The title of the performance is a reference to the American reality show Dance Moms, which focuses on child dancers and behaviour of their mothers as they observe their competing kiddies. The relationship between mother and child is probably the most intimate form of connection – universal and permanent. That is why we try to recreate it in othe relations: patchwork families, queer homes or trib groups. Each refers to the figure of female guardia of the hearth, whom no one can leave.
In the mother-child relationship, a phenomenon of physical kinship dominates; it spills out of the private sphere and becomes visibly political. It is not only womanhood observed through the prism of motherhood that is political, but also the figure of woman in post-reproductive age, which is being permanently erased from patriarchal culture. Mother’s desire and body become invisible, stepping aside to make room for child’s life.
In DANCE MOM by Wojciech Grudziński, the scrupulous and sensitive economist with forty years of service, daughter of an army officer and an accountant, will dance with three artists, her own son being among them. Family stories and autobiographical motives recalled during the performance will be th narrative about mother and son, goddess and idol, the part separating from the whole, beginning and ending, the conscious and the unconscious, the young and the old. We shall recall the elements that life consists of in the performance, reach to the sources of fertility to look at the time slipping away, we shall draw the first story from the relation between mother and son – comic, trivial and amazing, wonderful and useful, smart and stupid.
There are no inappropriate or maladjusted bodies in our “family of misfits”. There are no boundaries of performative freedom, there is no shame, embarrassment, “too much”; there is only the clearance of canals – entirely as in birthing. A mistake in dancing becomes an element of choreography and the canon of beauty is completely unchained from social rigors and cultural conventions. DANCE MOM is a celebration of kinship and a dance of derivative bodies; a dance of motherhood without children and children without mothers; of men, who want to be mothers, and mothers who want to be children. The immersion of the world in fairytale, song, canzona and ballad. The opera in a Warsaw four-room apartment. It is also a praise of the heritage of women choreographers, whom we call mothers of dance and whom we cannot forget.
Do you remember the myth about filthy Baubo, who amused Demeter, desperate after the death of her daughter?
I was born to make you happy (Britney Spears)
