Cuentos Cortos de mi Otra Madre
Dance theater piece written and performed by Emily Aiken and Agata Surma
Teatro La Quadra 2013 Panama City, Panama
Manias
In Manias, my charachter enters the stage styled as a classic pin-up: red lips, polished hair, high heels, and a fitted dress that evokes mid-century femininity. She moves with poise and allure, embodying the image of idealized beauty. At first, her gestures seduce and play to the gaze—smiling, posing, twirling. But then, abruptly, her body convulses. Her smile vanishes. A seizure-like tremor overtakes her—violent, raw, uncontrollable. Her limbs tense, her torso shudders, her face distorts with rage and pain.
These ruptures happen over and over again.
She returns to the performance of femininity—soft, composed, smiling—only to be ripped from it again by the surging physical eruptions of something deeper, darker, and far more real.
The audience watches as the woman on stage cycles through beauty and breakdown, seduction and seizure, silence and scream—trapped in the madness of enacting a femininity that was never hers, while the shadow of anger flashes like a flare from the depths of her true self.
