Mothers and daughters: is there a closer bond? Their lives are an extension of each other. Mother treads the same path her daughter will later follow. She is a friend, to whom one can always fall back.
But under the skin, a suffocating power struggle rages in which they hold and attack each other. Jealousy and competition gnaw at the domestic idyll. Escape is impossible. It is an oppressive fairy tale, which ends with the line: 'And they lived long after.'
Choreographer Cecilia Moisio sublimely evokes this insidious ambivalence in 'Mum's the Word'. However oppressive the mother's influence can be, the daughters cannot live without her. When mother is dead, they surround her with a ritual that seems to bring her back to life. Her foot-stomping thumps on, like a heartbeat. Of the mother or of a baby? Of death or of life to come?
You can feel this dark entanglement of death and life continually proliferating in 'Mum's the Word' under the glassy-eyed domestic life, in which the mother drills her daughters. The frantic dance moves are funny and abyssal at the same time. Obedience and defiance all in one. What enchantment reigns there? What drives the women to hold each other so tightly?
There is an intense yearning for contact, but mother does not seem to hear anything. She does, however, snoop in her daughter's diary. Forbidden pages. Lonely cries. They anger her. They gnaw at the exemplary family she wants to put into society. Who taught her to want that?
In the razor-sharp battle over clothes, the praising and denigrating, the jousting with table manners, the constant confusion about who plays which role, I regularly feel a smile coming up: this is so absurd, get out! But immediately the oppression hits me: stepping out of this maelstrom is impossible. Mother and daughters are in a prison with their own shadows as bars.
For a moment, there is an opening. The walls turn into jungle plants, the backdrop for a myth about a princess kidnapped by an underworld god. It is another beautiful moment where you are insidiously taken into a tangle of feelings: grief, desire to get someone back, liberation, relief that someone is gone.
Eroticism flows into the arena in abundance. And here too, you sense a surprising touch when not only does the mother keep the daughter in a straitjacket, but vice versa, the daughter also severely disapproves when the mother has a love life.
Significant is the mirror game the women play at the neatly set table. Fun, sweet, playful. But you also sense the blind stare at each other, the blurring of boundaries. When they fight with the other, they also fight with themselves.
Where is the redemption, I kept asking myself as I saw all this loneliness, helplessness and constriction. When the cramped desires for a man were suddenly joined by the cries of a baby, it made me feel great emotion for a moment. 'Something gentle and defenceless' amidst all that violence. Producing a child. Is that redemption? Yes and no. The crying goes on and on, warping into despair and reproach. The next link in the eternal chain of struggle.
The four women, as well as the background images and sophisticated projections on the walls in this performance, made me feel the longing for love, liberation and a person of my own in five quarters of an hour.
Photos: Jochem Jurgens
Performers: Soosan Gilson, Katarzina Sitarz, Yulia Kalinchenko and Sylvia Poorta
Videos and light: Mark Thewissen
Seen: 5 Mar, Theater Bellevue, Amsterdam
Still to be seen:
12 Mar Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Rotterdam 8:30pm.
23 Mar Schouwburg Arnhem, Arnhem 8:30pm.
13 Apr De Lawei, Drachten 8:30pm.
20 Apr Theater Vrijhof, Enschede 19:30h.
22-23 Apr Dansmakers Podium, Amsterdam 20:30h.
28-29 Apr Theater Kikker, Utrecht 20:00h.
30 Apr Chassé Theatre, Moving Futures Festival, Breda 20:30h
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