MEDIATHEK

Commissioned by the Diamantfabriek, Conversations With My Mother is a full-length music theater production conceived by composer Benedict Weisser and director Matthias Mooij for chamber ensemble Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, two sopranos, an actress, and an actor. Mooij and Weisser structured the libretto out of fictional and autobiographical accounts of phone conversations between a mother and her son, written by one Belgian and six Dutch authors. Conversations portrays a wide scope of the forms that the relationship between a mother and her son can assume. It premiered in December 2013 at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, the Amsterdam venue for contemporary music, to high acclaim in the Dutch press. (five ***** and four **** stars out of five reviews in Dutch national newspapers).

Conversations with my Mother highlights the dysfunctional relationship between mother and son. It often proves impossible to say to your mother what you had intended. The three mothers in the music theater production communicate through listening, singing, crying and complaining. The son talks, stammers, yells and weighs his words. We follow them crisscross through the different stages of his life: child; graying; adolescent; adult. Going back and forth between old and young. The music theater production also explores the foundations of the relationship between mother and son. In a society where answers to moral and existential issues from a religious or ideological perspective are increasingly difficult to come by, the mother has the last word. She is the moral arbiter of the twenty-first century.

Composition and concept: Benedict Weisser
Direction and concept: Matthias Mooij
Set design: Piia Maria
Costumes: Judith de Zwart
Libretto: Matthias Mooij in cooperation with Benedict Weisser
Libretto based on newly written texts by Abdelkader Benali, Oscar van den Boogaard, Herman Brusselmans, Jibbe Willems Marcel Lenssen, Tommy Wieringa, Omar Dahmani
Direction tour performances: Isabel Schröder