We present here fragments from a script that we co-wrote, a testimonial play entitled Nanay. The play draws on research that Pratt has done over the last 15 years on Canada's Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) in collaboration with the Philippine Women Center of BC (PWC of BC). It takes conventional research materials and turns them into a performance installation, with the objective of bringing academic research to a wider public in an immediate, engaging way. It is designed to get people to care and think more deeply about the LCP, and to initiate a public conversation about the massive expansion in this program over the last decade, and of temporary migrant worker programs more generally.The play uses transcripts from interviews with Filipino migrant domestic workers and their children, Canadian employers and nanny agents. We selected testimonies that were rich enough to allow characters to emerge, and each testimony (with the exception of Scenes 3 and 9: see Figure 1) is based on the words of an individual rather than being a composite of different people's stories. This is important because Filipino women are so often generalized as a type or a situation. The play thus forced a sustained engagement with an individual's testimony. Rather than extracting small portions from interview transcripts and reading across different people's experiences, audiences were invited to come to know individuals in some of their specificity.We sought testimonies of domestic workers, their children and Canadian employers that would elicit a sympathetic reaction; the goal was to create a complicated process of identification that would force Canadian audience members to address their own complicities and to search for a larger analysis (beyond scapegoating 'evil' employers). Except for a recorded soundroom, in which Filipino mothers and their children speak of their long years of separation, the testimonies were performed by professional actors. This reflects issues of privacy, the pragmatic situation that few domestic workers have the privilege to abandon their jobs for roughly eight weeks of development, rehearsal and performance, and the fact that the woman who testifies to her time in the LCP has been deported. The play was directed by a Vancouver theatre artist, Alex Ferguson, and produced by Caleb Johnston. Martin Kinch, of Vancouver's Playwright Theatre Centre, assisted as dramaturg. Both Ferguson and the Philippine Women Center of BC were involved from beginning (concept and script development) to end. The PWC of BC has used the professional nature of the production to hone their skills for their own subsequent community-based theatrical productions. During the rehearsal and performance of Nanay, we were able to hire three Filipino youths as assistant directors and stage manager, and Ferguson and Johnston (who has a long history in theatre

We assess Practicing Democracy , a play created by Headlines Theatre in Vancouver, Canada, which was the first attempt to deploy Augusto Boal's legislative theatre in North America. The goal of this project was to use forum theatre to generate creative solutions to the dangers created by provincial government cuts to social welfare, and to work with local government to turn some of these recommendations into new local government laws. This goal was not attained, although the report produced by Headlines Theatre may have supported other local initiatives. We examine the ways in which local politicians and planners maintained the distinction between expert and amateur, so as to undermine the credibility of public input. A bureaucratic process of classification and abstraction also inhibited the recommendations from being turned into law, and reinstated the expertise of politicians and bureaucrats. We balance this assessment with a reading of spaces that are excessive to this rational calculation: the city as a concrete site of embodied, creative spatial disruptions; and theatre as a pedagogical public sphere.

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance-dependent, migrant-sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted. Abstrak: Sa tulong ng Migrante International at gamit ang ilang kwento ng mga residenteng patuloy na umaasa sa remittance o padala ng kanilang mga kamag anak na OFW, aming sisiyasatin sa papel na ito ang sistematikong produksyon ng tinatawag ni Neferti Tadiar na "life-times of disposability" na siyang nagtutulak sa pangingibang bansa ng libo libong Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) mula sa Bagong Barrio, isang barangay sa lungsod ng Caloocan, Maynila. Sa lugar na ito, ang pagsasara ng maraming pabrika at kontraktwalisasyon nung 1980s ay siyang nagtulak sa marami upang maghanap ng trabaho sa ibang bansa. Para sa mga residente ng Bagong Barrio na aming napanayam, ang pagalis ng Pilipinas para sa hanap buhay ay hindi lamang isang personal na pagpapasiya. Isa itong kasagutan sa matinding pangangailangan. Bukod pa rito, karamihan sa mga OFW, sa tulong na rin ng kanilang mga kamag anak ay napipilitang gamitin ang remittance para sa pagaaral ng mga anak o sa pagbili ng lupa at bahay bilang puhunan para sa kanilang mga anak, ang susunod na henerasyon ng OFW sa kanilang pamilya. Sa kontekstong ito ng pawang na siklo ng pangingibang bansa, nais naming pakinggang mabuti ang mga kwento ng mga residente ng Bagong Barrio upang mabigyang pansin ang iba pang uri ng pamumuhay na kontra sa karaniwang pagtingin sa buhay ng Pilipinong migrante, na ito ay nasasayang lamang o isa nang patapon na buhay.

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abstract. We present five scenes from Nanay, a testimonial play that we cowrote, drawing on conventional social scientific research transcripts from interviews conducted with Filipino domestic workers, their children, nanny agents, and the Canadian employers of live‐in caregivers. We developed this theater play from May 2007 through August 2008 and performed the piece in Vancouver and Berlin in 2009. A reading of the script was staged in Edinburgh in 2012, and the play will be performed in Manila in November 2013. We have turned to performance to create and extend public debate about current immigration policies, racial and ethnic stereotypes, the commodification of reproductive roles, and the transfer of care labor from the global South to the global North. We interject the scenes presented here with behind‐the‐scenes observations to more fully contextualize the script and to suggest ways in which this process of creative writing and performance informs conventional social science writing.