Fatherland/Motherland

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on FATHERLAND/MOTHERLAND at the Arches Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 28.4.12
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4 stars ****

WHEN NIC GREEN first burst onto the Arches scene a few years ago, with her remarkable Trilogy, it was clear that there was a fierce new creative intelligence on the block. It wasn’t only that Green was a powerful choreographer and dancer. She also had a story to tell about the persistence of patriarchy in a supposedly post-feminist world; and she was fearless in exploring new means of making theatre, using documentary material and huge teams of volunteer performers.

Her latest show is a diptych exploring themes of fatherhood and motherhood; and the boldness of the contrast between the two elements reflects Green’s restless creative energy. Fatherland is a solo movement piece – with live sound created by three male drummers – which reflects on Green’s own relationship with her absent Scottish father. There is some recorded dialogue, in which the men in the audience play father to Nic Green’s daughter; there are quiet moments of poetic monologue and song. Most striking, though, is Green’s deconstruction through movement – first in a man’s suit, and then almost naked, with woad-like blue markings on her body – of the very idea of this absent Scottish father; the drums thump, she sings a Braveheart marching song, but the man himself remains resolutely absent.

Motherland, by contrast, is a kind of staged oratorio in which twenty volunteer women – dressed mermaid-like in rustling blue paper skirts – sing, yell, move and whisper their way through an astonishing vocal score created by Green with Daniel Padden, Becki Gerrard and the company, reflecting a series of encounters and epiphanies among a group of women. There are old films of childbirth; and at the centre of the event sits a heart-achingly beautiful baby boy with his mother, playing with a pine-cone, bursting with new life, in a reminder of the oldest and most powerful human diptych of all.

ENDS ENDS