Stabat Mater

Visitors of Stabat Mater on Saturday 22 June can attend the festive event FRASC at NIGHT with their performance ticket.

A renewed acquaintance with the age-old rejected mother

interview with Janaina Leite

by Mendel Hardeman

Where does Stabat Mater come from?

The piece starts with a drawing of three people on a bed: my mother, myself, and my father. It’s unclear what’s going on between them. 

I more or less grew up in bars, a girl left to her own devices among drunk men by her father. Back home it was us three girls, plus father, mother and an ailing grandfather. I was the middle of the three, and my parents chose me to play the role of most-loved daughter. My father was drunk every day, and violent in the broadest sense of the word. I had a highly symbiotic relationship with him. My mother was mainly disgusted with him. It was an extremely troubled environment, marked by great sexual promiscuity. Total chaos and confusion. There are themes which haunted me for years, without me being able to say for sure what really happened, and what didn’t. My last piece, Conversations with my Father, is about this environment so full of violence, where love and loathing held equal sway.

For a long time, the relationship with my mother wasn’t a theme for me. I saw her as a resilient woman, who’d raised her children at great personal sacrifice. Until I became a mother myself, and suddenly this no longer felt quite right. The way she’d denied herself and given up her own life for three daughters and an alcoholic husband, as well as for her dependent father - suddenly I could no longer empathise with it. I was mainly appalled. Not at her, but at this kind of motherhood. What kind of mother might I be myself, with baggage like this?

In this moment of confusion, the process of Stabat Mater began. All appreciation I’d felt for my mother had disappeared. In Stabat Mater I try to reacquaint myself with her, and to make a new pact with the age-old rejected mother.

I realised that, in order to tell this story about that self-denying womanhood we call mother, I would have to take to the stage with her. The piece is about a legacy that is passed on from mother to daughter, and which is as old as the Virgin Mary. This is why I didn’t want a fellow actress onstage. ‘Mum, I want you. With your strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t matter that you’re not a professional actress. The vulnerability of your presence, which is so beautiful and strange, this will make the piece so much better than anything I could ever write myself.’ She’s a seventy-four year old woman with no education or understanding of theatre. But she never asked: what would I even do onstage? She just said yes.

She had no idea of what she was getting into then.

Because, apart from your mother and you, there’s no one else onstage?

I wanted a triangle: a daughter, a mother and a man. This man represents the men who attract us, and the men who rape us. His role is comparable to that of a figure in a line-up.

At one point I had the idea of asking a pornographic actor for this. Because they walk the line between this attraction and revulsion, just like certain men in our lives do.

In the piece you see how this idea slowly unfolds, until it turns into a sex scene directed by the mother and performed by the daughter and porn actor.

Such a scene was a problem, of course. That’s why it’s not about the scene itself, or about the filmed result, but rather the question: what will these three people do with this problem? As if we were doing a lab experiment. And whether it failed or proved to be a success, it would be equally interesting either way, because the problem itself was interesting.

The selection of the actor was also part of that, and was filmed in its entirety. It was quite something, after an hour-long pre-interview, to present men from the traditional porn world with the question whether they were willing to film a sex scene with me that my mother would direct.

We chose Paulo Cesar Moreira, who’s a porn celebrity in Brazil. We rehearsed for one day, and on day two, while recording, we got into a rather serious argument. The recording was completed, but when we were done he left immediately .

In hindsight I knew I’d been naive, and a bit frivolous as well. I’d approached pornography without realising it was a totally different universe, with very different agreements and expectations. It was a real culture clash. I’ve made two more pieces since about pornography and sex workers, because I realised there were greater depths in that theme than I’d ever thought.

But honestly I find my mother’s presence onstage far more obscene than the pornography. 

What makes her presence obscene?

The fact that the piece doesn’t provide answers to all kinds of questions. Is she a strong woman or an invisible woman? Is her relationship one of strength, or of violence? It feels obscene, because it fully reveals the theme’s internal contradiction, and that of the theatre too, and it isn’t resolved. The ending of the piece is unsatisfying, with ethical questions about my mother’s presence. It all remains open-ended: my relationship towards her, and also the question why she’s there in the first place. I feel that’s more obscene than the porn.

You know, my mother is there for very different reasons than I am. The main one is her love for me. That puts a knot in the story: it might easily end in self-denial in her motherly role again. And I don’t think Stabat Mater can resolve that. At the same time, she’s up there with a lightness I don’t have in me myself.

But this isn’t her life. She’d rather be back home with her dogs. But she does enjoy the touring.

This interview took place on 11 May 2024.

Mendel Hardeman is a filmmaker and composer.