Chris's Voice

Would we view the M(other) project - and, in particular, our staged performances in Athens - as a success? We wanted to escape from the situation where, as Michelene Wandor explains, 'individual skills are so fetishised that myths develop: writers are temperamental flowers, actors are intellectual zombies, directors are martinets. Political and alternative theatre challenges the crudities of these myths, by finding ways to encourage responsibility for all stages of the work: for what a play is saying as well as how it is saying it; a politicising of the whole aesthetic process'.

That we were successful in destabilising our traditional roles was due to the fact that we had been working together, towards this method, for nine years. But it has to be acknowledged that there was another timeline at work for M(other)1; that of producing a 'successful' product in a concentrated rehearsal period of four weeks in the studio. The final piece received positive reviews (or so we have been told, as they appeared in Greek). However, democratic decision-making requires not only a long gestation period. It also requires time - of which we simply did not have enough - to sharpen and focus our unified creative vision. The time commitment to this method of working cannot be overestimated and, of course, this is one reason why it is used so infrequently in commercial theatre.

Our bodies have taken a journey and one which is still very much ongoing. As this journey continues, certain ways of being, interacting and connecting have been realised and are still seen to be shifting. The practice we've been discussing provides us with a framework where we as women could be heard and - in terms of somatic outcomes, I would add - have been seen and felt. This impacts on our dramaturgical and aesthetic decisions because the quality of listening and responding to each language on stage is heightened.

The somatic principles where one learns the ability to let go of the need to be right, not to make assumptions, not to take anything personally and attempts to create with words rather than destroy started to play a very active role in enabling us to re-think certain older patterns and invite new ones in. As Elaine Aston points out, we mustn't overlook the possibility of a field of theorised activity that ends, begins and processes through real bodies that 'matter very much'.


Roberta's Voice

Our hosts in Athens received us warmly but they were clearly bemused by what we performed and how we approached performance. What we made defied easy classification by genre. It did not comfortably tick the box labelled 'drama' which they assigned us. Nor did they understand why we each wanted to be described in the programme as 'creator/performer'; why we didn't want to - couldn't - name a director; why Chris both was and was not the writer; why Ruth, who was responsible for the languages we spoke with our the bodies, was not strictly speaking the choreographer.

But somebody in Athens decided that it was necessary to 'out' us. And so despite our best efforts, I was still listed as 'the director', presumably because I was the one who corresponded by email and talked to the technicians. The fact that, through our methodology, we couldn't help but to destabilize conceptions of both process and product is evidence of their symbiosis. It is also evidence, again as Aston suggests, that a non-hierarchical collaborative practice that disturbs systems of representation is genuinely possible.