Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Randia's Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder

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

Kazubowski-Houston, Magdalena

Paperback

General DramaGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0228024781
ISBN13: 9780228024781
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Apr 15 2025
Pages: 282
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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.

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