Children of silence

Iben Nagel Rasmussen, perhaps more than any other of her colleagues from Odin Teatret, characterises her performances through a strong, self-conscious and direct exploration of her work as a direct consequence of who she herself is. This was particularly evident in the two performances she presented here last week as part of the Malta Summer Arts Festival.

She rounded up Wednesday's performance of White as Jasmin reciting verses from acclaimed Danish poet Halfdan Rasmussen, also her father, commenting that she was saying them in her mother's voice. This was an allusion to an initial moment in the performance where she narrated an encounter with an old friend of hers who commented that her voice sounded exactly like her mother's, disappointing her in her expectations of having significantly changed her voice through training. Thus, in her final moment of a performance which took her through the trajectory of her voice's development as she demonstrated the shifts and developments she took it through in the various phases of Odin Teatret's work, she acknowledged that this journey is but a journey of herself, a journey which does not negate her roots but rather celebrates them in who she is.

With this understanding, the performances presented in Malta this July complemented each other, strengthening each other in the heightened understanding they allowed of the performer, Iben, herself.

In Ester's Book performed on Thursday, backed by a three-faced cream screen, seated in the front left corner of the designated shape, Iben performed her mother Ester, accompanied by Uta Motz who, in the front right corner with her back to the audience, offered a voice to represent Iben's own in the dialogue with her mother, and the rich musical texture of the violin. The performance was still and therefore potentially a disappointment to those intrigued by the incredible physical strength of Iben's body, but in its stillness offered a physical strength that was equally powerful in carrying the intense emotional weight of the performance dramaturgy.

Iben sat at the typewriter whose sound seems to have characterised her childhood, referenced in both performances presented. Against the backdrop of the images relayed of the social context in which Ester and Halfdan met and brought up their children, as well as images of their family life together, Iben spoke her mother's words which she extracted from The Book of Seed written during her pregnancy carrying Iben. The words carried the hope of parents as they strove to create goodness in the harshness of the occupation and war that was hitting them at the time. Interspersed with these words was the dialogue between mother and daughter that happened later when Ester, suffering from Alzheimer's, was resident in a respite home, and both she and her daughter were moved with the strength to deal with this. Ester longed for home; Iben both supported her mother and refused her mother's continual plea to come and live with her. Both continued to search for home and belonging, for a sense of who each of them is. Beginning with the question "where does my mother come from?", she ends singing the words:

"I call you my beloved
And chain you to a seed
Tonight the cold roams blindly
Tomorrow the thaw will begin
And the seed shall grow
And the tree shall die."

The mother and the daughter's spirit and history continue to be intertwined. This is a performance about Iben, as much as it is about Ester; it is a performance that carries the words and the spirit of both. If we all could pay such tribute to the mothers and women in our lives!