My Home: text, space and performance

Abstract

We were sitting in the living room, warming up and drying out with some hot tea, when suddenly a hatch opened and a Somali man popped his head out. He beckoned us onto the balcony and, gesturing towards the council estate around us, described his beautiful garden in Somalia and all the things that grew there. He was the first of five characters we would meet over the next hour as we explored three empty flats in Shelmerdine Close, Bow, that had been transformed into the homes of Polish, Kurdish, Somali and Vietnamese migrants to London, in London Bubble's performances of 'My Home'. Through these spaces and the verbatim re-telling of stories gathered in interviews, we learned what home meant to different people. From his leather armchair in a richly red room, a Polish man and two friends talked about home as invoking a feeling of comfort. Over tea and biscuits, and amidst piles of boxes, a Polish woman shared memories of the orange carpet in her childhood home. The Somali man then came back to take us into his living room, where we watched and listened as he fixed the curtains and spoke about his encounters with the National Front. Blaring music from next door drew us into a Kurdish girl's bedroom and for a while we were her teenage confidantes, staying up too late listening to stories about not being Turkish. Delicious smells lured us finally into a kitchen, where a Vietnamese man was making dinner for his mother and talking about the differences between their ideas of home. We spent only a few minutes with each character but in every scene and during the carefully choreographed movements between them we were encouraged to feel welcomed into a real home. There were no curtain calls providing closure on this immersive theatrical experience and many of us came away with heightened senses of the people and spaces around us, wondering what stories they carried with them.

Life after the volcano: the embodiment of small island memories and efforts to keep Montserratian culture alive in Preston, UK

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Creating geographies of hope through film: performing space in Palestine‐Israel

“…For example, Pratt and Johnston (2007) discuss forum theatre, and the politics of performance, in North America and its repercussions on spaces of politics, communication and democracy. Other geographers such as Nagar (2002) and Blunt et al (2007) have also sought to analyse the relationships between theatre and geography using case studies that highlight the role of people involved, suggesting that performance can use space in interesting, potentially transformative, hopeful ways.…”

The need for practical workshops

“…Arguing for such a shift may not appeal to everyone, nor suit everyone's research, but the remainder of this commentary will discuss some alternatively organised events in order to encourage the production of more experimental ‘workshoppy’ events. As a result it situates workshops within a wider geographical shift to develop creative, experiential approaches to the production and dissemination of knowledge (for instance, Dewsbury and Naylor 2002; Morton 2005; Blunt et al. 2007; Foster and Lorimer 2007).…”