Whatever your mental image of a refugee might be, it’s probably time you adjusted it.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, at the end of 2021, of the 89.3 million forcibly displaced people, an estimated 36.5 million (41%) were children under 18 years of age. Between 2018 and 2021, an average of between 350,000 and 400,000 children were born into a refugee life – into camps, into detention centres – per year.

Stark figures such as those lie behind Tides of Longing, an ambitious work new for orchestra, massed choirs and a single young actor – a former refugee – created by Perth-based writer and director Jay Emmanuel and Western Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

“For an artist who runs a small independent theatre company in Perth [Encounter Theatre], this is a pretty major step,” Emmanuel tells Limelight. “To commission a company like ours to tell a story like this to a WASO audience gives me hope that others elsewhere will be inspired to do likewise.”

Jay Emmanuel. Photo supplied

Tides of Longing is an evolution of a project Emmanuel has been working on for...