Who is under treatment here: the audience, the performers, the theatre space? We Are All Mothers WAAM is a journey to collective healing that draws on the fact that all our bodies and experiences are connected. Together, the performers create a space in which the individual and the collective melt into one. Bringing their individual symptoms to the stage, they transform them into joint experiences, challenging the separation between health and art and creating co-existence, co-regulation, understanding and a sense of support. The audience witnesses and becomes part of this transformation process through dance and music that dissolves the lines between performer and spectator, healer and patient.

Treatment in We Are All Mothers WAAM is turned into a both choreographic and musical composition, metaphorically, but also literally. Choreography plays a crucial part in this healing process. Including theatre machinery in the performance creates a holistic environment in which every single element contributes to the overall experience. This concept emphasises collective care while challenging the typical idea of medical treatment as an individual process and presenting it instead as a communal, collective endeavour. Everybody’s experiences and contributions come together in a joint composition. By acknowledging and accepting differences, the performers create an environment that is reflected in a choreography in which the movements of individuals together make up the collective narration. We Are All Mothers WAAM is a tribute to Anne Juren’s mother, who passed away in the summer of 2022.

This performance is a co-operation with Wien Modern, the biggest festival for contemporary arts music in Austria. Every year for one month, Wien Modern presents a tight and diverse musical programme at many venues all over the city of Vienna.

Anne Juren, born in Grenoble, is a choreographer, a dancer, an author and (since 2013) a Feldenkrais practitioner. She lives and works in Vienna. In 2003, she co-founded the association Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung. Her choreographic work and artistic research have been presented by international theatres, festivals, art spaces and event venues. Since 2015, she has developed an ongoing artistic research at the intersection of therapy and choreography, of the physical and the poetic, entitled Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies. She was part of the artistic committee for the master in choreography at the University of Dance and Circus (DOCH) in Stockholm and finished her PhD in choreography at the Stockholm University of the Arts in 2021. She is currently a guest professor at the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT).

            Matthias Kranebitter studied electro-acoustic composition under Dieter Kaufmann and German Toro-Perez, media composition under Klaus-Peter Sattler, both in Vienna, post-gradual composition in Amsterdam as well as in Graz under Alexander Stankovski and Beat Furrer. His music deals with aspects of our media society with its flood of information. It is characterised by a high degree of density and heterogeneity and by the inclusion of a great variety of (non-)musical materials as a means of de-hierarchisation and qualification of dogmas and taboos. Mostly, Kranebitter works with electronic and new media. Previous collaborations included, among others, the Belgian Nadar Ensemble, the Decoder Ensemble in Hamburg, the Ensemble Mosaik in Berlin, the Talea Ensemble in New York, the Ensemble Phace, the Klangforum Wien and the RSO in Vienna. Kranebitter is one of the co-founders of the Unsafe+Sounds Festival and the artistic director of the Black Page Orchestra.

            Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung was founded in 2003 by dancer/choreographer Anne Juren and artist Roland Rauschmeier. It produces exhibitions, presentations and performances and is part of Vienna’s independent scene. Its works are presented in both domestic and international contexts. The association is supported by the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport.