My Name Is Truda Vitz
Image: Photo: Victoria Baldwin
How do we tell the stories of those who came before us? Our family, our loved ones?
Olivia Satchell explores how we use stories to create meaning about our loved ones through her one-woman show, My Name Is Truda Vitz.
Focusing on her own family history, Satchell tells the story of her grandmother, Truda, escaping from Vienna in WWII and making a new life for herself.
“It’s a migrant narrative, so many of us in Australia live here because our forefathers and mothers have been displaced. [They’ve] come here and made a new life for themselves,” she says.
Switching between the characters of herself, her father and Truda at the age of seventeen, Satchell explores our need to make meaning in life through stories.
“We have to make stories, we have to give meaning to those we loved or could have loved, because they couldn’t tell their own stories,” she says.
The production is an intimate, personal performance that also features Satchell expressing her grandmother’s displacement by playing cello throughout the show.
“I feel like music can access parts of yourself that language can never quite reach,” she says.
“It basically feels like I am putting my heart on a stage for all to see.” (SOC)
Jun 25–Jul 6, TAP Gallery, 278 Palmer St, Darlinghurst, $18.50-25, somersaulttheatre.com/my-name-is-truda-vitz
BY SHAUNA O’CARROLL
