Look At Me Now, Mummy

2015/2008

‘Charlotte Vincent is… one of the most important feminist artists working in Britain today.’
★★★★ Luke Jennings, The Observer, March 2015

Director/Choreographer Charlotte Vincent’s Look At Me Now, Mummy, is a comi-tragic one-woman show created with long-term Polish collaborator Aurora Lubos, eight months after giving birth to her first child.

Set in a dishevelled and chaotic kitchen, Look At Me Now, Mummy is an intimate, funny and moving portrait of a mother’s desire to look the part, whilst not really knowing what part it is that she is supposed to be playing. It’s about trial and error and theatrical failure, with a baby always crying somewhere in the distance.

Originally created in 2008, Look At Me Now, Mummy was restaged in 2015 as a 5-hour durational event / 50-minute production as part of 21 YEARS / 21 WORKS, a live and online collection of Artistic Director/Choreographer Charlotte Vincent’s film and production work that toured to Shoreditch Town Hall and Southbank Centre in London, Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry, Yorkshire Dance in Leeds and Brighton Festival 2015.

‘Lubos captures the exhausted, surreal derangement that comes from being a new mother… It’s superb performances such as these, as well as Vincent’s own choreography, that have ensured the company’s survival’
Judith Mackrell, The Guardian

‘Loved it! Look At Me Now, Mummy made be hold my breath!’
Audience Member March 2015

To order a DVD copy, please contact the VDT office.

Director's Notes

Look At Me Now, Mummy was made in late 2007, 8 months after Aurora happily gave birth to her first son. It’s a dark and intimate portrait of a woman tangled up in her own imagination, caught between conflicting roles as a performer and as a mother, never sure whether she should stay on or leave the stage.

Look At Me Now, Mummy reads like a series of unpredictable scenes from shows that will never be made, a number of fleeting, improvised ideas and that seem momentarily convincing, but don’t stack up to much. The work attempts to make things that are completely artificial try to appear natural. There is lots of space around each image. We are inviting an audience to see something so private.

Look At Me Now, Mummy is concerned with the choices a woman makes about making work or making babies, about being an artist or being a mother. It’s not representation, not an obvious story. The performer is dropping in and out of performance states, unsure of how to continue, or why to continue with the show.
It could be read as a game that a childless woman invents to pass the time.
Or a tragi-comic portrayal of a woman who has lost a baby.
Or a heart-rending portrait of someone yearning for the possibility of having a child.
Or a woman on the edge of giving up.
Or a lonely performer questioning her need for the show to go on.

Photos

Context

Made in 2008, Look At Me Now, Mummy was originally co-commissioned by Danceworks UK (South Yorkshire), The Point, (Eastleigh), Lakeside Arts Centre (Nottingham) and The Tron Theatre (Glasgow) and funded by Arts Council England.

Links
Still Alive by Aurora Lubos
Aurora Lubos Vimeo channel

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