Three Mothers, the award-winning show about three female characters moving forward and rebuilding lives despite enforced migration embarks on a UK tour this summer to coincide with Refugee Week 2019. It starts with a three-date engagement at the Migration Museum, London from 4-6 June before visiting venues in towns including Manchester, Sheffield, Bradford and Wakefield.
Three women, two children, one story.
Set in present day Senegal, Bavaria and post WW2 Sudentenland, Three Mothers spans 60 years and immerses the audience in the personal lives and the dilemmas facing its three female characters.
When Khady’s husband dies, she is forced to sell his goats. Sending her eldest son away from Senegal across desert and sea to Europe, in the hope that he will find a better life, she plunges her entire family into uncertainty. When Gisela’s life in England is turned upside down, she goes home to Bavaria seeking comfort and familiarity. But her attempts to assist the steady flow of refugees arriving in her childhood village soon awaken memories from her own past. Erika reveals the truth about the journey made on foot with her baby daughter after being expelled from Sudetenland in 1945. The bold choices made by these three mothers are brought together as one compelling narrative in this award-winning play.
The production is an amalgamation of verbatim research, original text and physical theatre, written, directed, designed and performed by an all-female team.
Matilda Velevitch says: “I’m so excited about the Three Mothers tour because it’s an opportunity to take the show out of London, away from traditional theatres and bring it to former British textile towns such as Bradford, Bolton, Wakefield and Oldham, where a large number of migrants and refugees have both historically and recently arrived. It feels fitting that it will be seen by new audiences, particularly during Refugee Week 2019. I designed the Fabric of Our Lives Workshops to invite a wide range women in these towns, to come together and create a lasting piece of participative art for exhibition, symbolising the importance of women rebuilding lives and creating a new perspective of “home” within changing communities in Britain.”
Three Mothers tours throughout June to include Refugee Week 2019 (17-23 June 2019) and is visiting towns and areas that have a history of migrant arrivals or are currently receiving Refugees and Asylum Seekers. As well as traditional theatres, the tour includes a number of performances in community centres, colleges and cultural hubs. Running alongside the production is a workshop series called The Fabric of our Lives. This workshop aims to bring women from diverse cultures and migratory backgrounds in the same room together to create a project around the subject of ‘Home’. 120 women will be involved in the workshops in former textile towns; Bolton, Wakefield, Bradford and Manchester as well as London.
Three Mothers is at London’s Migration Museum 4th – 6th June 2019. For more information visit www.threemothers.co.uk and www.fabricofourlives.co.uk .
