Mother’s Blood

Jacob Boehme with Keith Deverell and Isaac Drandic (VIC, QLD & TAS)

Mother’s Blood is a contemporary urban drama played out online and IRL about three generations of an Aboriginal family, exploring political change across decades, online identities and technology in dramatic storytelling.

Jacob Boehme is a Melbourne born and raised artist of the Narungga and Kaurna Nations, South Australia. He is a multidisciplinary theatre maker and choreographer for stage, screen, large-scale events and festivals.

This project is the second in a series of works around the theme of blood. Mother’s Blood highlights the experiences of Aboriginal women living with HIV, alongside themes of contemporary Aboriginal identities, sexuality, family loyalty and community. The process brings Jacob back together with artists Isaac Drandic and Keith Deverell, extending their artistic collaboration seeded during the making of acclaimed performance work, Blood on the Dance Floor.

Creative Team: Writer and creator – Jacob Boehme; Dramaturg and director – Isaac Dandric; Video artist – Keith Deverell; Performers – Kamarra Bell-Wykes, Chenoa Deemal, Kiah Cruse (image)

This project is supported by Native Earth Performing Arts (Canada), the Australia Council for the Arts Resilience Fund and Creative Victoria. It is produced by Insite Arts.

Image: Jacob Boehme

Published on

25 September

Live+Local

Adhocracy In Conversation panel: Racism, whiteness and transforming representation in the arts
Friday September 18 at 8pm

Readings/artists-in-conversation (with Takatāpui)
Friday September 25 at 7pm

Residency Outcome

Aboriginal Australians are enthusiastic and avid users of social media. In 2014 more than 60% of the remote Aboriginal population were on Facebook, 20% more than the average Australian community. Social media benefits Aboriginal Australians in several ways: identity, power and control, education, culture and connection and is an opportunity for young Aboriginal people to extend and explore their identities online.*

Mother’s Blood is a new text-based performance work which explores how we marry the digital, online and imaginary worlds of each character to live action in the theatre. The team have worked remotely across 3 states (VIC/QLD/TAS) via zoom, a couple hours a week over several weeks.

We have focussed on developing the online world of 15-year old, Sarah, and discovered we have created an extremely voyeuristic, potentially dangerous and uncomfortable space for audiences and the safety of the characters that inhabit this world.

In the larger work, Sarah’s online world will be delivered to the audience via projection in the space and/or directly through their own private hand held devices, which brings up questions of the role of the audience and how complicit YOU become in the story that unfolds.

As an exercise in writing for performance, creating an online world for the character of Sarah has opened up a rabbit hole of fine details and complexities in the development of the character, which has also provided the team with an opportunity to indulge in pure joy and absurdity ie: What does the choice of GIF say about a character?

We also ask:
How many narratives can we flood these devices/platforms with before we lose clarity of story?
Why use technology to tell this story?
How does the use of technology and social media platforms create more tension for the audience?
How can we use these platforms (Facebook, Tik Tok, Messenger, Instagram etc) with live dialogue to create humour, conflict, surprise, dread?
What bits of narrative information come from what source? What is the logic behind it? How does the use of technology make the audience question their role as either witness or voyeur?

*The following content contains coarse language, adult themes and racist language which may be triggering for some people*

*Aboriginal use of social media, Creative Spirits https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/media/aboriginal-use-of-social-media

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Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.