www.lustyjuventus.co.uk The M(other) Project 'Birth of Character/Death of Director' by Roberta Mock A decade before we embarked on M(other), I played six roles in one year. Half were maids; half were prostitutes. It was at this point that I abandoned 'acting'. A number of realizations dawned at once: 1) that I was not particularly adept at mimetic representations of character; 2) that my body and/or my presence was too easily conflated with 'types' of character that did not correspond with who I thought I was or could be; 3) that I was not particularly excited by naturalistic theatre; and, 4) that I was much more interested in considering an entire stage picture from an external material perspective than my specific role within it from an internal psychological one. And so I started 'directing'. If pushed to describe the nature of my role as a director, I would have to say that I approach theatre as an auteur working within what can be considered a 'classical' avant-garde tradition. This is not due to the force of my creative vision or because I have a particularly unique world view which I feel compelled to share. Rather, in keeping with Gabrielle Cody's summary of auteurism, my 'overarching impulse' seems to be 'the will to fuse historical events and narratives into a diorama of synthesized images, sounds and non-linear temporalities'. I try to shape the voices of others and the various stage languages we can create separately and together, into patterns. My preferred method of creating theatre is devising and I enjoy working with dancers because I'm fascinated by the ways that proxemic constructions and spatial and kinesthetic relationships can mirror and inform dramaturgical meaning-making. As a spectator, I am most engaged by live art practice and for some time have been trying to identify and analyse performative slippages in theatrical representation. But M(other)1 was deliberately and consciously not directed. It is also important to note that it was not co-directed. Put simply, it was formed and refined by three bodies with three perspectives making decisions together in one theatrical space. I came to the project knowing that, as part of a collective, I had to perform to create but that, because of my individual needs, I could not impersonate. My starting points were our questions about the meanings of motherhood personally and politically, and the understanding that my own body – in particular, my height and my hair – is both ordinary and extraordinary. As when I 'direct' others, I began with intuitive scraps that felt 'right' both together and in terms of wider goals for the production: a poem, Swinburne's 'The Triumph of Time', and a visual image. The image was of me on a beach, wrapped in material and wearing high heels, crushing a circle of eggs underfoot. I performed this action – which I call M(other)0 – two months before we entered a rehearsal space. The footage that was recorded on that day, along with that of Ruth and Chris exploring gesture and relationship in a summer garden, formed the basis of the video projection used for our performances in Athens. More than this, however, the videoed actions and our dialogue with them as they were edited into the projection was the foundation of our character development and non-verbal stage languages. My process took me from the interaction between site specificity and what Michael Kirby called 'nonmatrixed' performance to an interaction between stage space and the scripted scenario of mother and daughter offered by Chris. The result was a staged persona that acted as metaphor and did not simulate. The 35 meters of green satin material that bound me on the beach was unwound across the stage like a web, compartmentalizing it, restricting and encasing the 'other' narrative. The poem, bodied and disembodied, punctuated the 'other' script, recited through a radio mic with a heavy echo. The shoes were lost during the rehearsal process (and not without a fight), as it became clear that the persona that needed to emerge was grounded and sure footed – and that my untrained body needed a firmer basis on which to push through the stage space like a steamer. The eggs, difficult (if not a health hazard) to work with in a live context, were condensed to a single image of life, identity-construction and death at the end of the play – my only direct physical interaction with the others, as a material sign that is not meant to be read as a material body. Several ironies surface with the 'Essential Mother' who finally appeared – that I myself am deeply sceptical of essentialism; that we have created one 'type' (an archetype) in order to destabilize another (that is, a stereotypical construction of motherhood); that she probably subverts Swinburne's original intention; that the text she recites in the first person does and does not refer to herself; that in the context of what the audience experienced, she would only make 'sense' relative to the story being performed by Chris and Ruth. Fundamentally, what I did onstage was unwind and recite. I became set and setting. And it could be said that in this way I 'directed' (or rather, was allowed to 'direct') as I always have done: spatially, non-linearly, in a heterogeneous symbolic landscape. This time, however, the patterns – visual, aural, narrative – were created from within the stage space. No final decision was mine alone. There was no external 'I' or eye. M(other)1 contained and incorporated three parallel texts: the story of Eva and her mother, the embodiment of the Essential Mother, and a video which hints at their interrelationship through a vocabulary of fragmented and disintegrating images. For me, perhaps our greatest accomplishment was to unite these texts, each working in very different performance registers, through a process of collective dramaturgy.