Author:
Olena Fedorova
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My performance practice revolves around the self, memory, place, migration and identity. I explore links between lived place (Bachelard), theatre as landscape and chorography (Pearson), environmental theatre (Aronson), and theatre phenomenology (States). In this chapter I present my current research project, which focuses on the creation of an experience of place in the space of a performance studio. The place I seek to evoke in my performance-making is the place/time of my own childhood, a place that is both geographical (the Ukraine) and experiential (my childhood); both contribute to my identity, and to the insistent sense I have that my life now is deeply tied to this place that is my past. To this extent, my research is auto-ethnographic. But the place that I seek to recreate in (performance) space has been formed by multiple factors that link my lived place to the experiences of countless others. As Spry notes, auto-ethnographic performance is ‘the convergence of the “autobiographic impulse” and the “ethnographic moment” represented through movement and language in performance. By articulating the intersections of peoples and culture’, it reveals how identity is ‘always migratory’. Tuan’s notion that place is a pause in movement, a ‘dwelling’, invites us to see migration and exile as ‘un-dwelling’, as a loss of home. My childhood exposure to the Chernobyl disaster and subsequent migration/exile to Australia is personal, and creates for me a sense of displacement and the loss my former self. But the experience of ‘dwelling’ and ‘un-dwelling’ is common to millions all over the world and throughout history. By a careful and evocative construction of nostalgia in the performance space, by imbuing significant objects and persons with symbolic value, by creating a tension between stopping and moving, and by an intimate and subjective sharing of this performance space with audiences, I attempt to create for others the place of their own experiences. By means of the shards of my own particular personal childhood memories, my work evokes delicate memories of something lived, loved and lost.

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