The Day That My Mother Forgot About Me...

This piece began with an image from my childhood - I was sitting on a biscuit tin on Christmas Eve watching TV all day - and a phrase that I found to describe it: "The Day That My Mother Forgot About Me...". Mary and I were talking about how liberating it was for our kids to feel they'd been 'forgotten' about once in a while; that they weren't being 'supervised' or 'organised' but were just 'pottering' free from adult eyes, and suddenly this event from when I was 7 or 8 flashed into my memory. The day was memorable on two counts: one, TV was rarely available during the day in my childhood, and two: my mother would never have countenanced my sitting idly in front of the tele had she not been so busy preparing for Christmas Day in the kitchen. On that day I was free to wander into the fantasies provided by black and white films (David Lean's Great Expectations sticks in my mind).
We were both excited by this starting point because it suggested a momentous event in childhood but we weren't sure what exactly, and both the title and image stuck! That was back in the early Spring of 2009; we were still performing our first piece - Last Night I Dreamt My House Was Leaking.. and we started work on this new piece by letting other material drift into consciousness which seemed somehow connected. There were lots of films (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Volver; The Dreamers; The Piano Teacher; Marnie; The Night Porter), novels (Austerlitz; The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Peter Pan), theory related to photography (Barthes), memory (Sebald), transgenerational trauma, Jung's 'shadow self', stories about our mothers, and any number of dreams which involved both Mary and myself finding 'new' rooms in houses that we were living in, or were about to live in.
Throughout 2009 we worked through the material that insinuated itself into the process. We have learned to trust the dream sequences that emerge when we work on a piece, and we follow 'hunches' when introducing new material (the novel Austerlitz became an important part of our work after we kept encountering the 'Rue d'Austerlitz' on a weekend trip to Paris). We don't throw anything out but some of the sources 'wither on the vine' and disappear from consciousness although they remain for reference in the blog (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane disappeared abruptly after we'd both had a go at performing the dance!)
By the beginning of 2010 we had a lot of fragments which had emerged during the previous year but no sense of how these fragments might cohere. The piece felt fragile and precarious; we both talked about 'knowing something about what we were doing' in the rehearsal room but this would evaporate as soon as we then re-integrated into our family and work life. Over the past few weeks we have returned to our recent dreams and discovered two things: first, every dream in which Mary and I appear together references our adolesence in their 'tone'(we're discussing boyfriends, talking about nights out, worrying about getting pregnant), and second, each dream involves a betrayal of trust (Mary's too busy with her boyfriend to rehearse, I'm going out but haven't invited Mary). Most significant was a dream in which I had decided to give up on creating theatre and had begun a career in stand-up comedy. Worse than this, my routine centred around jokes at the expense of avant-garde theatre. The big decision a couple of weeks ago was to trust these prompts from our subconscious and deal with adolesence and betrayal as themes within the piece. We had no idea how these linked with motherhood or daughterhood but it has always been our practice to work ideas through in the studio as a means of testing their relevance. We think differently when we're 'doing'.

Amanda
www.famousanddivine.org