People have always migrated to other countries to work and earn money. To-day, this global labor migration is one of the most complex and invisible phenomena of our society. In some countries, migrant workers now make up the vast majority of the population, but with very limited rights and sometimes precarious living conditions. Migrant workers also fill important gaps in industrialised countries like Germany or Taiwan—they work in home care, in industry, or in the construction sector.

Taiwanese choreographer Fang Yun Lo joined forces with Vietnamese choreographer Ngo Thanh Phuong and Taiwanese set designer Cheng Ting Chen to lead a two-year research.

In spontaneous encounters at work, in snack bars and stores, they interviewed over 100 persons with a Vietnamese background and talked about their experiences as direct immigrants or as second generation members of a family torn between cultures.

What promises and desires lead young people from Vietnam and other countries of the global South into such dependencies? How are they different from the contract workers of the 1970s and 1980s? How do these conditions manifest themselves for those affected in each case, and what does this tell us about our societies?

HOME AWAY FROM HOME composes a moving, multi-voiced journey through theatre and history from all these memories. Divided into small groups, the audience encounters six performers at different stations who tell their personal stories—as artists, workers, YouTubers or students, in Germany as well as in East Asia. A complex mosaic of human relationships emerges from narratives, images, films and audio pieces, and tells of the global dimension of migratory movements and intercultural reality; it reports on turmoil and structural violence but at the same time also explores overarching human categories of home, identity and happiness.