Danish Act Motherly Love in Cuba

“Nobody is born old,” said Iben Nagel Rasmussen to this Havana audience in a performance of Esther’s Book here by the Odin Teatret from Denmark, giving voice to her recently passed away 85 year-old mother and creatively coping with aging, loneliness and separation.
The piece opened with images on a center stage screen of the funeral procession, a white coffin with pall bearers in a final pastoral setting. Flanked on the left by the brilliant Rasmussen as her mother behind a typewriter and Elena Floris as the daughter on the right, playing a real violin, the still and moving images showed Iben’s family life until her mother’s final days of senile dementia. There was a quiet frenzy in the air at the Adolfo Llaurado theater, a space for the very dedicated, sold out with plastic seats in the aisles holding a cult of dread locks, same-sex couples, local theater stars and folks still talking about the art installation in an adjoining gallery.
The 63 year-old Iben Nagel Rasmussen would have made her mother proud, the Danish accent in Spanish hardly noticeable, and singing in her native tongue with a voice that betrayed her age. “Those were crazy times to have babies,” said Iben as her mother, who married three days before the German invasion of Copenhagen, “but we loved life and desired it with a thirst. We were optimists and adored the sun.”
The slide of a pregnant mother came next in the deeply sophisticated portrait that traced with images and text her mom’s writers association meetings, the end of the war, images of condemned nazis, the working class neighborhood in Copenhagen, family park scenes, horses plowing fields, babies being washed and kids chalking the sidewalk.
Havanans love dogs and chuckled at the family pet pictures of jowley bulldogs and petrified cats hanging from trees, a personal drama cast by the top member of the Odin Teatret, founded by Eugenio Barba.
In the program notes he was thankful for this piece and accepted for the first time not to be Iben’s director. He said in March 2006 that Iben was Esther’s gift to the troupe, and remembered how the mother actually came to live at their headquarters.
The ensemble’s website http://www.odinteatret.dk/ explains it “performs on famous international stages, but also in geographically remote and socially discriminated areas.” It has “never tried to be a political theatre, it always was one, thanks to its ability to freely ask questions concerning established orders.”
Iben says in the program the piece is “a reflection on becoming old in present day Denmark, about loneliness and separation,” which are personal and political themes on the island of Cuba, a geographically and socially discriminated area for decades, greatly thanks to US interference.
How many times has the issue of an aged mother living with a child been broached in the family dialogs of Cubans? And how much more complicated can that idea be here, where the legislation of the world’s most powerful country specifically limits the possibility for family unification?
Even this author’s mother has been personally reminded by those authorities she can only come to see me and her grandson once every three years, a story all too familiar to we who choose to live here.
This tragicomical dialog between the typing mother and violinist daughter finds a receptive community for its message that “Life is a good and bad moment.” Perhaps the final videos of the mom prancing around a living room, play-fencing with what appears to one of her older children, provide a common testimony to the memory of motherly love, which gives all us children the strength to carry on.

Images and text by Mike Fuller, an ex-artist, writer and occasional member of Havana's theater crowd.