MISSA MAMA NOVA is a performance with dance and choral singing about femininity, the final part of a trilogy in which theatre-maker and composer Timo Tembuyser moulds Christian rituality to his will. The previous part, Missa Mater Sola (2022), was nominated for the BNG Bank Theatre Award at the Dutch Theatre Festival.
The mother figure inspires awe and admiration. Mother Mary is probably the most depicted woman in cultural history. But, says Belgian theatre-maker and composer Timo Tembuyser, the mother figure has also become a ‘sacred cliché’ and even a ‘normative prison’. In his MISSA MAMA NOVA, Tembuyser wants to free ‘the archetypal Mother energy’ from the straitjacket of patriarchal Christian traditions.
Timo Tembuyser: ’I want to free myself from ingrained frameworks. By embodying archetypes over and over, I try to contemporise them.’
After Missa Homo Sacer (2019) about the sinner and Missa Mater Sola (2022), this new performance is the final part in a triptych of Masses in which Tembuyser explores the tension between the individual and the community. The mother figure is played by dancer Fumiyo Ikeda. A chorus of six fatherless sons (called ‘Queer Kings’) swarms around her in search of their own adult voices, using an eclectic musical idiom. From the side lines, a flutist – representing the mother’s breath – directs the performance. Finally, the liberation of the mother leads to a joyous celebration of the feminine in every human being.
Theaterkrant on Missa Mater Sola (2022):
‘Astoundingly beautiful compositions form the backbone of the performance. Drawing on various religious vocal traditions in a range of languages, Tembuyser manages to create an overwhelming
emotional resonance.’