R a n d i a ’ s Q u i e t
T h e a t r e :
P e r f o r m i n g C a r e
a n d A c t i v i s m
w i t h a R o m a n i E l d e r
Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, McGill Queen’s University Press, May 2025
Revealing the politics of aging through ethnographic theatre-making with a Romani fortune teller, storyteller, and performer.
**Winner of Heldt Prize for the Best Book in New and Innovative Scholarship in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies, The Association for Women in Slavic Studies/The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
**Winner of Ann Saddlemyer Book Award for Best Monograph in Theatre and Performance, Canadian Association for Theatre Research.
** Winner of the Ethnography Division — Best Book, The National Communication Association.
** Winner of the Communication and Aging Division — Outstanding Book Award, The National Communication Association.
** Honorary Mention, Senior Book Prize, Association for Feminist Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.
** Honourable Mention, Taylor & Francis Book Prize in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Canadian Association of Slavists.
** Honourable Mention, (UAAC) Book Award, The Universities Art Association of Canada.
Endorsements and Award Citations
“Randia's Quiet Theatre is a powerful work that shows how theatre and performance can lead to cross-cultural connections, self-knowledge, and even survival.”
Ioana Szeman, University of East Anglia
“An intellectual feast, this book is truly compelling. Kazubowski-Houston’s work is touching, with a powerful ability to transgress traditional boundaries between object and subject of research.”
Michał P. Garapich, London Metropolitan University
"Randia’s Quiet Theatre is a perceptive and expansive contribution to performance studies. Kazubowski-Houston models the fluid creativity with which we might approach concerns about infrastructure for seniors and other marginalized communities."
Literary Review of Canada
"Randia’s Quiet Theatre is a record of a collaborative [two‑decade-long] relationship, which blurred the line between ethnographer and participant. Field notes, interviews, and transcriptions of their 'dramatic storytelling sessions' [form an] 'intimate ethnography'... Kazubowski-Houston provides an unsentimental, critical assessment of her use of performance. Randia’s Quiet Theatre is a perceptive and expansive contribution to performance studies."
Literary Review of Canada
Heldt prize for the Best Book in New and Innovative Scholarship in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies Committee, The Association for Women in Slavic Studies/The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Citation: Randia’s Quiet Theatre explores broader issues of elder care and memory among minority populations. Using performance ethnography, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston explores the life and experiences, both past and present, of one Romani woman living in Poland. Kazubowski-Houston integrates herself as both scholar and participant in the text, demonstrating the possibilities of staging and intimate, personal performance to generate imagined pasts and futures, to communicate the unsayable, and to enact care. Throughout the narrative, she intentionally places herself as equal with her subject, allowing Randia to voice her experiences through her performances without judgment or categorization. In this way, Kazubowski-Houston allows real emotion to seep out of the pages of the story. The book offers an innovative integration of performance, emotion, and ethnography to support the dignity of aging while highlighting the complexities of care.
Ann Saddlemyer Book Award for Best Monograph in Theatre and Performance, Canadian Association for Theatre Research, Citation: Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s book, Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder, offers a singular take on ethnography, conceptualizing “quiet theatre” as both a methodology and an artistic practice that opens up space for activism in the lives of Romani women in Poland. This book’s originality also lies in its form, blending autofiction, ethnography, and theory from across a number of fields. The result is a vivid example of what a truly ethical and relational ethnographic research study can look like, with quiet theatre operating as a key practice through which more interdependent and accountable ethnographic relationships can be actualized. Quiet theatre is also a novel way for the ethnographer to contest deficit-oriented perspectives when studying and documenting the lives of others.
Aligned with Eve Tuck’s longstanding call for more “desire-based” approaches to counteract “damage-centered” narratives in research, this book functions as a powerful assertion of agency, dreaming, and the “not yet” in the experiences of marginalized communities. Quiet theatre is therefore an activist practice that opens up space to envisage alternative lifeways, resist foreclosure, and foreground the imagination as a source of healing and care. This book forms an integral part of a growing body of literature in theatre studies that is examining the connections between artistic practice and care, an area of study that has gained increased prominence and urgency in the wake of the COVID pandemic and of a social care crisis in which neoliberal economic policies have eroded state-sanctioned economic safety nets for vulnerable people, particularly older adults.
There is a directness of address in this book that, from the outset, establishes a sense of intimacy with the reader. While very much rooted in the scholarship of ethnography, ageing, and performance, it is the richness of the narratives, supported by a substantial body of interview and storytelling data, that implicates the reader in the following central questions: How can we study and write about the lives of the marginalized in ways that preserve dignity and dreaming? What is a truly ethical research encounter? The depth and breadth of the author’s theoretical references, and her confidence in synthesizing them and bringing them to bear on her case study, is impressive. This is a strikingly interdisciplinary and daring piece of theatre and performance scholarship that makes a case for the location of self and affect in our work as theatre scholars.
Honourable Mention, Taylor & Francis Book Prize in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Canadian Association of Slavists, Citation: Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) examines the problem of Poland’s “prisoners of the fourth floor” – elderly people with disabilities who are socially and economically marginalized. Kazubowski-Houston has written a methodologically inventive work, which blends ethnography with improvisational methods taken from theatre to focus on the life of a Romani fortune teller and storyteller. Kazubowski-Houston’s experimentation pays off: her comparison of interviews with storytelling sessions with the same person reveals two distinct subjectivities and serves to make Randia a figure for “prisoners of the fourth floor” more broadly. Kazubowski-Houston’s concept of “awkward reflexivity” is a genuinely portable concept.
Description
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.
