By using our voices, we mothers can become the authors of our city plans, our national plans, and our international policies to ensure that children’s need are prioritized and their rights protected.
Since in addition to touring The Mother Tour with MAU, I am professor of theatre at the University of Colorado, I presented a paper on The Mother Tour at an academic conference for a panel entitled “Performance in the Global City”.  Preparing for this I discovered some things about mothers and their roles in our cities across the globe that I’d love to share in the following excerpt from the paper.
I was drawn towards this session because of the compelling metaphor of city as text. In my work engaging mothers to see themselves as agents of change in all aspects of public life I thought of all the mothers with whom I have worked in various cities across the world. Nowhere in my travels has it seemed that the mother was a primary author of the text of the city. The storyscapes that tower above are concerned primarily with commerce, profit, and high level governance. Mothers with children in a bustling city often seem out of place and vulnerable. Mothers with whom I have worked who are in at-risk situations or living in poverty, and seem to be more victims of the city-story rather than participants in it. But in these workshops, this theatrical practice is instigating a shift in authorship as mothers rehearse using their voices to design their own versions of city and reality—one that supports their primary charges, the nurturing and rearing of children. But taking it even farther, to benefit children beyond their immediate circle of care, cities are the places where primarily policies and laws are created that impact nations. Mothers are also rehearsing to be authors of these decisions that determine how we allocate resources, resolve conflicts, and how we measure the impact of our actions.  Our aim is full public inclusion such that children around the world have access to health care, education, and safety and that we begin to measure our actions based on how they impact the world’s children.
During these workshops many connections are made; finding ways to sustain each other’s commitment to acting up on their concerns. This process requires mothers to re-imagine themselves and their role in civic participation. It requires the development of a public voice and a public self for mothers, who are historically private people within the inner circles of community. Mothers stepping into the public realm—effectively entering into the conversation of how policies are established, resources are allocated, conflicts resolved, and decisions are measured—has the potential to radically intervene in the shaping of the city, the nation, and the world. By embodying our voices we can bring that maternal, corporal wisdom to the building of the city as a strengthening agent that could be added to the cement of our city’s foundations, as we continually rebuild and seek to improve the structural integrity of our programs and policies that shape, fortify and characterize our cities.
