Mother Hen

In Mother Hen,  Lisaboa Houbrechts delves into her mother’s family lineage. She attempts to crack the code of the genetic lottery that carved a strange, cruel path through different generations of women. Why are so many women in the family condemned to the convent, hidden away and silenced? She unfolds her family story through fragments of anecdotal scenes, extracts from medical files, and dance and music where words fail. Houbrechts creates a world of female intimacy, repressed sexual identity, medical coercion, binary thinking, heightened spirituality, and the eternal question of reproduction and fertility. Who bleeds, and who does not? 

These generations of women appear on stage themselves: older dancers alongside girls and young women, dancers and actors, past and present colliding in the same space. Together, they explore how the small, personal history of a family is interwoven with the larger whole: the intimate with the monumental, the personal with the political, the past with the present.