Special contribution of Wings of the Butterfly to movement building...

ABOUT "WINGS OF THE BUTTERFLY" AND "THE LABYRINTH OF THE BUTTERFLIES"

By Wings of the Butterfly Co-coordination

This play, commissioned to Ailyn Morera by the Wings of the Butterfly Project, developed out of the presentation of two doctoral theses by Constanza Rangel and Maria Suárez Toro at La Salle University in Costa Rica in 2005. Their research brings to light the significant contributions of women in all areas of humanity’s knowledge, experience and work from all time periods that have remained invisible and been devalued, or, when they have been recognized, have been narrated and interpreted by others, not by the women themselves in their living voices.

The Wings of the Butterfly Project grew out of proposal made by Guadalupe Urbina. After hearing the doctoral presentations, Guadalupe announced her intention to stage and make a musical out of the thesis, where women would speak with their own voices.

The play is based on the book that grew out of Maria’s thesis, Women: Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect, published by Editorial Farben Norma in August 2008 in Costa Rica. The book was developed out of the communications work of the author and the team at Feminist International Radio Endeavor over the last 18 years.

Currently the Wings of the Butterfly Project is coordinated by María Suárez Toro and Constanza Rangel, with the additional help of Yarman Jiménez. It is made up of a collective and a multidisciplinary Advisory Group of women in Costa Rica, which seek to promote a positive image of women in history. In the course of their work they have rediscovered histories that always reconceptualize the official version of events. But the work does not only consist of exposing these histories; on the contrary, these characters report that they often acted from paradigms (mental codes converted into so-called ‘common sense’) other than the hegemonic paradigms of abusive power, control, domination, dichotomization and discrimination that have prevailed in the world during the last 5,000 years. Patriarchy as a paradigm does not allow us to see how trapped humanity is in its net of death and destruction.

To hear and recognize the contributions of women rooted in a feminist paradigm is relevant to the challenges that afflict humanity on our planet. When it seems that everything has been said and almost everything is lost, these women speak from another place, their place in history as guardians of the treasures of the paradigms of respect and caring for life, of respect for our bodies and our collective body: the planet we live on.

An innovative aspect of Wings of the Butterfly, and in particular the play, "The Labyrinth of the Butterflies," in bringing these voices to the theater is that by utilizing art, we are popularizing academic research that too often remains on university shelves, which makes it difficult for people who do not earn advanced degrees to even know about this research.

Having brought these women and their voices and knowledge in all disciplines, which are rooted in their daily lives and their experiences, to academic texts authored by Constanza and Maria is already a great achievement that demonstrates that knowledge is not only created in academia and through the scientific method, but that life itself is a source of knowledge that must be validated.

The Wings of the Butterfly also has an International Advisory Group of women from Uganda, South Africa, Malaysia, Iran, Great Britain, Holland, the United States, Argentina and Mexico who help to publicize the show and project internationally. This process also has innovative aspects. It was created in Latin America (and translated into English as part of its internationalization), but it is universal in its themes, presenting women from all regions of the world (Africa, Europe, the United States, Latin America and Asia) and of diverse identities.

To share the experience of artistic creation that took place in Costa Rica with the participation of women from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, and to present a universal vision from the historical experience of women from all times, all regions of the world and different ages and cultures is a great achievement.

In addition, the fact that the Latin American characters are collective and are represented by Mayan weavers implies a vision of another type of "planetization" that does not homogenize cultures or individualize experiences completely as globalization does, but rather builds a planet-wide world citizenship with a planetary consciousness that is woven from the collective ancestral identity that we bring with us from our collective ideologies even though they have been denied or remained unknown historically.

We have commissioned Ailyn Morera to bring to the stage these theses and this unconventional project with the unedited and indomitable voices of women from throughout history. We told her that we hoped that the play would continue to be a labyrinth of unedited voices that come from the lives and experiences of women from all disciplines. And the play demonstrates that she has done it in her own field as well! Her choice of genre (documentary theater), combined with her inventiveness in articulating things in her own voice, has resulted in the innovation of a type of theater that has never before been seen in Costa Rica. But, as the historical characters in the book on which the play and project are based do, she has also endowed it with the effect of the use of multiple languages—including in the game—to say the difficult things that must be named, and does so from the pleasure and humor that characterize those we are meeting again and reconciling them with our voice and the voices that have told the story.

And this is the labyrinth of the butterflies! And the actresses and producer haven't fallen behind; they have created their own dramatic labyrinth in the life of the characters and their own resonances.  Without knowing or recognizing where we come from (the bodies and places that women have reclaimed in history); without re-knowing who these weavers of history are, still unrecognized in all their valor; without searching for our own resonances with them, whether we are women or men, today we cannot know who we are and much less can we re-chart our course on the planet.

May the voices of these women mix with yours, women and men open to questioning and soul-searching rooted in other viewpoints, mental codes and experiences in the non-official history that is also our own. This other history is our labyrinth!

A special performance of the work in progress was shown once under the title "Wings of the Butterfly" at the festival Women Inc. in Holland in 2007 under the direction of Luchy Pérez, artistic direction of Guadalupe Urbina, and the production of Gladys Chiny (see www.alasdemariposa.org for details). In addition, this play was developed in part out of the work commissioned by Wings of the Butterfly to Roxana Campos in 2006, which has not yet been brought to the stage; the conversion into a musical by Guadalupe Urbina, which will soon be released as a CD, Wings of the Butterfly; and the multimedia work developed by Patricia Velásquez for the performance in Holland, which will eventually be published as a CD-ROM.