Expats in Prague and the “In Between” Life: Belonging, Theatre, Everyday Sacred

I often describe my life as “in between”.

Not fully here, not fully there. It’s the shortest way I’ve found to say it.

I use that sentence deliberately, because it names something many expats and migrants recognise, even when they do not have words for it. You can live in a city for years and still feel slightly outside it; you can return to a place you once called home and realise you no longer fit in the same way. Home stops being one clear place on a map. It becomes something you build, again and again, through routines, friendships, shared spaces, and the small daily choices that make a life feel real.

Having lived across borders, I have noticed how quickly identity is assigned from the outside. Depending on the country, a person becomes “local,” “foreigner,” “new,” “not quite,” or “from somewhere else.” Over time, I’ve learned to be careful with labels, because belonging is rarely singular.

This “in between” experience sits at the centre of both my PhD research and my theatre work. My research looks at migrant identity and the sacred in everyday life. My theatre group, Cultural Bridge Theatre Group in Prague, supported by Integrační Centrum Praha (ICP), is where these questions become practical, week after week, through real people and real stories.

In our rehearsals, we do not begin with a finished script.

We begin with people.

Actors arrive with diverse backgrounds, first languages, and histories. In the room, we try not to reduce anyone to a label. We pay attention to what they carry in their voices, in their memories, in the way they enter a space and take their place within it. We play theatre games, we improvise, we tell stories. Over time, scenes grow out of conversations that start off very ordinary and end up revealing something true.

This is also where theory becomes useful. I read about exile, identity, and liminality in books, and I hear the same questions turning up in ordinary conversations. “Liminal space” is not an abstract phrase when someone says they do not feel fully at home either “here” or “there”, yet their life still goes on. They choose relationships, build routines, raise children, make plans, change direction, and begin again. The “in between” is not a pause; it is a way of living.

One of the first things people notice in our group is the sound of many languages thinking behind the English we use on stage. We rehearse in English, yet the room holds several inner worlds at once. Someone pauses, searching for a word; a sentence arrives slightly differently than it would in their first language. Meaning doesn’t disappear; it just moves. When a phrase resists translation, it becomes a gesture, a rhythm, a look. The group learns to understand through layers, not uniformity. Over time, we build a shared grammar that is temporary but real.

We keep our voices.

We keep our accents.

I care about this because an accent is not a problem to be corrected; it is evidence of a life lived across places and among different people. When someone tries to erase their accent completely, something human often disappears with it. At Cultural Bridge Theatre Group, we treat voice as part of identity’s movement. Identity shifts, and the voice carries those shifts. Our theatre work starts from that acceptance.

Alongside identity, I also pay attention to the quiet ways the sacred appears in ordinary life. I do not mean institutional religion. I mean the moments that feel non-negotiable to a person, the things they protect without always being able to explain why. The photos they keep close. The object they will not throw away. The recipe that matters more than it “should”. The story they repeat every year, because it keeps a fragile part of the self intact.

For migrants and expats in Prague, these small rituals often travel across borders. A dish from “home” appears on a table in Prague next to a new dish invented with ingredients from here. A family celebrates the same holiday in two time zones on the same day, one version via video call, the other in the kitchen where they live now. Old traditions can feel slightly distant; new ones, slightly unfamiliar. Life and celebration happen, again, in between.

On stage, that “in between” becomes powerful material. It allows a character to carry more than one self at once: the person they were before leaving, the person they are now, and the person they might become. Theatre creates a safe space to test these possibilities without forcing a single answer.

The process matters as much as the performance. What happens on stage may last one evening. What happens in rehearsal can last longer. People realise they are not alone in feeling divided between places. They recognise that a mixed inner life, made of languages, memories, and habits, is not a failure to belong. It is another form of belonging, one that is built rather than inherited.

For me, Cultural Bridge Theatre Group is a bridge between research and practice. It is a place where migrant identity, the sacred in everyday gestures, and the reality of living “not fully here, not fully there” can be explored with care and humour. It is also a reminder that community can grow from curiosity and shared experience, rather than from fear and labels.

From time to time, I also host public events connected to this work. They might be talks, workshops, or discussions, but the aim stays the same: to bring these questions out of the theatre room and into a shared space, where people can speak about belonging without needing the “right” vocabulary first.

If you recognise yourself in this “in between”, you are learning how to belong in more than one way. That can be difficult, but it can also be creative. For many of us, it is simply what life looks like.

My work as a researcher and director is to give language and a stage to life lived in between, so that this experience is not only seen, but heard.