Backpages 26.4, Performance and the Maternal

We created our ‘Performance and the Maternal’ research project is order to investigate the intersections between performance studies and maternal studies. To date we have organised and hosted three research gatherings at the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, Edge Hill University and the University of South Wales. The research gatherings connected 36 scholars and artists and welcomed babies and children. The ‘Performance and the Maternal’ project is conceived as both collaborative and pragmatic, enabling us to bring together our research interests derived from our scholarly work and independent performance practices and our everyday lived experience. In this article we explore how to write with and in response to one another, across geographical and temporal spaces and enable the gaps to become generative rather than problematic. The format is designed to enable living and representing our maternal experiences. How to write and think together, and yet apart? How to stay focused? How to find time for research, demanding (yet loving) children and insistencies of family life? The correspondences that have made it into this final publication have been edited, re-written and written over in order to bring together our thoughts on performance and the maternal after our three initial research gatherings. A version of these letters was presented as a paper at the ‘Museum of Motherhood’ conference at Manhattan College in May 2016.