“GOODBYE, MOTHER”

“GOODBYE, MOTHER”

Mar 25, 2017

“GOODBYE, MOTHER”

Women’s issues are making strides in equal rights. Our voices are becoming more audible and are definitely resonating but there is a huge backlash to all this progress: The Femicide rates have increased globally.

I met Patricia Masera, a theatre performer from Paraguay, based in New York City, and working mainly in technical theatre on Broadway, in 2012 working on Hotel Project, in NYC. Since then we’ve been cooperating on different stages of our own work, until this year when our desires and goals met to create and produce “GOODBYE, MOTHER”.

“GOODBYE, MOTHER” is a new play about femicide that gives a voice not only to the women who can’t talk anymore but to the people who stay behind.

All these people and the human networks around them and the impact that every single femicide has on every single person. “GOODBYE, MOTHER” shows that the women killed are not numbers in a yearly list. We need to give them names and lives and people around. We need to see them as they are.

She was my friend. She was my mother. She was my sister. I was alive and loved. I was surrounded by family and friends and my killer. She was my mother and I left her there. I had a daughter, and a husband. I had a father and I left him alone with her. She was my favorite aunt and all I have are beautiful memories of her, she baked me lemon muffins. My aunt Marcia, she was 32.

The project has grown exponentially since its conception. Our initial phase involved research and interviews with key people in three cities: Asuncion, London, and New York City.

We are determined to get as much information as possible to hear the voices of the people around the victims and to catalyze them in one universal piece of work, that can be heard and understood regardless of origin.

After our research and development work, the writing phase started. We will soon start producing the work for its presentation in New York, London and Madrid.

CLICK HERE TO READ "GOODBYE, MOTHER"
Thousands of women are violently killed by their partners or family members, every year. A study published by the United Nations concludes that Femicide:
• Is difficult to eradicate
• It has significant prevalence in all regions
• Is important to monitor
• Needs future research work to better understand enablers/drivers and perpetrators.

“GOODBYE, MOTHER” focuses on the last point of the report that is, to my understanding, the only area in which art, and theatre in particular, can contribute, and it is our responsibility as artists to take on the task.

Picture: Patricia Masera by Tim Becker

“LDA: ADELA”

“LDA: ADELA”

Oct 8, 2012

“LDA: ADELA”

LDA: ADELA will première on October 24th in Queretaro, Mexico.

PopUp, the New York Theater production company founded by Tamilla Woodard and Ana Margineanu are preparing the second edition of LONG DISTANCE AFFAIR (LDA) and I am directing ADELA as a part of it.  ADELA is a distopian play written specifically for this show by Mariana Carreño King, my talented Mexican playwright. She has created an exciting challenge for me: To direct a play in which there are three different dimensions of time and two dimensions of space.

María José Doiz, my actress from Navarra, is working tirelessly with me in our process of creating ways to show how time can move and be shaped in different forms and all this as a part of the creation of her character.

This play is not happening in the present and that is a rarity in the world of the Theater. It has already happened and it will happen again, and sometimes when we are in the present of ADELA it’s not our very same present. So in which time will the consequences of the events happening in this time take place? Will they affect the character or has she been already affected by them?

Borges meets The Wachowskis in ADELA.  Watch the audience’s opinions after seeing the show.

 

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