The Quota is a live role-play experience designed to explore some of the pressures and crisis points experienced by refugees and migrants trapped in the limbo of an immigration detention centre. You will play an individual struggling with the loss of their autonomy within a system, in which many have been trapped for years, unable to move forwards with your life or make significant choices about your future and the futures of any loved ones you have responsibility for.

 

The fiction behind the role-play will be a near-future scenario in which Great Britain has divided into separate states and England is on the verge of economic collapse, triggered by failed economic separatism and severe droughts. You will play English refugees and economic migrants hoping to be granted a right of entry in  Gweriniaeth Pobl Cymru (The People’s Republic of Wales). Play will take place in a so-called ‘temporary’ detention centre on the English-Welsh border.

 

Key themes that will be played upon include:
 

• State/institutional control over your daily life, when you eat, what activities you have access to, what your future will be.

• The sense of uncertainty, as you strive to meet a set of arbitrary criteria that might or might not secure your release from the detention centre.

• Anxiety about individual identity, as your previous markers of identity (language, status, profession, etc.) are all potentially rendered redundant.

• The absence of a duty of care on the part of the state towards the stateless, i.e. inadequate access medical, educational and other support facilities.

• Lack of personal safety: in both your interactions with the centre’s security personnel, who are there to control you, and potential violence within the population of the detention centre, when security personnel are not present.