Re-Visiting Nursing Mother

Abstract

20-odd years ago, while still in the deep dark of mourning my mother’s death and nursing the infant daughter born 7 months afterward, I wrote an email to my dearest friend, Tami Spry, that opened: “It is time. My time is upon me, I can feel it quickening, some performance of mine...” That prescient utterance would become the opening lines of Nursing Mother—my first solo show performed in the Kleinau Theatre in 1998—that braided stories of my mother’s death and Hannah’s birth in order to critique the medical technologies that supersede women’s bodily authority and autonomy. Nursing Mother emerged from me at an historic juncture in my life as a newly tenured, newly motherless, mother of 2, and at an historic moment in my discipline as Performance Studies was grappling with the emergent form of autoethnography and “the politics of solo performance” as in the millenial of TPQ where Nursing Mother would appear. Looking back with the hindsight-insight of 20 years, I can see that Nursing Mother became my touchstone as an autoethnographic performance poet through an esthetic that would guide my solo work for 2 decades: specifically, a sustained, highly cadenced poetic text, structured into titled cantos; interlaced with interlocking imagery— preferably alliterative—staged around a single chair on a bare stage, used in as many different ways as I could choreograph. Nursing Mother has continued to nurture me as I have performed excerpts from the show, and 10 years ago, shared it here at QI, as the keynote performance. But it is the nature of memory to seek out new gestational cycles, to push repeatedly against the muscle of articulation, that narrative cervix through which autoethnography brings experience to matter and to meaning.