Poet and playwright Aspazija wrote her
play “The Witch” in a time when her works were being staged at the Riga Latvian
Theatre, and yet women’s status in society was, in the poet’s own words, “rolling in
the mist of a black night”. Today, almost
130 years later, the notion of equality, with Aspazija’s fist, is still knocking
insistently at the front door of our culture.
Tracing the
pattern of Aspazija’s ornate language, the creative team play with voice and
rhythm to highlight in “The Witch’s” story a thread that reveals the woman’s
experience, as she fulfils her dreams and longing.
The witch "with all her
flaming essence bursting out of the old life and unable to find a position for
herself in the new light as of yet, clinging to the old with a thousand
tentacles and thus anointed in eternal contradictions,”* lights up, gets brighter
and becomes a fire, burning herself and others down to embers.
Fusing cultural heritage and today's reality, and accompanied by a
pulsating beat, the creative team invites us to use the sparks of light and
darkness to illuminate a path beyond a dualist view of the world and beyond the
idea of continuous progress.
*Aspazija on the
process of writing her play “The Witch”, “Teātra Vēstnesis”, 1924 (2).