Abstract
Let Down (2018) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women's experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public. Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who dance alongside a digitally transposed and augmented soundscape of sonic aspects of maternal experience, and improvise to the live sounds produced by infants in the audience. The work responds to a ‘quietening’ of maternal corporeality in some Western societies through a feminist dramaturgy of sonic disruption that refigures intermedial relations between sound and movement in performance to make unheard experience sensible. Attending to the complex sociopolitical and affective terrain that informed the work's creation, I discuss how a methodology of ‘quietening’ developed during the choreographic process generated space for a dialogue between private and public spheres of experience. I propose that the methodological concept of quietening offers both an alternative approach to choreographies of affect, and a critical framework for questioning representations of socially ‘quietened’ corporealities.
Highlights
Let Down ( ) is a practice-as-research (PaR) dance performance that communicates women’s experiences of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, a jurisdiction with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, due, in part, to the social stigma attached to breastfeeding in public
Choreographed in collaboration with a composer and social scientists, Let Down is a duet for two lactating women who dance alongside a digitally transposed and augmented soundscape of sonic aspects of maternal experience, and improvise to the live sounds produced by infants in the audience
The work responds to a ‘quietening’ of maternal corporeality in some Western societies through a feminist dramaturgy of sonic disruption that refigures intermedial relations between sound and movement in performance to make unheard experience sensible
Summary
Scholarship at the intersection of maternal studies and psychosocial theory has highlighted the problematic positioning of the mother within much psychoanalytical and philosophical thought as a figure who must be rejected in the process of subjectivity formation. The mother becomes, as Lisa Baraitser suggests, ‘a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her’.16 Countering this disappearance, Let Down placed mothers’ experiences centre stage in a duet for two lactating women – dancer and choreographer Paula O’Reilly and myself – that was in dialogue with both live and recorded sound and voice. The mother becomes, as Lisa Baraitser suggests, ‘a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her’.16 Countering this disappearance, Let Down placed mothers’ experiences centre stage in a duet for two lactating women – dancer and choreographer Paula O’Reilly and myself – that was in dialogue with both live and recorded sound and voice. Barbara Browning, following her own experience of breastfeeding, and writing about the significance of breastmilk in Afro-Brazilian curative dances, notes the ‘insufficiency, the meagreness of individual experience in grappling with political questions’ related to the topic of breastfeeding, and the need for an understanding of ‘the fluidity of cultural forms, as well as alternative models for understanding literal bodily fluids’.17 Embracing this fluidity, and a desire to ‘move through and beyond one’s own embodied perspective’,18 the development of the work’s articulation of a quietening included verbatim excerpts from interviews conducted by sociologist Maria Herron with both breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding mothers across the island of Ireland and the UK.. Creating a performance of silenced maternal corporeality engages in what Uri McMillan argues to be a ‘sonic of dissent’, which, in its voicing of ordinarily concealed experience, produces ‘a form of embodied knowledge that momentarily trouble[s]’ existing narratives and ‘distinct circuits of spectatorship and performance’.21 Let Down’s soundscape employed this dissensual sonic approach to communicate mothers’ often concealed or untold affective experiences of public breastfeeding and breastmilk pumping, which can be, as Maggie Nelson suggests, a ‘sharply private activity ... that is physically and emotionally challenging’, yet a necessary one for breastfeeding women who wish to (or must) continue to labour across both private and public spheres of their lives. Through processes of transposition, digital augmentation and amplification, the piece created a sonic environment for the spectator that drew attention to both the corporeal labour required to breastfeed, and the contradictory societal expectations that women should breastfeed, but that this labour be kept silent and out of sight, especially in public
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