Mothers of Time took place on a farm, and explored the effect on the body of the drudgery of traditional women's work.
Mothers of Time was a performed installation that took place on a farm in central Massachusetts at a site that included fields, woods, a pond and a stream. The piece began at dawn, and the audience began arriving at 6:30 AM, staying as long as they wished, until the event ended at twilight. I developed and performed it with Joan Gale, Mari Novotny-Jones and Sarah Hickler.
This was a durational piece, exploring the literal effect on the body – both physically and psychically – of the drudgery of traditional women’s work. As we worked, we considered issues of mortality. The event was not a staged, theatrical event, but rather a kind of ritual that was intended to result in some kind of transformational change within each of us. Each performer selected activities that carried personal meaning, and each of us confronted our own fears about death, in an effort to reach another level of understanding. The effect of exhaustion, boredom, and the concentrated focus on the nature of our own deaths was heightened by the extended time.
The images evolved over hours, so that the audience was observing a process of the images transforming. Early in the day the tasks were seemingly idyllic: sweeping paths across the field, gathering baskets of flowers, carrying buckets of water to fill kettles and water gardens, harvesting herbs, tending fires, preparing food, dyeing long lengths of fabric in a large kettle over a fire and drying it in the fields. As the day progressed, the quality of the activities began to change. The work became harder as we became more exhausted. The scale of the tasks became impossible, such as sorting a large mound of seeds, removing thorns from a hedge of wild roses, and spinning heaps of fleece.
The audience functioned as witness. They were requested to remain silent and refrain from assisting the performers, but were free to wander throughout the site. They could watch the activities from a distance, or as close as they wished. The performers talked to themselves as they worked, so that the audience had to come very close if they wanted to hear what they were saying. Occasionally a performer would talk with an audience member briefly and privately, on their concerns about time and mortality.
Maintaining silence on the performance site engendered a state of contemplation. The opportunity for the audience to engage in personal reflection was heightened by the privacy of the individual’s experience and by the intimate nature of any contact that they had with the performers. In a sense, their relationship to the piece parallels one’s relationship to history. Seen from a distance it appears simple and idyllic. We can never grasp it completely, because too much knowledge has been lost and buried. We can only ever catch glimpses, or hear fragments, of the past.
The arc of the day was a gradual descent to the grave. And as the day waned, the pressure of completing all our work before the end added a kind of tension, an anxiety or despair. The piece culminated during a thunderstorm and drenching downpour. Gathered with the audience around the fire in the circle of the meadow, we completed our final actions, burning the thread that had been spun all day, burying everything that remained, and laying paths of ash and seeds to the graves. Finally, we went to finish digging our graves, naked and shivering, in the pouring rain.
