Motherbaby

‘Everyone relates to a mother’, thinks theatre duo Marieke&Sophia. Together with actress and theatre-maker Kristien de Proost, they explore the mother-daughter relationship. As (young) women who will (or will not) one day become mothers, they discover their own expectations and fears around motherhood.   

Through popular culture, they expose the brutal clichés surrounding the mother figure: From the Holy Mother-Madonna, through the evil stepmother to the maneater. What are we trying to hide when we burden the mother figure with our expectations of unconditional love? And why does she become the scapegoat when society fails?  

The result of their research is Motherbaby, a ‘DIY musical’, in which the actors sing about the relationship between mother and child in all its contradictory facets. Accompanied by pianist and musician Alan van Rompuy, they intermix homemade songs - a kind of new lullaby or folk tale - with spoken text. Oscillating between suffocating love and tender aggression, they aim to break free from the constraints of these (societal) roles. 

In just a handful of sentences, the trio exposes the oppressive dynamics and destructive dependency between mothers and daughters. 

— Charlotte De Somviele, Etcetera  

• The leitmotif throughout the work of Marieke&Sophia is a fascination with the (female) body and the imagination and meaning ascribed to it. They go looking for the cultural scripts that mould and discipline our bodies, and the possible opposition within those scripts. They previously created Guilty of Love, a piece about the imagination of the raped body and the clichés about it. In Motherbaby, Kristien De Proost joins them on the stage. She is a theatre-maker and actress, who has worked at, among other venues, Bronks, Het Toneelhuis, and Victoria, and was part of the artistic heart of Tristero from 2004 to 2017. She is currently focusing on writing, solo work, and encounters with new artists.