Their Sessions

In the early 2000s, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston returned to her native Poland to conduct ethnographic research on Romani women. During the project, the York University anthropologist grew close to Randia, a fortune teller who, “over time, became a significant presence” in her life. “Randia and I came back to the moment we met many times,” she writes. “It sparked a two‑decade-long friendship.”

Randia’s Quiet Theatre is a record of their collaborative relationship, which blurred the line between ethnographer and participant. Kazubowski-Houston structures the book around her field notes, interviews, and transcriptions of their “dramatic storytelling sessions.” What unites these forms is “intimate ethnography,” a mode of research that “takes up emotional experiences as an anthropological subject.” Such an approach demands extraordinary commitment. From 2010 to 2019, Kazubowski-Houston made frequent trips to Elbląg, the small northern city where she grew up. There she dined with Randia, accompanied her on errands, helped manage her medications, and assisted with chores. During the same visits, she tended to her own ailing mother. “I found caring for both her and Mama mentally and physically taxing,” she admits. “But at the same time, I found myself relying on Randia’s counsel.”

As a member of the marginalized Romani community — an Indo-Aryan ethnic group — Randia faced a certain amount of discrimination. Up until her death in 2021, she lived in one of many “grey ghettos,” rundown districts populated by low-income seniors. Her deteriorating building lacked an elevator — a serious barrier to mobility for someone in her seventies, in poor health, and living on the fourth floor. Yet Kazubowski-Houston consciously turns her attention away from large-scale, systemic inequality, focusing on the minutiae of Randia’s everyday life.

While many Polish cities remain walkable, a growing car culture has increased sprawl and diminished public transit. Randia could not afford taxis or ride-sharing services and had no one to drive her around (by 2018, five of her ten children had passed away and the rest had emigrated). So she spent most of her time confined to her apartment. In one moving interview, Randia described counting the “minutes and seconds” of each hour. She said that she felt “the time flowing through my hands.” More than anything, she wanted to see her children again. “I want to hear their voices.”

Dramatic storytelling became a way for Randia to process some of this pain and loneliness. “In Randia’s quiet theatre,” Kazubowski-Houston writes, “time was circular rather than chronological.” Conducted in the privacy of her kitchen, these were improvised scenes in which both women slipped into different characters and explored scenarios that mirrored Randia’s life. Performance-based experimentation enabled Randia to voice “the absent, silent, taboo, unconscious, and unacknowledged aspects” of her experiences. “All this is true,” she said, challenging the fictional nature of her stories, “because I’ve lived it, other people’ve lived it, my family’s lived it. There’s nothing made up here.”

Kazubowski-Houston noticed the sessions seemed to lift Randia’s mood and encouraged her to convey desires or memories she might otherwise suppress. Through performance, Randia explored alternative lives and tapped into “subliminal bodily sensations and moods.” Frustrated by the financial strain of supporting her incarcerated son, for example, she created a scene in which one of her characters, Córka, stopped sending her own jailed child care packages. Later she imagined that Córka went to live near her adult daughter in England, where she was less isolated. These freeing exercises allowed Randia to temporarily inhabit different pasts, presents, and futures. “If only one could choose to live a different life, just like that, wouldn’t that be nice?” she wondered. “Don’t like your life? Take someone else’s.”

Kazubowski-Houston argues that by showing Randia ways to “circumvent the contingencies and necessities of her own life,” these immersive collaborations helped her come to terms with grief. But the ethnographer discovers the method’s limits for making lasting change. Randia often criticized her for emigrating to Canada and leaving her family behind. After their storytelling sessions, Randia seemed more compassionate and forgiving, but that proved fleeting: when Kazubowski-Houston would return to Poland after an absence, Randia would again chastise her for living abroad. Kazubowski-Houston speculates that these experiments “facilitated a momentary affective attunement rather than long-term empathic understanding,” conceding the shortcomings of theatre in an anthropological context.

Kazubowski-Houston provides an unsentimental, critical assessment of her use of performance. But at times she struggles to clearly explain her key concepts. Take “quiet ethics,” which she defines as “not simply an escapist fantasy but rather a springboard for action that cracks open possibilities for different experiences, relationships, and imaginaries.” Even for specialists, this language is vague. Occasionally she makes perplexing claims that contradict the emotional core of the book. Toward the end, she explores the limitations of mutual understanding between scholar and interlocutor. “Empathic knowing can be experienced as an infringement on privacy,” she writes. “As yet another insidious form of colonialism.” The assertion ends there. No clarification or further context is provided. Are we to conclude, then, that empathy is harmful? Such moments are admittedly rare, but when they occur, they undermine an otherwise careful and personal work.

Nonetheless, Randia’s Quiet Theatre is a perceptive and expansive contribution to performance studies. Most of us will care for an elderly person at some point — and, with luck, grow old ourselves. Kazubowski-Houston models the fluid creativity with which we might approach concerns about infrastructure for seniors and other marginalized communities. She acknowledges that the activist potential of drama-based ethnography is nebulous: “Quiet theatre may be a way of being, doing, and intervening that cannot be fully knowable.” Still, she reminds us that, at the very least, we must nourish relationships with the vulnerable among us and be prepared to step into their worlds when they need care.