“Exile & Sanctuary”: Sanctuary and the Search for Belonging

“Sanctuary is something that is much more personal. It can be a moment, it can be a song.”

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, sanctuary is a word of hope, a place we long for when the world feels fractured. Whether born from exile or from the universal human yearning for belonging, the search for sanctuary shapes our lives and our art. In this conversation, we reflect on the tensions between home and homelessness, loss and arrival, hope and memory.

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

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

Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Drew Dir:
Not all of us have experienced the kind of political or physical violence of actual exile, but all of us have sought refuge from work, from the stress of daily life, trouble with relationships or family life. We all need some kind of sanctuary.

DEFINING SANCTUARY

Leti Volpp:
If we think about sanctuary, it has very old roots. There are traditions of sanctuary across various great religions.

Alex Saum-Pascual:
The word I guess originates from a sense of a spiritual veneration, but I also like to think about it in its English connotation as a nature reserve, as a place that we create or we secure to regroup endangered species, allowing folks to regroup, to heal, and then fly free.

Drew Dir:
When you pair exile and sanctuary together, it almost sounds like sanctuary is the natural happy ending of exile, and I think a lot of Manual Cinema’s work deals with characters who are seeking a kind of sanctuary that they think they want, and then when they find it, they discover that it comes at a cost or it provides material sanctuary, but not spiritual sanctuary. The ambiguity around different forms of sanctuary, and who’s providing the sanctuary, and for what reasons, is an idea that we find very intimidating.

EXILE AND SANCTUARY

Julia Keefe:
I think they live in the same house together. You can find sanctuary after exile. You can find sanctuary before exile. You can find sanctuary within exile.

Lara Downes:
I don’t know that the act of being in exile necessarily introduces you to sanctuary. It can on some level. You are physically safe. Are you emotionally safe? No. I mean, I think that that’s such a part of the experience that you’re always like… You’re always broken. There’s always a part of you that’s missing because you left it back there.

Angela Marino:
I don’t know anyone who’s sought sanctuary [or] been in exile who has been unclear about what the journey actually is about or for. I think they’re so clear that it hits the nervous system every day.

Lara Downes:
You can’t go back to the way a relationship was yesterday or the way that your body every day is getting old. You can’t go back. So I suppose we’re in permanent exile in some way.

CHOICE

Alex Saum-Pascual:
On the one hand, we may think that there’s no choice in exile. But there could be a certain opportunity in leaving your country to find better reception for your ideas and to influence and change the culture of the other place. On the other side, we may not have choice around sanctuary because in many cases it may be a question of life and death. And unless we decide that helping someone [or] protecting someone from an imminent threat and death is a choice, then sanctuary shouldn’t be.

Angela Marino:
When we’re witness to exile or sanctuary, it’s an invitation for us to come together and to, as a community, resolve what those issues are.

Leti Volpp:
So in addition to religious organizations, we can also think of the so-called “sanctuary jurisdiction.” So cities, counties, states, they have decided to not use their own resources to assist in federal efforts to engage in immigration enforcement. They’re deciding to position themselves, their communities, as safe and welcoming places for people who are in exile, people who are refugees, people who are undocumented immigrants.

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Alex Saum-Pascual:
The sense of sanctuary can be quite unique to those people fleeing political prosecution. In the case of the political condition of a political refugee, and in that case is a very clear condition. But if we’re thinking about sanctuary in more spiritual or metaphorical terms, I feel that’s more of a universal feeling.

Julia Keefe:
The human experience is painful no matter who you are or where you come from. You experience pain and you experience loss and you experience grief. You experience anger.

SANCTUARY AND ART

Julia Keefe:
Sanctuary is something that is much more personal. It can be a moment, it can be a song. It can be a lifelong spiritual practice. My artistic sanctuary is being up on the bandstand with my band, being able to be in performance with these amazing artists, and meditating and practicing this music, and sharing this music with an audience.

Lara Downes:
More and more I’m aware that when I share my music in any kind of a room, any kind of a space with others, it is an essential safe space. I think that is the value of it. I think that is the superpower of it.

SanSan Kwan:
Dance as a recreational practice can serve as a form of individual sanctuary, a space somatically for people to express longings for home, experiences of home, cherishing of home. I also believe that dance is a collaborative form, and when done in community, can create a real sense of collective empowerment, a sense of belonging.

Angela Marino:
First step I think is really understanding the capacity of the theater to bring about the kind of social change that a lot of us are envisioning and that we need in this moment.

SanSan Kwan:
I mean, just moving to a shared rhythm is itself kinesthetically a feeling of community.

Angela Marino:
If the empathy bridge is really going to be there and we’re trying to open that empathy bridge, it will collapse without having foundations. And the foundations should be rooted in the actual conditions that people face, and understanding what is the purpose of that empathy if not to actually generate the kind of world that we prefer to live in.