A tourist’s guide across time
Home is the place one returns to. Our birthplace holds memories, emotions, opinions, and important milestones of our lives. We return there because we long for safety, isolation, and understanding. We stay because we feel a rush of euphoria, love, and nostalgic sounds. At some point, these qualities go into negation and begin to itch. Whether our departure from home is motivated by curiosity or is a form of defection from the toxic influences of our family, perhaps there always comes a time to take that one step further, that one step where we go out across the threshold of home and look around more than we look behind us.
The original monodrama Všechno své si nosím s sebou (I Carry It All With Me) by four female Czech creators from JAMU offered a tourist’s overview of the world in a forty-minute tape. As an enthusiastic backpacker on the second floor of the JAMU's Theatre Faculty, the actress talked not only about her travel experiences, but also about her ancestors – about escaping from political oppression, misunderstanding, exploitation, and an unstable family background, in the hope of finding a better beginning.
The humorous travelogue, contrasted with the historical interpretation of the homeland, took in various genres – from satirical to critical perspectives (through interactions with the audience) to a tragic situation with comic relief; at its core, this felt like a family album. The leafing through photographs (and thus experiences), delivered through the actress’s enjoyable narrative, had a functional gradation and temporality, varying between the present and the past through several compartments, linking carefree travel for exploring other cultures with forced departure for the sake of one’s own safety.
The thematic link was in a simple prop – a backpack. At the beginning, we see it as a classic and necessary possession of a traveller, but in the course of the narrative this object becomes a repository of ideas, memories, and historical sources. Through the contents of the backpack we learn the genesis of the migratory man – whether as part of the burgeoning global backpacker culture, a family history where the holy trinity of questions (career-wedding-status) is constantly and intrusively repeated, or an involuntary flight in search of a better life.
The question of home takes on a multidimensional spectrum. We travel to know and understand, to compare what cannot be compared without experience. And we return home to share new wisdom. Home is where one returns... if there is a place to go.
