In Kapusta, Moure performs silence on the page and aloud, writing
"gesture" and "voice" to explore the relation between responsibility and
place, body, and memory, sorrow and sonority. Here, poetry flourishes as
a book "beyond the book," in a space of performance that starts and
stops time.
In Little Theatres, Ern Moure's avatar Elisa Sampedrn first spoke
about theatre and the need for smallness in order to articulate what is
huge. Sampedrn, who reappears in the translation mystery O Resplandor
as the translator of a language she does not speak, vanishes later in
The Unmemntioable when the split in human identity that results from
war and displacement is acknowledged. Now, in Kapusta, the character
E. is alone, in the smallest of spaces - the bench behind her
grandmother's woodstove in Alberta. Here, E. struggles to face the
largest of historical and imagined spaces - the Holocaust in Western
Ukraine, and to understand her mother's silence at the sadness of her
forebears, her "salt-shaker love."