Magdalena at Theaterlab

Theaterlab presents the world premiere of MAGDALENA, an intimate multimedia solo performance by the award-winning filmmaker and a Guggenheim Fellow Gabri Christa. This work is a deeply personal account of experiencing Christa’s Dutch mother’s dementia, and an effort to piece together her past, marked by struggles with war, interracial marriage and unconventional motherhood. Born to a modest Dutch family, Magdalena survived the bombing of her hometown of Rotterdam during WWII and eventually married a middle-class Black man from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. When her memories started to fade, Christa took on the task of rebuilding her mother’s life through stories, dance, and images. The resulting 60-minute multimedia piece is part family album, part story of love and race, but above all, a reckoning with the harrowing consequences of a devastating illness that affects an increasing percentage of the world’s population.

MAGDALENA marks a stage comeback for Christa, whose work has been hailed as “stunning… multimedia dream” by The New York Times.