2 For further details of the Festival see the collaborative essay by myself, Gerry, Harris and Lena, Šimić, ‘“It is Good to Look at One's Own Shadow”: A Women's International Theatre Festival and Questions for International Feminism’, in Elaine, Aston and Geraldine, Harris, eds., Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 169–89Google Scholar. This also details the beginning festival moment, as I develop it here, about rethinking the maternal.

3 For details of the Magdalena project see Susan, Bassnett, Magdalena: International Women's Experimental Theatre (Oxford: Berg, 1989)Google Scholar.

4 In Looking for the Meaning Adams storytold the death of her mother as a way of coming to terms with her own experience of ageing, while Rasmussen's performance looks back over the life of her elderly mother who is now suffering from dementia.

5 Eve, Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 1Google Scholar. Briefly, through a discussion of affect, pedagogy and performativity Sedgwick argues for a ‘step to the side of antiessentialism’, for the need to think beyond the versions of what we already know, or what we have already learned to look for. Sedgwick asks what we might be able to see, learn or think ‘otherwise’ if we are prepared to relax our grip on ‘the hygiene of current antiessentialism’ (p. 111) or are prepared to loosen up on the anxiety of absolutely, resolutely needing to be antiessentialist in our thinking and theorizing.

6 Ibid., p. 8.

7 Jill, Dolan, ‘Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian Performative”‘, Theatre Journal, 53 (2001), pp. 455–79, here pp. 456–9Google Scholar.

8 At each point in the performance that this detail is revealed it is accompanied by an image on the screen of a child's eyes, peering out of a basket, a child taken to market whose gaze looks anxiously back at the ‘viewer’. See Anna, Yen, Chinese Take Away, in Don, Batchelor, ed., 3 Plays by Asian Australians (Brisbane: Playlab Press, 2000), pp. 32–71Google Scholar, Scene 5, p. 46 and Scene 21, p. 66.

9 See Scene 10, ‘Mother Arrives in Australia’, Chinese Take Away, pp. 51–2.

10 Yen, Take Away, Scene 20, p. 62.

11 Yen, Take Away, Scene 22, p. 69.

12 Her fight is physically embodied as a struggle between ‘warrior woman’ and ‘crying child’, performed through physical movements taken from the Wushu Sword form. See directions for Take Away, Scene 12, p. 53.

13 Carolyn, Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986)Google Scholar. Steedman's seminal account examines the way in which her working-class mother's life shaped her childhood, and, in particular, ways in which her childhood perceptions were coloured by feelings of being unwanted: ‘There was nothing we could do to pay back the debt of our existence. “Never have children dear,” she said; “they ruin your life” (Landscape, p. 17).

14 Julia, Kristeva, About Chinese Women (London: Marion Boyars, 1986; first published 1974), pp. 37–8Google Scholar. ‘Smug polymorphism’ could, for example, be taken as a way of characterizing an earlier (second-wave) phase of cultural feminist theatre-making whose aesthetics, composition and practice were largely concerned with ‘translating’ ideas, sourced by French feminist theory, into a practice that imagined a ‘return’ to the pre-Oedipal or Imaginary Mother.

15 Kristeva, About Chinese Women, p. 38. To this I would also add the more recent general criticism of Kristeva's approach to knowing ‘about Chinese women’ that Sarah Ahmed presents in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). Ahmed's caution is that in About Chinese Women, where Kristeva applies an approach that relies on becoming a stranger to oneself, the risk is that one might create a new ‘universal’: a ‘new community of the “we” is implicitly created. If we are all strangers (to ourselves), then nobody is’ (Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 73).

16 See, for example, Elaine Aston, ‘Making a Spectacle Out of Herself: Bobby Baker's Take a Peek!’, European Journal of Women's Studies, 11 (August, 2004), pp. 277–94.

17 In Scene 14 Yen tells the story of the marriage resisters, women from the silk factories who formed all-female societies that vowed not to marry. ‘It was said that if a Marriage Resister was forced by her family to wed, she would sew herself into her underclothes on the wedding night’ (Yen, Take Away, p. 55).

18 In a scene in which Anna enacts one of her best memories of her father, an occasion when he took the family to see a Chinese acrobatic troupe, she gives a performance of ‘The Other Anna Yen’. Yen explains that she was told about another performer called Anna Yen by a woman researching British music hall. All that was known about her was: ‘Anna Yen, three eggs on a Chop stick’ (Take Away, Scene 16, p. 58). This ‘other’ Anna Yen is presented by Yen as playing the English music hall, performing a bawdy, lively, raucous routine. Then she stops performing, marries an Englishman and disappears into an ‘English pastoral landscape’: ‘I was so very proud of my children. They didn't look Oriental’ (p. 59). ‘It was a quiet life’, the other Anna Yen concludes, as ‘[h]er vanity case suddenly opens and china plates and cups spill out, breaking noisily’ (p. 59). The Gestus of the (feminine) vanity case that spills and breaks its (domestic) china indexes the violent containment that operates in the name of mother.

19 SuAndi, The Story of M, in SuAndi, ed., 4 For More (Manchester: Black Arts Alliance, 2002), pp. 1–18, here p. 16.

20 SuAndi, The Story of M, p. 18.

21 See, for example, Ahmed's chapter ‘Knowing Strangers’ in Strange Encounters, pp. 55–74.

22 Coco, Fusco, ed., The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. xiv–xvGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid., p. xiv.

24 Specifically Fusco writes: ‘As cultural theorist Hortense Spillers so eloquently points out, the annihilation of family structure, the mutilation, and the severing of the body from will are real traumas at the root of black experience in the New World’ (Bodies, p. xiv).

25 Judith, Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 19Google Scholar; added emphasis.

26 Ibid., p. 23.

27 There is no published text of Toothless. I am indebted to Kazuko Hohki for a video recording of the show.

28 One of Hohki's current performance projects, for example, is exploring Japanese women's obsession with Wuthering Heights, which she has been researching through a ‘Time and Space’ Fellowship held with us at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University. It is through the fellowship arrangements that I have been getting to know Hohki's work.

29 SuAndi, The Story of M, p. 17.

30 One of the ways that Hohki presents this is through the narration of her flight back to Japan for the funeral, and the comic telling of the various obstacles and delays attendant on international travel that variously militated against her attempts to reach her mother's body.

31 Undoing Gender, p. 23.

32 Ibid., p. 24.

33 Hohki experiences an urgent need to see her dead mother's body, to see her for one last time. Yet when she gets to see the body it is not how she expects it to be: the body has no life, is cold to touch, has no presence.

34 See note 28 on getting to know Hohki's work. SuAndi has also forged friendship and research links with us at Lancaster, while the possibility of knowing about Yen's performance arose out of the Transit Festival, Magdalena Project network.

35 Eve, Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 174Google Scholar.

36 Ibid., p. 149.