Past Event
This doctoral research performance project explores the lived experience of Australians who were separated from their mothers at, or soon after their birth, and "adopted" under Australian closed-record adoption policies and forced adoption practices.
Infans, VOIC’D is a play for and of our times!
Breaking with social taboos this new work gives voice to a socially and politically silenced demographic, bringing the invisible “adoptee” out of the shadows of secrecy and into the heartbreaking light of truth.
Latin for ‘one who cannot speak’ the speechless infans, raised in isolation from all knowledge of their origins, lives with an unspeakable psychic wound – a wound induced by an historical event of trauma – an event which cannot be narratively reconstructed from memory.
How does the wound make itself known? Will the social and political world listen to the story of the wound in the knowing voice of the adult “adoptee”?
Developed in collaboration with the research participants, representatives of an estimated 250,000 Australian-born “adoptees”, this is verbatim theatre with a twist – an immersive, deep-listening experience – a theatre of testimony and witnessing.
Please join us for a Q&A/discussion with the cast after the performances.
