Motherhood is a messy business, the German-born choreographer Frauke Requardt tells us in her new work. She has created Mothers from personal experience, and it’s an appropriately relentless piece, set to a nervy and eclectic recorded score. As the titular parent, we see Requardt run ragged by the demands of her offspring (adult dancers Neil Callaghan and Jacob Ingram-Dodd). Young children, we are reminded, are incontinent bundles of ego. Their fixations are plentifully indulged – oral, anal, genital, the full crapshoot – and at moments the stage is a skidpan of bodily fluids.
Mothers asks and answers the question: why would any woman put up with this shit? Requardt hangs her piece on two finely crafted trios, the first clothed (in flared slacks and hideous sweaters – thanks for those, Laura Rushton), the second naked, in which Requardt, Callaghan and Ingram-Dodd entwine with such intricate, slip-sliding intimacy that it’s impossible to tell whose limbs are whose. The first trio demonstrates the absolute and barrier-dissolving nature of biological interdependency; the second moves with calm authority from the personal to the universal.
The context couldn’t be more different from that of Frederick Ashton’s Monotones, but Requardt’s choreography shares the same sense of microcosm and macrocosm, of lunar ineluctability. Why the squalor of motherhood? Why the loss of self, the mindlessness and the vile plastic toys? Because the universe requires it, she tells us.
This is not a piece about love. It doesn’t, for one moment, presuppose notions such as “maternal instinct”. In a sense it’s a piece about everything except love, because only by getting love out of the way can Requardt root out the truths she’s after. Some of these are pretty opaque. For much of the piece – too much – we’re watching Callaghan and Ingram-Dodd dressed as giant toadstools toting giant, and disturbingly fungal, penises. Requardt’s reaction to their antics is an all-too-true bemusement at the sheer oddness of male infantile behaviour, but the sequence is a Freudian metaphor too far. Naked, the three of them tell us so much more.
