MOTHERTONGUE
MotherTongue was a collection of 5 different, bilingual one person shows, for one person audiences. The actors stage? A box.
Over the course of 4 months I lead 5 actors in a search for community and story. Each actor conducted an interview in their respective mother tongues with at least one expat in Denmark, who outside of this project was a complete stranger to them that they would not have met with otherwise. From these conversations we started to find threads of each cultural identity, their struggles and successes with moving their lives to Copenhagen, their similarities and their uniqueness. We worked hard on weaving together the threads and created 5 individual pieces which carried the stories we discovered, in a unique and abstract adaptation.
Each performer offered the show both in English and in their respective Mother Tongues, and handed the control of which language over to the audience.
There was laughter, joy, shock, and even tears shared in the boxes between actor and audience, and we witnessed such childlike wonder upon people exiting the boxes. We received such an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for this project and we anticipate remounting it at a later date.
This project wouldn't have been possible without the help and generosity of ST:ART, Sydhavn Teater, Tuborg fondet, and Theatre Replacement.
MotherTongue is based on Theatre Replacement's BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience. They have been so generous to allow us to play, experiment, and build upon their work. For more information on their work, please visit theatrereplacement.org