Randia’s Quiet Theatre

Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780228024927
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Introduction: Hearing the Good Silence
• The Interviews – Randia, Caregiver
• Dramatic Storytelling – Randia, Rover in Time
• Subjectivity and Reflexivity – Randia and Me
• Conclusion: An Ethics of Reciprocal Care
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index