Workshop participant's 'Make Yourself at Home' items.
Make Yourself At Home
Inside an empty cardboard box big enough for two adults to sit in, you meet a stranger. A stranger who wasn’t born here. They want to make you feel at home. After they’ve made you tea, they ask you to think about a room, from any point in your life, that reminds you the most of home.
‘Where were the doors and where were the windows?’
Make Yourself At Home is a large scale performance installation that pairs one audience member with one performer who identifies as a migrant. Using cardboard furniture, cardboard windows and cardboard plants, the performer recreates a room that is also a memory inside a cardboard box for an audience member. The audience member is then invited to go with the performer to see an installation the performer has made of the room that reminds them the most of home. MYAH is designed to facilitate dialogue and a shared act of remembering between an audience member and a performer who identifies as a migrant.
Make Yourself At Home was originally created and performed by Deborah Pearson as a one-on-one performance at the Battersea Arts Centre in 2008. It was then re-created as a large scale performance by Caroline Williams, Deborah Pearson and Gary Campbell (The International Activities Club) for Nuit Blanche in Brussels in 2016.
Make Yourself At Home is available for touring.
