“Traveler of Absences. A Dramaturgy of Deterritorialization.” opens in Medellin May 10 for two nights only.
The work of drama is the result of a university project by director Angela Gomez, who recently completed a degree in Representative Arts from the University of Antioquia. She said, “I am displaced from the municipality of Granada and seeing what happened with all the community, that all the friends and neighbors are all over the country and I said to myself ‘Well, I study theater. I have to do something to graduate, what about doing a dramaturgy about deterritorialization, about the event that happened in Granada in 2000’.”
In 2000 paramilitaries dressed as leftist guerrillas took over Granada. The paramilitaries killed 47 people from the town between 2000 and 2003 and forced 80% of the population of the municipality as well as the surrounding villages to leave their homes. The play contains fragments of stories of the lives of those displaced people.
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The director said the play offered her the opportunity to heal and offered others the opportunity to become more aware of the situation of displaced people.
“Theater offers people the possibility to have a cathartic experience, the possibility to see and remember and in that way when one sees and remembers what happened, heal,” said Gomez
“The play is about the forced displacement that the people of Granada suffered in 2000. It is the poetic representation of what happened in the municipality. It comes to the stage and asks ‘Why do things happen to displaced people?’.”
“The drama seeks to condemn what happens in the country, what happens to us or to the community day to day and often because of being caught up with the television and the Internet and our jobs, we don´t think about what has happened to the person in the countryside.
“What can be achieved is a sensitization to others what happened to people who were displaced. So people can be more humane in the face of displacement.”
The play is at Medellin Teatro Elemental Carrera 42, No 44-46, on May 10 and 11 at 8:30PM.
