Trilogy of Bodies was its live performance outcome. This was presented for a week at the Argos Theatre in Athens and comprised three 20 minute sections: the first was a 'dance' piece; the second 'drama'; and the third is best described as improvisatory ritual. Lusty Juventus was allocated responsibility for the second section, the 'drama'. Although the three parts were discrete and no collaboration actually took place between the companies in terms of performance-making, they were unified by their adherence to the aims of the programme as a whole. The starting point for all three performances, according to the original proposal, was Medea (although nobody ever mentioned this again).

In the end, we created M(other)1 (so numbered because we always felt this was the start of a bigger project which would take many forms, including the dissemination of our research findings). The piece explores the dislocated experiences of a mother with Alzheimer's and her daughter who subsequently questions her own identity. This scenario is juxtaposed with sections from Algernon Swinburne's 'The Triumph of Time' which was written in the 1860s. 'The Great Sweet Mother' of this poem, who became 'The Essential Mother' in our performance, also separates 'motherhood' from the 'maternal'.

From the time we created Ceremonial Kisses in 1996, Lusty Juventus has tackled a variety of themes and situations, most of which deal with power-relationships and the mechanisms of silencing individual voices. Behind and integral to this, have been wider research questions related to aesthetics and creative methodologies. In particular, we have been attempting to tease out a working model for collaborative theatre practice.

The F Word: feminism

Like the themes of our productions, including those of M(other), our methodologies correspond with what can be considered a 'feminist theatre practice'. According to Elaine Aston, this is a resistant mode of 'doing'. Here is the 'broad-based conceptualisation of feminist aims and objectives' that she offers:

	-	a feminist practice may constitute a theoretical domain;
	-	a feminist practice may operate formally and ideologically as a 'sphere of disturbance' (a concept Aston borrows from Simone Benmussa);
	-	feminist practice 'steals' from wherever and whatever is necessary to create the desired 'disturbance';
	-	representational systems (of gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.) are the subject (and are subjected to) this 'disturbance'.

What Aston describes resonates with our practice. However, we did not set out to test a feminist model, nor did we use it as the basis of our work. In fact, we feel that such conceptualisations are not exclusively feminist and can equally be identified with political theatre models, many of which by definition set out to disrupt hierarchical structures (at least in terms of their messages). While not denying the impact of feminism on the world, on theatre or on us, as thinking political women, what we are concerned with most is respecting difference in the widest sense.

The research questions that we set ourselves - individually and collectively - are not predicated upon Aston's project but correspond with it, particularly with regard to the 'organisation of the work'. She offers three possible directions:

	-	Collective organisation in which all members have an equal share in every task;
	-	Collaboration with an emphasis on skills specific to individual members;
	-	Collaboration with an emphasis on individual skills development and acquisition.

The latter two usefully describe our practice, especially in the making of M(other)1. Although we have, from our first collaborations, consciously tried to work fairly and with equality, it was only when we moved beyond skills specialism to skills development and when we began to blur the boundaries of theatre-making roles, that we truly began to work non-hierarchically.

The Journey

And so, our challenge has been, and continues to be:

	-	to collaborate as peers non-hierarchically;
	-	to explore the tensions between process and product, as well as between words and movement;
	-	to examine the inter-relationships between ourselves as simultaneously performers and creators.

We are doing this by destabilizing our roles, our reference points, and our meaning-making, in order to test creative decision-making processes.

In this article you will be offered our story and our stories. Each of us will address our individual roles and research questions, how we approach collectivity and how this leads to a collective dramaturgy. You may hear contradictions in our individual accounts. We consider this healthy and inevitable when individual needs meet collective ones. We will also be presenting documentation of our processes and live performances as well as M(other)3, a film based on this work which has been created with Russell Frampton.

We are charting a journey in which individual and collective processes led to a publicly-funded product worthy of being received by a general theatre-going audience - in this case, in Greece. And beyond this, as research-practitioners, to other forms of expression and dissemination such as digitally created posters, video (as both documentation and creative practice), and the electronic journal article you are now engaged with.