Back Home

Back Home is a poetic one-woman play-journey exploring the ties between land, memory, and migration. Moving between reality, personal testimony, and folklore, the piece captures the bittersweet nostalgia of leaving home: the ache for land, smells, songs, and landscapes that continue to live in memory. Back Home is a gentle act of resistance, a celebration of cultural memory, and an invitation to remember something you didn’t know you remembered.

The play does not offer simple answers. Instead, it asks: what is home made of once it no longer exists as a place? Can memory, land, and story become something we carry — and something we share?

The performance unfolds as a journey, circular rather than linear, inspired by the structure of Ukrainian folk tales, where being lost is not a failure but a necessary condition for transformation.

The heroine wakes up in what should be her home. Slowly, it becomes clear that it is no longer intact: the house has been destroyed. This moment marks the rupture between the real world shaped by historical events, war, and displacement, and the internal journey that follows. From here, she leaves, attempting to fit herself into other spaces, other “homes.” Through physical exploration and movement, her body reacts to unfamiliar environments, objects, and architectures, testing how much of herself can adapt and how much resists.

Rhythm plays a central role: repetitive movement, restarting actions, and a train-like pulse evoke migration, departure, and the constant attempt to begin again.

After failing to find a home elsewhere, the heroine returns to the ruins of her own. There, she begins to reconstruct memory and space through objects, gestures, sound, and imagination. This act of rebuilding opens a threshold into the folklore world - a realm of myth, nostalgia, and ancestral presence. Here she encounters Earth: Матір-Сира Земля, a pre-Christian Slavic deity, presented not as a metaphor but as a living, witnessing force. Earth is warm, rhythmic, and attentive; it’s holding memory, history, and continuity.

The sensory world of the performance shifts. The real world is dark, fragmented, and unstable: malfunctioning lights cast consuming shadows, and sound is sharp and interrupted. The folklore world is warmer and grounded, filled with nature sounds, filmic memories projected onto set objects, and repeated physical patterns that feel ritualistic and ancient.

Throughout the piece, the audience experiences the journey viscerally. They hear Ukrainian songs and fragments of speech, feel the weight of repetition, and witness the body negotiating loss and belonging. The final moments bring a reunion, not necessarily with a physical home, but with land, memory, history, and nature. Whether the heroine has truly “found” home again is left unresolved. Instead, the audience is invited to sit with the question themselves.

Back Home expands how we understand migration – not only as the movement of people, but as the carrying of land, culture, and tradition within us. It asks what “home” consists of once it has been lost, altered, or destroyed, and whether it can ever be found again. Rather than offering answers, the piece invites audiences into a shared act of remembering and imagining, where story becomes a form of survival and connection becomes new ground to stand on.

Creative Team
Concept, Performing & Producing: Masha Khaleeva
Concept, Directing & Scenography: Daria Holovchanska
Directing Advising: Eftychia Spyridaki
PR Management: Alime Dzhelilova
Lighting Design: Vlada Hrystenko