"Shivering of the Rose"

From March 24-31, DAH Theatre's director Dijana Milosevic and actress Maja Mitic are performing their piece "Shivering of the Rose" in Lextington, Virginia and Georgetown, Washington.

Still avaiable for booking from April 1-7 

SHIVERING OF THE ROSE

The old Peruvian Quechua people do not think of the past as something that we leave behind, but instead they see it as always being in front of us. To be able to construct the future we have to constantly gaze at the past, they believe.

This is the performance about the performance "Presence of Absence", where actress and director reveal how they created the piece. "Shivering of the Rose" deals with the post-traumatic memories of family members, especially women, who have missing persons from their immediate environment. Their disappearances are tragic events for individuals and families who have been left in the dark and the only thing they have left is memories and hope for resolution. During the process of resolution, which requires time, the memory fades and erases along with the historical truths that are also being erased. Deep wounds caused by disappearances continue to undermine relations between groups and nations, sometimes decades after such disappearances, and prevent the society to start with the process of healing.

Art, and specifically theatre art is able to record and revive those efforts through the live word and the presence of the performers.

"Story is the way we remember, the way we make judgments - and perhaps, because they touch the heart - stories point the way to forgiveness and understanding. By means of story, we can experience the terrible and noble dimensions of what happened, we can put names to faces, meaning to places and events, gain a sense of the humanity of the victims and the victimizers, relive the events of history in their fearsome detail."
"The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule", Edited by Ksenija Bilbija, Jo Ellen Fair, Cynthia E. Milton, Leigh A. Payne

At the end of the performance, while leaving, the audience will see roses beside the painted silhouettes of disappeared people on the sacks that were brought in at the beginning of the performance by the 'Centuries Old Woman Who Saw it All'.  Roses were carried by Mothers from Plaza del Mayo in Argentina, in their ongoing circling, searching for the truth about their missing. The Saturday Mothers from Turkey carried roses and put them in front of the main state institutions, seeking for truth about their missing. Hundreds of roses were carried by families of the disappeared from Dulici, Bosnia, who left them on the sites of the concentration camps where their dearest had been taken and all trace of them had disappeared. Also the families of kidnapped Serbs from Kosovo carry roses when they mark the anniversary of their disappearance. In her text Of Beauty and Justice the Argentinian artist Claudia Bernardi writes about families of missing children from Guatemala. During the trial of a massacre where children had been abducted and killed, the families, as a sign of protest to the verdict of 'not guilty', held up the roses that they had brought. Bernardi finishes with these words: "I imagine the movement of the roses, undulating gently, like a hug, like a lullaby, without words or sounds. A lament dressed in deep red for the children who perished..."