“Exile & Sanctuary”: The Art of Exile

“I think the art that is created in exile is a reflection of the unconquerable strength of the human spirit.”

Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; Directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.

Cal Performances’ 2025–26 season of Illuminations programming draws from the performing arts and UC Berkeley scholarship to explore the theme of “Exile & Sanctuary.” As we define it, exile is more than a movement across borders—it is a rupture in belonging, a break in the story of self. In this conversation, we explore what it means to live and create in displacement: how exile reshapes identity, fuels creativity, and leaves traces in the art born from it.

This video features Julia Keefe, jazz vocalist, actor, activist, and educator; SanSan Kwan, PhD, professor and chair of UC Berkeley’s department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Alex Saum-Pascual, PhD, UC Berkeley professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and member of the Executive Board for Berkeley Center for New Media; Leti Volpp, PhD, UC Berkeley’s Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice; and Lara Downes, pianist and radio Host.

For more on our 2025–26 season and our Illuminations programming, visit calperformances.org/illuminations.

Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Julia Keefe:
The choice to leave your homeland is because it’s no longer livable for you and your family and your community and your descendants.

SanSan Kwan:
There is an energetic difference between the term “exile” and the term “migration”. When I think about the term “exile,” it means that someone is forcibly moved from one place to another against their will.

Alex Saum-Pascual:
You may choose to exile to a place and then use that possession of power from outside to influence and change the culture from the country you are leaving behind.

Leti Volpp:
Communities of people in exile long for a past that predated their needing to leave.

Lara Downes:
I have this tattoo on my arm. It says, “Here by the Pacific Ocean, it’s a long way from home.” And that’s my dad’s handwriting. He wrote this just when I was born and he was putting me to sleep at night and worrying about my existence in the world.

DEFINING EXILE

Leti Volpp:
There’s no legal definition of the term “exile.”

Alex Saum-Pascual:
I mean, it can range from just feeling other… by being in a country or a culture that is not your primary, but also, it could be an actual political situation of forced displacement.

Leti Volpp:
There is a legal definition of the term “refugee”: “One that has either experienced past persecution or has a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of one of five grounds: race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” And the refugee is somebody who has been forced to leave their home. They’re unable or unwilling to live in their country because they’re being persecuted, either by the state or by private actors that the state is unable to control. They’ve had to find another place to live.

Alex Saum-Pascual:
And in that sense, it’s definitely different from just feeling out of place or feeling othered. You may actually feel more at home in a foreign country when you’re feeling endangered by your own.

Lara Downes:
I think there’s a reason that Americans are obsessed with their roots. How do you feel at home in a place where most of us have not been for that long? I mean, most of us can’t trace our families back all that many American generations, so there’s always this feeling of where do I come from? And what did somebody have to do to leave that place? And why did they leave that place?

VIOLENCE

Alex Saum-Pascual:
The question of violence around exile is very complicated. We could be talking about material, physical, bodily threat, and in that case, violence definitely comes to the forefront. But then there could be other kinds of more subtle violence.

Leti Volpp:
The analogy I think about is a tree that’s being uprooted. There’s a violence involved in pulling that tree from the ground, pulling the roots from the ground, right? And so if we think of the person who’s forced to go into exile as having to leave their home, it seems like it would necessarily involve that kind of violence.

Alex Saum-Pascual:
When there’s external forces that are molding or shaping your behavior, when you don’t have the freedom to choose or be in the place of your choosing, that is a violent situation. It doesn’t come with bodily harm, but it comes with a psychological damage that comes from not being free to make your own choices.

THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS

Leti Volpp:
Something that I think about a lot are the writings of Hannah Arendt, who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Essentially, you need a political body that actually will protect your rights. So when you think of the person who is in exile, the person who’s a refugee, they need a new nation state, a new political body to protect their rights. We could think, for example, of lesser protections where people are still considered members of a particular political community. Maybe they’re not fully citizens, but we think that they deserve some kind of membership. And certainly, when you think about the United States’ framework, the idea of the Constitution, persons are protected. You don’t need to be a citizen, for example, to be guaranteed due process or equal protection.

DISPLACEMENT AND CREATIVITY

SanSan Kwan:
Migration and exile have shaped the dance forms that we know today. When African and enslaved peoples were brought to the United States, plantation owners forbade them to play the drums, and so thus, tap was born, because they found other ways to embody the percussive traditions that they knew about without drums, but instead, with their bodies.

Julia Keefe:
There’s beauty in building community and reaching out and holding hands and knowing that you’re not alone in that experience, in the pain of the loss of language or the loss of culture, the loss of spiritual practices, the loss of life. There’s beauty in community, in that connection, and it also is a calling to rebuild, to reclaim, to keep moving forward, to honor the sacrifices that were made by continuing to uplift the next generation of Indigenous people.

THE ART OF EXILE

Julia Keefe:
The human experience of loss is a unifier. The human experience of resilience is a unifier. The human experience of expression is a unifier. Regardless of what happens, we dance and we sing and we create. It is our human nature. It transcends identity.

Lara Downes:
So 200 years ago, the reality in my family was not any kind of a dream for anyone, right? For my dad’s family, who eventually came to Harlem via Jamaica, I don’t know at what point in colonialism and enslavement they were experiencing life 200 years ago. My Jewish family from Eastern Europe, also not great 200 years ago. So I just think that in my blood is this spirit of self-expression as survival.

Julia Keefe:
I think the art that is created in exile is a reflection of the unconquerable strength of the human spirit.