Dafna Maimon: Wary Mary / Performance

Dafna Maimon’s new piece "Wary Mary" scripts and performs two parallel narratives of disobedient women. The first narrative developed from personal contemplation of motherhood and consideration of contemporary forms of social pressure on women to reproduce and care. Maimon’s research brings in different and often taboo voices on women’s choice, such as Rachel Cusk’s novel “A Life’s Work,” which narrates the author’s pregnancy and first year with a colicky baby; and sociologist Orna Donath’s series of interviews with women who speak openly about regretting motherhood. These voices merge in the narrator’s attempt to connect the dots: are her personal wishes her own, or simply an expression of her social context? It is a struggle of both mind and body, as the piece features women who have been absurdly stretched and possessed, only to embody exaggerated notions of the Mother.

Alongside this contemporary narrative a second, historical woman haunts the scene: the figure of Mary Mallon or ‘Typhoid Mary,’ who became known around the turn of the 20th century as the first “Superspreader” – she carried a disease without ever being sick herself. One of the “Many Marys” in Maimon’s story, Mary Mallon was eventually quarantined and served her sentence for unknowingly infecting her employers, though she never understood her own condition. Mallon was an immigrant, single, childless woman, so that designating her body as a threat to public health reflects layered social anxieties. Both narratives explore viral and psychological contagion — the woman’s body as a carrier, a site of both danger and reproduction — but do so within a grotesque, over-the-top scenario and amidst humorous embodiments of desires and fears.

Maimon’s artistic research was developed in dialog with Tieranatomisches Theater and contemporary academic perspectives on gender and biopolitics.

Dafna Maimon (FI/IL b. 1982 in Porvoo, Finland) lives and works in Berlin.

Performerinnen / Performers: Rosalind Masson, Leah Katz, Emma Waltraud Howes, Lulu Obermayer Musik / Music: Nathan Gray
Assistenz, Kostüme / Assistance costume design: Tea Palmelund

Dafna Maimon’s new work is produced in cooperation with Assemble, Berlin.