Portals

The Open Studio series is a part of a larger body of work that Mother Mother is dreaming into and gathering materials for called Mother Brings Herself Back To Life. The Open Studio is an experiment in sharing elements of the revival movements that have come to Mother Mother in her private, nighttime dance communions with other dancing mothers in public and virtual community spaces. In addition to developing content for the future soft-time performance installation Mother Brings Herself Back to Life, the Open Studio series gives Mother Mother practice in producing soft-time performances that have a hybrid collaborative-time (face to face) component as well. Mother Mother is deeply fascinated by how we can stretch, split, and fracture time. How can this one moment be realized as many moments? 

Mother Brings Herself Back To Life evolves as 4 concurrent movement constellations, each one existing inside a distinct time parallel along the continuum of Mother Mother’s being, where she turns to the dance to revive herself and her fertility after feeling like she has died or is dying. A central part of Mother Mother’s discovery explores this question: How am I able to still feel alive and access a vitality for living and dreaming in the midst of such turbulence and uncertainty of daily life as a multitudinous mothering entity? It’s the dance. It’s always the dance. 

Elemental is an experimental, soft-time, performance installation that inhabits pockets of possibility for a multitudinous mothering entity who is re/discovering the raw movements of life and her body soon after giving birth to her 5th child. Sourcing fragments of time, and attached to or in close physical proximity of one or more children at all times, the dancing mother activates everyday spaces as transient laboratories where she can dance, dream, and feel into the expansiveness of a world that will one day be big enough, and soft enough, to make space for all of her.

Black Mothers Birthing Everywhere is a visual prayer call with Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy. Black mothers are invited to share photos and stories of their moments of birthing in freedom. Black Mothers Birthing Everywhere will live as a freedom script + photo essay + story collage + soft-time practice portal.

Freedom scripts are communiographies and embodied expansions of the liberated hymns from Mother Mother’s ancestral mothers. Commonly referred to as “negro spirituals,” Mother Mother has reimagined these songs as freedom scripts, ancient mantras coded with the dream of liberation when her foremothers sang them long ago. As a dancing mother, she activates kinetic and textual communions within these sonic scriptures by singing them, and then dancing inside the frequencies they reveal. These are some of the movements and visual stories that are emerging.

The Daily Dancer is a collection of oral story activations set to fertile soundscapes curated by Mother Mother. These offerings encourage creators to amplify presence in their bodies and discovery new movements, narratives, and possibilities with the support of Mother Mother’s voice-guided dance practices.