Lisa Stiegler whispered her anger into the microphone for several minutes. The anger at this powerlessness, having to decide now, child yes or no. About the fact that family and work are not so easy to reconcile in Germany. About stupidity and intolerance. And about this injustice. “If it’s injustice, then at least for everyone.” This sentence fits. It is not so important who came up with this idea. It could be from any of the 22 women who were entitled “(Not) Mothers!” for the evening in the Marstall. was questioned. Her anger was bundled at the end, Stiegler breathes it across the stage, by no means harmless, the basic feeling is rather seething.
Being a woman, being a mother, being a trans woman, not being a mother, having or not having children, the relationship with one’s own mother, pregnancy, the desire to have children, abortion, unequal pay for women and men – all of these topics are dealt with by “(Not)Mothers !” away. At the end of June, the US Supreme Court overturned abortion rights. In Germany, paragraph 218 still criminalizes abortion, and the ban on advertising abortions in medical practices has only just been abolished. The question of how freely women in our society can decide whether they want to become mothers or not is undoubtedly a burning one. In 2018, the Canadian author Sheila Heti gave the debate a new, more self-confident tone with her book “Motherhood”. This can now also be felt in the Marstall.
In the ensemble of the Residenztheater, Lisa Stiegler, Barbara Horvath, Marie Gimpel, Friederike Meisel, Sara Dec and DJ Theresa “BiMän” Bittermann had forced the topic on themselves. They developed a questionnaire and had it answered by 19- to 94-year-olds – including themselves. They collected 22 views and recorded the voices. They are the material on which the evening is based: personal experiences, opinions. There is no philosophical superstructure, no meta-level, no analysis of statistics. It has become simple listening, documentary listening theater so to speak.
Instead, the stage in the Marstall is dominated by a tree-like framework to which horn loudspeakers are attached. The voices are now emanating from them, sometimes from here, sometimes from there. Sometimes Stiegler, Horvath and Bittermann also speak the texts on stage – confidently even after an interruption due to an emergency in the audience that went off lightly. They then give the utterances a body. Occasionally they also dance, but mostly they unscrew or screw on the loudspeakers, redistribute them in the room, for whatever reason.
“(Not) mothers!” is a status report. The thoughts are not terribly new, they are not a feminist overwriting of a text thought up in an intellectual lounge. This comes straight from the gut, which is why the evening thrives on the urgency with which the subject is brought up. It is a legitimate concern, a contribution to the discussion, fed by the power of the stage.