Freya's work stems from a belief that music can reach out into the everyday and give voice to our communities in all their facets and variations. With a focus on women, she was inspired to find something that could cross cultures and borders and that was not made obsolete through age, language, belief or identity. In its first iteration, this has led her to examine MotherDaughter: that every woman on the planet is a daughter and has a mother.
The work is informed and inspired by the women making up our wider community and was collected through a series of questionnaire responses. Using the concept of the Mitochondrial Eve, the piece explores the topics surrounding what it is to be a woman using the power of the voice. It seeks to explore womanhood through the eyes of contemporary women, their mothers and their mothers before them.
People did not need to be mothers or have been born daughters to take part in this research (just to identify as a woman) and women did not need to have a close or long relationship with their mothers. Every story, individual viewpoint, difference and similarity was relevant. Women were told that their answers could be serious, silly, playful, reflective, sensitive or emotionally charged: anything that they were happy sharing, we were happy hearing.
Responses were brought to a four day rehearsal period with singers in early 2018. During this period, we explored ways of devising as a group by creating text, movement and melody through a series of improvisations and experiments. Every singer comes from a different musical discipline and each in turn has infused the musical process with their own thoughts, feelings and practices. The result is a series of musical moments, that explores the multi-faceted nature of being a woman today, and our connection through femalehood.
The work has been devised as an A Capella piece with the hope that it can be performed anywhere, in any space. With each performance, Freya hopes it can evolve by inviting audiences to share their own experiences.
