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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines a storytelling project with an elderly, disabled Romani performer in Poland, exploring performance ethnography as a form of quiet activism that envisions alternative lives and futures while fostering an ethics of care.

Paper long abstract

This presentation draws from my new monograph, Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025), which blends autofiction, ethnography, and theatrical improvisation to unravel the politics of aging in Poland. Throughout Poland, thousands of elders live with disabilities in four-storey walk-up apartments. In many cases their children have emigrated; they live with loneliness, silence, and the absence of care. At the centre of the book is Randia – a talented Romani fortune-teller, storyteller, and performer confined to her fourth-floor apartment in old age.

The book discuses my performance ethnography project, which studied how Romani elders face prejudice and discrimination after the widespread emigration of young and middle-aged Roma following Poland’s 2004 EU accession. I argue that, in the interviews, Randia’s identity was fixed: she told of the hardships she faced as a Romani girl and as a wife, mother, and grandmother whose relationship with her family had been shaped by separation, sickness, and death. But in storytelling sessions staged in her home, Randia stepped into characters and was freed: her tales moved between the past, the present, and the future, across life and death; her characters looked after one another and changed history. I argue that Randia’s storytelling sessions constituted a quiet activism through which she envisaged alternative lives and articulated an ethics of care among individuals, communities, and spirits. Ultimately, I ask how performance ethnography can cultivate more equitable ethnographer-participant relationships, new ways of being together, listening, and caring for one another.