Becoming a mother brings radical changes and challenges in women’s lives while society's idealised image of motherhood often overlooks the more difficult aspects that many women have to face. The performance combines unflinching objectivity with liberating irony to reveal these, often taboo realities.
What does it mean and what does it entail physically, emotionally and financially to become a mother (in Romania) today? Oana Rusu and Alice Monica Marinescu's captivating, energetic and outspoken duo questions narratives, compares popular views and realities they encounter through personal testimonies, reactions of the immediate and wider environment, external and internal expectations.
'It is also stated at one point that «we are destroying the reputation of motherhood», and indeed, MATERN does not – it may seem - campaign for motherhood [...] Dramaturgically, the counter-campaign is still a success, because in the end, the undeniable love washes over the performance and catharsis is born.’ Bea Kovács, Szinhaz.hu, 2021
Partners: Replika Educational Theater Center, National Dance Center Bucharest.
Special thanks to Elena Irimia, Ioana Ilie, Carolina Huncu, Adina Marincea, Mihaela Michailov, Kazuhide Miyashita, Veda Popovici, David Schwartz, Yannis, Zen Mommy Village, Veda Popovici.
Alice Monica Marinescu is a performing artist, active in the independent theater scene in Bucharest. She works as a performer, writer, and director in political theater- and community art projects. She coordinated creative writing- and theater workshops in various communities and co-organized several editions of the Political Theater Season (Stagiune de Teatru Politic) in Bucharest.
She supports a politically engaged art type and trusts in theater's power to challenge the establishment and trigger social change. She is a single mother, a feminist, and believes in the motto „the personal is political”.
