THE CHOICE || Movement and puppet show for adults

"Memories are often just fragments, brief moments or touches, from which the collage of life is composed. Memory is inviolable ground. But it is full of ghosts." (Edith Eger, "The Choice") During the Second World War, Edita Eger was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp along with her mother, father, her sister and other Jewish families. She – a ballet dancer and gymnast – danced for Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death. The belief that everything happening was temporary, that she would soon see her beloved and her parents, helped Edita find strength and endure not only incomprehensible horror, cruelty, humiliation, dehumanisation, exhausting labour, hunger, illness and the Death March, but also life after : "When we were liberated, I was so weak that I could not even speak; unable to move, I lay in a pile of corpses. We were free, but we did not know what to do with our freedom." Both of Edita's parents died in the gas chamber. Her boyfriend was killed one day before liberation. It took many years before Edita learned to forgive – not only others, but also herself. Through her unique experience she invites all who suffer to confront their traumas and choose freedom from them: "You cannot change what happened, you cannot change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose to live now." In a show inspired by Edita Eger's book "The Choice", the aim is to tell, through movement, dance, fragments of memory and puppets, the story of a woman who witnessed incomprehensible human cruelty with her own eyes, who kept her memories locked inside her for many years and who gradually came to understand that true freedom, true liberation from prison, would come when she dared to return to the place from which so many never returned... This is the story of all of us. The story of people who have experienced great hardship, of people who cannot release the ghosts of the past, of people suffering in the prison of their own thoughts. "This material chose me... When I read 'The Choice', I thought it was such a shattering, inspiring, transformative book... but is it possible to bring it to the puppet theatre stage? I kept pushing it away, looking for something else, yet the book kept holding on... and I let it in. I continue my journey of duality. I seek the transformation of the living and the non-living . Movement, figure and human being... On stage fly the splinters of a person, the husks, the memories of a former life, which are merely "fragments, brief moments or touches, from which the collage of life is composed". We constantly live among them. They envelop us, hinder us, and sometimes push us forward. I think it is important to meet our own ghosts, look them in the eye and let them go. To choose life, to choose light", – director Gintarė Radvilavičiūtė shares her thoughts.

Adresas: Vilniaus teatras „Lėlė“