Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder
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- Synopsis
- Throughout Poland, tens of thousands of elderly people live with disabilities in four-storey walk-up apartment buildings. In many cases their children have emigrated; they live with loneliness, a lack of basic amenities, silence, and the absence of care. They are known as “prisoners of the fourth floor.”In Randia’s Quiet Theatre Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston mixes autofiction, ethnography, and theatrical improvisation to unravel the politics of aging in Poland. At the centre of the book is Randia, a Romani fortune teller, storyteller, and performer confined to her fourth-floor apartment in old age. In interviews, Randia’s identity is fixed: she tells of the hardships she faced as a Romani girl and as a wife, mother, and grandmother whose relationship with her family was shaped by separation, sickness, and death. But in storytelling sessions staged in her home, Randia steps into characters and is freed: her tales move between the past, the present, and the future, across life and death; her characters look after one another and change history. Kazubowski-Houston finds in Randia’s performances a quiet activism through which she envisages alternative lives and articulates an ethics of care among individuals, communities, and spirits.Interwoven throughout Randia’s Quiet Theatre are Kazubowski-Houston’s own stories about caring for her elderly and disabled mother, making the book a collaborative, reflexive, and complex creative work. It reveals how ethnographers and their interlocutors can stand on more equal ground. Ultimately it is a profound reflection on how the elderly can live with dignity and how we can care for each other.
- Copyright:
- 2025
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 282 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780228024927
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780228024910, 9780228024781
- Publisher:
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 05/30/25
- Copyrighted By:
- McGill-Queen’s University Press
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Drama, Plays and Theater
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.