Sample of Wings of the Butterfly performed in Holland

Amsterdam. December 2, 2007.

Last night the capital city of The Netherlands witnessed a sample of Wings of the Butterfly in a premiere performance at the theater festival “Women Inc.” “Lucy” headlined, played by Costa Rican actress Luchy Pérez Wolter, in the shortened version that included four characters.

An audience of almost one hundred people, mostly Dutch and immigrants from Latin America, enjoyed a sample of the work in progress, which will debut in Costa Rica in 2008.

More than 6,000 people attended the festival on December 1st and 2nd, also participating in workshops, concerts, plays, films and exhibitions, which all addressed women’s rights and women’s creativity.

The festival was held in the famous Beurs van Berlage building. The building, located in the heart of the city, ushered in the age of modern architecture in Holland. At the time of it construction in 1903 by Beurs van Berlage, it was the first building to have a glass roof.

Among panelists, talks and workshops addressing HIV/AIDS, women and money, and sexual orientation, Maria Suárez Toro, author of the book the play is based on, was one of the few Latin America speakers. She shared experiences of women in her region about these issues. “The women’s movement by its nature is a migratory movement because women are concerned with all issues and are in every organization everywhere. Women are concerned with everything; but our home is the feminist movement because it feminism is the political platform that deal with gender to demand an end to our utilitarian subordination, “invisibilization” and disempowerment, which is too often expressed in mixed organizations that do not challenge sexism.”

The musical, Wings of the Butterfly, was the only Latin American show at the festival. Wings is being produced in Costa Rica by an advisory group of 12 women from various disciplines, among them lawyer and feminist activist Alda Facio and historian of the body Anna Arroba.

Under the stage direction of Luchy PĂ©rez, the artistic and musical direction of Guadalupe Urbina, and performed by Tatiana Sobrado and PĂ©rez, the premiere in Holland was also performed by three special guest artists from The Nethelrnads: Thea van der Meer, Tineke Langedijk and Angela de Boer.

The prologue to Wings of the Butterfly—a dance of metamorphosis by the young Angelita de Boer— was narrated in Dutch by Langedijk and introduced each of the characters that appeared in the shortened version of the play. Lucy, the 3,000,000-year-old humanoid skeleton returns to tell us about females and women’s contributions to the evolution of the species.

Mileva Maric, who assisted Einstein in formulating the theories that resulted in his first Nobel Prize, was not recognized until now.

Rosa Parks, the African-American woman who challenged segregation in the 50s in the Southern United States by refusing to give up her seat, is also in the play. “This is my place,” she says, holding onto the seat that was forbidden to her by racism.

Comfort Women dancing their pain and their reunion a half century later to break the silence surrounding what had happened to them during the Second World War when they were made “comfort women” for Japanese soldiers; and lastly, all the women in the song “Señora de Mar de Cambios”, a tour of universal syncretism which venerates women and the feminine throughout history, before patriarchy and in spite of it.

Wearing all white, the female cast took their places on a simple stage decorated with white blankets hanging from the roof that enhanced the actresses and the musicians and returned them to us as reincarnations of history, as these forgotten, ignored women, without a voice to tell us their histories. A multimedia presentation by Patricia Velásquez closed the performance.

“It was interesting to find that although I don’t speak Spanish, I could understand a lot. I’m a physics student and I understood almost the whole part about Mileva Maric, the mathematician and Einstein’s first wife. The acting was so brilliant that I could even guess which mathematic formulas the actress was dramatizing. And the most incredible thing is that in all the years I have studied this field, no one has mentioned her,” said a twenty-five-year-old who traveled from Utrech to see the play.

For more information about the show go to: