Performing Feminist Matrescence

This paper seeks to draw attention to the representation and conceptualisation of matrescence in contemporary performance. There has been recent critical discussion around maternal performance, with Lena Šimić and Emily Underwood-Lee’s books (Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations [2021] and Mothering Performance: Maternal Action [2023]) framing the connection between maternal and performance practices as ‘embodied, relational and durational’ (2021). This paper seeks to critique the assumptions of a Western, male universal subject and address the significance of matrescence within human evolution (Jones, 2023). Through examples of performance practice, I explore how cultural myths of motherhood have informed theatrical representations and how staging motherhoods have illuminated lived experiences of mothers. I argue that these mother/artists perform a feminist praxis.

Maternal subjectivities have been neglected within theatrical canons, and when they have featured, mothers are often reduced to various tropes of the monstrous, devouring, absent, incestuous or murderous mother. Theatre and performance has an active role to play in questioning and challenging, as Elin Diamond puts it, ‘whose bodies are represented and whose are not’ (1997). When matrescence has been staged, what maternal identities are visible and whose remain unseen? The lineage of Western dramatic literature has resulted in a canon which is largely Anglo-American, Euro-centric and patriarchal – this paper seeks to avoid homogenous dramatic representations, instead curating works which move beyond a solely Western focus. I suggest that contemporary performance, with its aesthetic qualities and ways of communicating beyond text or language, can provide spaces for mother/artists to re-imagine myths of matrescence.

This paper seeks take a matricentric feminist approach asking the question ‘where are the mothers?’ in theatre and performance and offer the provocation: ‘what role does performance have in staging maternal myths, where is it complicit in re-telling stories, or can contemporary performance find ways of challenging them and re-imagining the maternal?’