★★☆☆☆
Frauke Requardt is a British-based choreographer with a taste for the offbeat. Her latest work, choreographed with her fellow performers Neil Callaghan and Jacob Ingram-Dodd, is a sometimes surreal and outright wacky non-narrative dance performance about becoming a mother. Despite its all-embracing title, the hour-long production is by no means definitive about Requardt’s experience of motherhood or the subject in general. Her take on it is admirably non-sanitised and unsentimental, and flecked with some simple yet striking physicality and imagery. Yet it’s also marred by random flat moments and, right up until the last scene, Requardt’s own empathy-negating lack of vulnerability.
Set to a laidback rock soundtrack, Mothers lurches about from the get-go, with Requardt declaring: “I am Mother!” before slipping into a slow, entangling trio with her co-stars. The two males are identified as adult dancers, but they become something more akin to squabbling, overgrown stand-ins for Requardt’s children. At one point, turning her upside down, the men seem to be mopping the floor with her. Stripping off their clothes, they repeatedly give flopping birth to themselves through one of the half-dozen or so oversized building blocks that are among the designer Hannah Clark’s key set pieces. Adorned with pictures and letters of the alphabet, these blocks, when properly placed, spell out words — including the show’s title.
It’s a clever visual gag. There are other bits of ingenuity, such as the kazoos that Requardt and the men use while charging around like rampaging dinosaurs — an effective metaphor for the bawling chaos that can come with day-to-day parenting. Clark’s other important design contribution is a pair of giant, red-topped mushrooms that also serve as comically phallic costumes for the men. By the end everyone is naked, rolling and sliding in a dim light across a stage flooded with faux urine. Watching them I couldn’t help feeling that it was far more important for Requardt to have made Mothers than for me to have seen it.
Touring to June 17