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Randia's Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder

Randia's Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder - Paperback

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Availability:In StockContributor:Magdalena Kazubowski-HoustonPublish date:2025-04-15Pages:282
Language:EnglishPublisher:McGill-Queen's University PressISBN-13:9780228024781ISBN-10:228024781UPC:9780228024781Book Category:Performing Arts, Social ScienceBook Subcategory:Theater, Cultural & Ethnic StudiesBook Topic:European StudiesSize:8.90 x 6.00 x 0.80 inchesWeight:0.9017Product ID:SCQS638M64
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.
Language:EnglishPublisher:McGill-Queen's University PressISBN-13:9780228024781ISBN-10:228024781UPC:9780228024781Book Category:Performing Arts, Social ScienceBook Subcategory:Theater, Cultural & Ethnic StudiesBook Topic:European StudiesSize:8.90 x 6.00 x 0.80 inchesWeight:0.9017Product ID:SCQS638M64
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston is associate professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance & Performance at York University and the author of Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women.
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

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