Vital ingredients

From the beginning of this process we have been working with a number of 'strands' that have informed our working process. The work for this new piece, The Day My Mother Forgot About Me, began with Amanda's experience on the 'biscuit tin', which she has written about below. This was 'the day her mother forgot about her'. On that day she watched the TV, watching films, one of which she remembers was Great Expectations. We began to think about films, and we decided to watch a number of films that explored Mother and Daughter relationships in their narratives. This strand of the 'films' has provided us with narratives and roles that we perform in the piece as well as some action that initially derived from the films, these have transformed as we work through this material creatively, and as we ask ourselves what are we doing with this material within the context of the piece we are making.
The filmic strand was also an aesthetic we wanted to explore in the piece.
Initially, we also decided to write down our stories about particular experiences of going to the cinema. Amanda wrote about her experience of going to watch The Go-between when she was 14, I wrote about how I had gone to watch In The Realm of the Senses with a new boyfriend (a big mistake), and also about watching The Wizard of Oz in a makeshift cinema, where I fight broke out during the film and everything grounded to a halt.
We also have the strand of our dreams, reoccuring dreams that run parallel to our creative process, we listen to these and they provide us with rich information and ideas about the work we are making. A dream about a 'secret theatre' that I would find once I had moved in to new houses kept reooccuring, we both had dreams about undiscovered rooms, in basements, behind other rooms. The secret theatre has stuck, this has provided us with ideas with regards to the 'world' that exists on stage.
This also links up with the strand of 'secrets and silences', the idea that memories and past experiences are transmitted from mother to daughter, unconsciously and in silence. These experiences might have been traumatic, they are not talked about as if experiences that are 'stuck', moments arrested in time and not integrated into the narratrives of these women's lives. They are often frightening, and we disussed how something about the relationships in the family changes and shifts in these moments; they have a destabilising affect.
Another strand is of adolescence, this theme emerged in our dreams and also in the film 'The Dreamers', where a group of adolescents who are 'left' by their parents, forgotten in the house, begin to transgress sexaul boundaries and 'test' limits. Recently, when talking on the phone about the work and our frustrations with it, we started joking about the frustration of not knowing what we are doing with this piece. We were talking about the photoshoot for our marketing and Amanda joked about how she could only see 'Marnie' in her nice suit; a role I play, in these photos, as she, as yet, had no defined role. We realised that we had not discovered what our relationship to each other was on stage, so it was unravelling as a series of monlogues with little interaction. We have always enjoyed the 'play' between us as performers and this has been a very pleasureable part of the making of work, this was missing in this process; an interchange of shifting energies on stage. We then decided that we would draw on this 'adolescent' strand to begin to explore our relationship to each other on stage. Once we had done this, we could conceive of eachother on stage together, and when we worked that weekend the play was there. From this we could begin to make the material for this new piece. The interplay between us as performers was a vital ingredient or catalsyst to the work, this was evident in the dreams we had been having, and once we had decided to work with this a vast range of possibilties opened up to us. We were able to find ways of constantly shifting this energy between us and a lot of new material has emerged from this.