Roseane dos Reis is an actress, artist, critical thinker, mother, Brazilian resident in Norway, who has created the theatre performance “Den Heilige Kua – Om å føde ein nordmann” (The Holy Cow – About giving birth to a Norwegian), with its debut on 8 March 2024 (see the poster of the performance above, with its design by Patricia Cavidades, and a photo of Roseane below).

I quote a part of the performance’s description (translated from Norwegian with online help):

“The smell of freshly brewed coffee greets the audience at the door. This is a poetic, humorous and informal story about a birth that becomes a metamorphosis. And a tribute to everything one can discover about oneself and others over a good cup of coffee!

While she tells the story of her first birth, the narrator becomes a cow, Audhumbla, the primal cow in Norse mythology. The story challenges stereotypical ideas about the foreign wife and mother, highlights several understandings of equality from an immigrant’s point of view, and invites the audience to a critical reflection on feminism and integration. It is about motherhood and maternity care, about community and equality, about identity, feminism and integration.”

To create this performance, Roseane conducted interviews with Norwegian and immigrant women, and reflected on her own experience giving birth for the first time in Norway as an immigrant. She intertwines this with Norwegian mythology and various other mythologies that she traced back in relation to her own ancestors, in India, Italy, the Netherlands, and Brazil, among others, and especially in relation to women and rituals, such as around drinking coffee. This blend of input conveys the complexity of emotions and socio-political circumstances in such a simultaneously simple and powerful way! As one audience member cited on the performance’s page puts it:

“It was like we felt the warmth from the poolside in Brazil. We heard grandma talking to the parrot. We were the ones who travelled from country to country and faced new challenges, good and bad. In the meeting with the maternity ward, we were the ones who sat there without dignity, without respect and understanding for our bodies and our child who was about to come. And when the child came, it was ours! My words only stretch to fantastic, gripping, moving and absolutely worth seeing.” (Lil’Gorilla Theatre Company, translated from Norwegian for this post)

For some impressions of the performance, Roseane shared some professional photographs from it, some by Kata Pasztor and others by Andre Nesheim, as you can see indicated specifically in the credits per photo. I’m very thankful for being able to share these here with the MobileWorlds readers in the gallery below!

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I only had the opportunity to see a small part of the performance, and the privilege to hear Roseane speak about the process of preparing and creating the performance, during a Master Class on Aesthetics and Creativity at HVL, in Bergen, Norway, and was truly touched. I subsequently interviewed her for this feature and ended up having a beautiful conversation about third cultures with her – a theme that resonated with her experiences as well.

I want to go into a bit more detail about what thoughts the piece, and Roseane’s background, triggered for me in relation to third cultures as I interpret them for this project. Among other aspects, Roseane recounts the story of giving birth in Norway, as a Brazilian (with multiple other roots). She had attempted assimilation in Norway, but in this moment suddenly noticed the importance of being seen as all of herself, as more than what she dared to show and present to Norwegians around her normally. For instance, her name, Roseane, being difficult to pronounce in Norwegian, she had been naming herself Ane, and now she was, needed to be, Roseane, on the papers, and in her experience. In the moment of giving birth, and of connecting to her child, she felt the need to connect to her family’s cultures – which were Brazilian, as well as mixed from various places around the world, – and as she rejected assimilation, she felt exclusive behaviours surround her in response. As she chose to demand things for the sake of herself and her baby, rather than just taking what was given, harsher social relations suddenly surfaced. At the same time, all this gave her renewed strength.

This highlights an important aspect that migration scholars often point to: key life changes – such as giving birth, but also finding a life-partner, changing schools, deciding to settle in a particular new home, etc. – are often triggers for a shifting relation to our identities. They are moments where some cultural aspect that had always been in the background, suddenly asks for attention. If such a moment triggers a migrant to go from a process of local assimilation to one of stronger identification with another country, or rejection of a local culture, this will likely generate a big shift in how the migrant is perceived by others. This does not need to result in tension, but if it does, it can reveal larger issues of cultural prejudices and have great impact on the migrant’s life and of those close to them. In the case of a birth, there is also the added element of the child’s inevitable relation to their country of birth, as well as the cultures their parents bring to their lives. All this can also be a moment of true reflection on third cultures – which parts of which cultures am I now resonating with, and why? What is something new I’ve found within myself, which I want to carve out, use to reshape who I am? Who does this allow me to relate more to, or less, and how? When children are involved: which cultural aspects do I wish to pass on to them, and which parts of the “other than me” will they adopt, how can I relate with this? Perhaps these are questions that individuals and societies could ask themselves a little more frequently, without the context of extreme shifts. Perhaps that is the power of engaging conceptually with third cultures: allowing and acknowledging shifts in cultural understandings, gradually, and in tandem with others.

These last points are not mentioned by Roseane herself, but they were themes that came up in me as I heard her story and about her art. This is the true power of such people and performances, it seems to me, to trigger deep thoughts in others, but allowing the receiving person’s experiences and backgrounds to add shape and colour to what is taken from the performance. Thus, again, third cultures can emerge and enrich imaginaries, and hopefully, also wider debates. And Roseane’s work confirms again how much art more generally and theatre and particular can help process and transmit such thinking.

I highly recommend all readers of this post to check out and follow Roseane’s work, via this Linktree: https://linktr.ee/roseanereis, and her instagram.

[You can find this text also on the Features page of the website!]