The Displaced Nation

New TCK columnist Dounia Bertuccelli is here with her first guest, another Adult Third Culture Kid who, like Dounia’s predecessor, Lisa Liang, has a passion for theater.

Hello readers! I’m thrilled to be contributing the TCK Talent column and thought it fitting that my first interviewee, Amy Clare Tasker, works in the performing arts—like my predecessor, Lisa Liang. I had the pleasure of meeting Amy at this year’s 2016 Families in Global Transition Conference, where she was one of the 2016 Pollock Scholars.

Amy is a theater director, writer, producer and performer. Born in Britain, Amy moved to California (the Bay Area) with her family at a young age, where they settled and eventually became US citizens, leading her to initially “identify more as an immigrant than as a TCK.” She pursued a drama degree at the University of California, Irvine, with a year abroad at the University of Manchester, her father’s alma mater and about 20 minutes from where she was born.

In 2013, Amy moved to London, “repatriating” after many years “abroad”. She is now exploring TCK/CCK identity through theater.

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Did growing up as a TCK influence your decision to go into theater, and how has it helped you process your TCK upbringing?
For my thesis project at UC Irvine, I wrote a play called Hyphenated. It was the first time I used theater to explore my British-Americanness—it’s a collection of autobiographical vignettes about my family, strung together with narration from an “Amy” character. I had the idea I could go back to where I was born and find the piece of myself that was missing—and finish my degree while I was at it.

How long ago was that?
This was nearly a decade ago, when I was just beginning to process my dual identity. I hadn’t yet embraced the concept of the Third Culture Kid, or TCK, as I wasn’t able to identify any real-life TCKs beyond myself and my sisters—and we’re not a perfect fit for the academic definition. I was still looking for the right word for who I was, when my confusion finally led me to the community of TCKs and CCKs (Cross-Cultural Kids). I’ve found a remarkable sense of kinship with people who have lived in those same liminal spaces. We recognize that shared emotional geography, even if we’ve never set foot on the same patches of earth. Since moving to London I’ve really embraced being part of the TCK/CCK community—and theater has been a big part of that, with the development of my own performance lab and a new piece, Home Is Where.

“You know where a lot of my family lives? England!”

I understand you’ve been in London for just over three years. What led to your decision to move eight time zones away from where your immediate family lives?
The decision to move came like a bolt of lightning at the end of Directors Lab West—a one-week intensive workshop I attended in 2012. The experience inspired and challenged me and got me thinking about my career. I have a habit of making major decisions through powerful gut instinct (and then rationalizing them at length afterwards, as I did in this blog post). Besides, I have grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in this part of the world.

Since making the move, have you ever gotten “itchy feet”?
I don’t think I get “itchy feet”. Unlike many of my fellow TCKs, I didn’t grow up with high mobility. I never developed that internal clock telling me it’s time to move on again. But still, I often wonder what my life would be like somewhere else in the world, what friends I haven’t met because I’m still here, what opportunities I’m missing out on, what other languages I might know if I hadn’t settled in English-speaking places all my life… But I also want roots.

Is London “home”?
London could be home. I accept I will never be as English as a person who grew up in England, but at least my accent doesn’t stick out here because everyone sounds different. It’s a great base for visiting and working in other European cities… I can see myself staying.

“Directing collaboratively is ‘upholding something with an open hand.’”

Tell me about Home Is Where. What led you to create this particular theater piece?
Whereas Hyphenated was motivated by finding my personal sense of self and cultural identity, Home Is Where is about trying to find a sense of belonging in the context of a global community. It’s also about reaching out to non-TCKs who are curious about these people who move around and get their cultures all mixed up.

I understand the creative process for Home Is Where has involved extensive collaboration?
The process started with identifying fellow TCK and CCK collaborators, and interviewing dozens of people about their cross-cultural experiences. Both the cast and the creative team have contributed ideas for the story, characters, and performance style. Collaboration on this scale is a challenging way to work—but it’s also exhilarating, and creates something unique to this group of people. All twelve of us bring our own cultural identities and diverse artistic backgrounds to the performance, be it music, movement, multimedia, or other styles of theater. The actors weave together their own international experiences with verbatim interviews from fellow cultural hybrids.

It sounds exciting but also a little daunting.
It’s the largest team I’ve ever led, and also the most technically ambitious project I’ve ever attempted. We’re using a technique called headphone verbatim: the actors are listening to the audio recordings of the interviews on stage, and repeating exactly what they hear. That way, the audience can hear exactly what TCKs told us in their interviews. We’re also extending our storytelling outside of the theater. Clips from all our interviews are available on our Online Oral History Library.

What are your hopes and plans for Home Is Where?
We’re still developing the play, finding the best structure to showcase the TCK stories we’ve gathered. At the start of last month we presented a work-in-progress performance in a space in London’s East End; it was set in a futuristic anti-immigration dystopia, inspired by the Brexit vote here in the UK. In an earlier version, we set the interviews in a fictional TCK Embassy—riffing off the idea of the Global Citizen. Right now, we’re in a new script development phase. Hopefully early next year we’ll be back in rehearsal to create the next version of the piece. Ultimately, we’re aiming for a full production in London and then touring around the UK (and maybe even further afield—stay tuned!).

“Five Helens look into a mirror, asking: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’”

Are you working on anything else?
I’ve been working on a project about Helen of Troy since 2010, when I started writing with my friend Megan Cohen, a brilliant playwright based in San Francisco. The Helen Project consists of fragments of monologue exploring the myth, icon, and real life of Helen of Troy. We’ve produced a few different “editions” with five actors in both San Francisco and London. I’m currently reshaping it into a solo show, with the idea of directing an immersive performance installation version at some point…

The story of Helen of Troy sounds a far cry removed from the TCK scene.
You know, about two years after we started writing it, I realized it’s also a TCK story. At the end of the Trojan War, our Helen says:

I came home to Sparta. Sparta, where you call me Helen of Troy. In Troy, they called me Helen of Sparta. Or just “the Greek woman”. No one will own me. I don’t belong anywhere.

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Thank you so much, Amy!

Readers, please leave questions or comments for Amy below. You can follow her progress on her Performance Lab site, Facebook and Twitter, where she uses two handles: @AmyClareTasker and @wearehyphenated. Interested in Home Is Where? Read more about it here, and don’t forget you can listen to the TCK interviews at the Online Oral History Library.

Editor’s note: The subheds were taken from Amy Clare Tasker’s blog posts. 

Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, to Lebanese parents, Dounia Bertuccelli has lived in France, UK, Australia, Philippines, Mexico, and the USA—but never in Lebanon. She writes about her experiences growing up as a TCK and adjusting as an adult TCK on her blog Next Stop, which is a collection of prose, poetry and photography. She also serves as the managing editor of The Black Expat; Expat Resource Manager for Global Living Magazine; co-host of the monthly twitter chat #TCKchat; and TCKchat columnist for Among Worlds magazine. Currently based on the East Coast of the United States, she is happily married to a fellow TCK who shares her love for travel, music and good food. To learn more about Dounia, please read her interview with former TCK Talent columnist Lisa Liang. You can also follow her on Twitter.

STAY TUNED for next week’s fab posts!

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Related posts:

• TCK TALENT: The talented Lisa Liang goes to Asia with her one-woman show about growing up everywhere
• TCK TALENT: Dounia Bertuccelli, writer, editor, mentor and #TCKchat co-host
• TCK TALENT: Benjamin Jancewicz, missionary kid, socially responsible graphic designer and pioneering vector artist
• TCK TALENT: Mary Bassey, Writer, Storyteller, Advocate and Scientist
• TCK TALENT: Nancy Henderson-James, Missionary Kid in Angola, Librarian in North Carolina, and Author/Memoirist

Photo credits: Top visual: (top row) London Bridge, Golden Gate Bridge and tragedy/comedy photos are from Pixabay; and photo of Amy Clare Tasker (supplied). Middle visual: Scenes from Home Is Where and flyer for September performance (supplied). Bottom visual: Bust of Helen of Troy by Antonio Canova at Victoria and Albert Museum, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Yair Haklai (CC BY-SA 3.0); and scene from The Helen Project (supplied).