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LADA is delighted to present this double bill on motherhood, two inspiring online screenings showcasing the journey into motherhood from conception, pregnancy and act of birthing. Featuring HBAC Performance Manifesto and GOO:GA.
Hannah Ballou’s comic live art performance for film, shot toward the end of a traumatic pregnancy. It takes a palimpsestic approach to re-performance, subjectivity in pregnancy, and the maternal comic body. The performance was one of the finalists for the 2022 Mother Art Prize, awarded by the Procreate Project.
In the context of a terrifying fetal diagnosis, midway through her second pregnancy and the pandemic’s closure of live performance venues, Ballou turned to another medium for the follow-up to her comic live art performance from her first, carefree pregnancy in 2016. The film explores how performance made by/about a joyously pregnant body as a feminist reclamation of fertility-as-spectacle then re-performed in the context of a later traumatic pregnancy might further develop Iris Marion Young’s theories of the doubling of the pregnant subject. The approach to feminist comic live art takes a hard left turn when the artist discovers her baby has even worse problems than the binary gender paradigm.
Content note: GOO:GA contains salty language, nudity, erstwhile animals, dodgy child acting, ironic pelvic movement, ukulele feminism, four minutes of literally nothing happening, and themes of fetal illness.
After watching the film, if you’d like to find out what happened to Hannah and her baby read a short epilogue and learn how to support Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity.
Hannah Ballou’s work is feminist, sometimes autobiographical, and challenges configurations of the comic body by asking who is funny, when, how, why, and why not? She is known to work with live animals and sleeping children. She once found out she was pregnant live on stage. She is behind the Marina Abramopug project, neo-burlesque alter-ego Lambchop Magoo, and is founder of Kingston Live Art. Recent works include Shhh, The Doctor Is In, and the hoo:ha series. She is a senior lecturer in Drama at the Kingston School of Art.
Captioned and audio description versions are available.
Produced by: Alice Roots
Filmed and Edited by: Claire Nolan
Design by: Peter Case
Sound Design and Mixing by: Tom Wilson
Featuring cameo appearances by: Farokh Soltani, Georgia Triana-Ballou, Alice Roots, and Nigel
GOO:GA was supported by the Kingston School of Art, the Rose Theatre, and the Society for Theatre Research.
We are pleased to invite you to BYOBaby Live Art Workshop, which is an artist-led exploration facilitated by Dr. Hannah Ballou, welcoming artist-parents and their little ones.
The workshop embraces the themes of interruption, levity, unruliness, and autobiography as participants will engage in a series of multi-disciplinary exercises and prompts drawn from Ballou’s own practice and research into performance-making. You might find yourself drawing, writing, moving, singing, and tending to your babe as needed. We will work unapologetically alongside our babies who will certainly interrupt us and that’s rather the point.
Banner image credit:
Claire Nolan
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