
February 29, 2024
PART I WRITTEN BY:
Damon Owlia and Lee Sunday Evans
LOCATION:
Harold Pratt House
PART II DEVELOPED BY:
Lee Sunday Evans
word premiere commissioned by:
The Council on Foreign Relations
Our deepest gratitude to Chris George, former Executive Director of IRIS who contributed invaluable perspective to the development of this project based on his decades of remarkable leadership in this arena. We would also like to thank the Community Sponsorship Hub, which helped create WelcomeCorps materials for this project.
DESCRIPTION
Waterwell was commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations to create an original, site-specific project about global migration to be performed in their historic building. Waterwell created an experiential performance project that highlighted key policy questions about how gender-based asylum law currently impacts the overseas refugee vetting process, and highlighted WelcomeCorps, a new State Department program that is revolutionizing the way that refugees can be identified and resettled in the U.S., paving the way for a bright new future where we can welcome more newcomers to our country. These two parts of the performance opened up fertile ground for a robust panel conversation with leading thinkers in the field: David Milliband - President of the International Rescue Committee, Gregory Maniatis - who leads the work on migration and refugees at the Open Society Foundations, and Shannon K. O'Neil who is the Rockefeller senior fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Read more below and watch this remarkable video to learn more about this innovative and deeply emotional event.
VIDEO
The Show
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Setting: Tegucigalpa, Honduras. 2022.
The audience sat in the round to watch a re-enactment of an in-country interview between a Honduran woman applying for refugee status in the United States and a U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) officer. The interview is one of the final steps in the process of being granted refugee protection and access to resettlement in the United States. The script portrayed a fictionalized account, drawn from true stories of asylum seekers from Honduras, and was developed by artists at Waterwell in close collaboration with former USRAP personnel and experts on refugee law.
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The audience then broke up into small groups around the CFR building and participated in small group meetings led by actors playing the role of Welcome Corps volunteers who were introducing this a new State Department program that has created a framework for regular people to welcome new refugees through community sponsorship groups.
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Those two performance events were followed by a robust panel discussion on factors driving global migration and the ways in which initiatives like Welcome Corps and other solutions are changing the landscape of resettlement and immigration policy in the United States.
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Actors
Salome Egas (G., Honduran refugee)
Jason Butler Harner (USRAP officer)
Welcome Corps Volunteer
Kathleen Chalfant
Alex Correia
Danielle Davenport
Meghan Finn
Enid Graham
Daoud Hedami
Ryan Kim
Sharina Martin
Marjan Neshat
Polly Noonan
Melle Powers
David Shih
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Speakers
Gregory Maniatis
David Miliband
Shannon K. O'Neil
Presider
Elmira Bayrasli