look of ashes

“This is my letter to the world, which never wrote back to me (…)
Its message is entrusted to hands which I cannot see -
For the love of her –my dear friends -
judge -me- lovingly ”
Emily Dickinson

with
Bruna Gusberti
author and director
Cristina Castrillo

With no biographical pretence “Look of Ashes” emphasizes characters and voices that were not originally placed into the limelight of history: Anna Göldin, who was believed to have been the last of the Swiss witches; Emily Kempin-Spiry, Europe’s first woman lawyer; Isabelle Eberhardt and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, two Swiss women who have marked lives of more than one century, yet are hardly remembered. All these women are special, and on the edge of conventional acceptability, according to the rules or the blindness of our era.

The show derives from an imaginary concatenation of events detailing the deeds and portraying the voice of a woman who is considered to be a real witch. Hers is the voice of the human condition, of an intention, of the consciousness of passing time. Hers is an inner voice that anyone is entitled to have within oneself in order to discover one’s own vocal identity and to propitiate/appease others.