When women create a work for or about their mothers, they say everything. There’s an all-encompassing flood of memory, friendship, grief, joy, quietude, of all the intricate layers of a mother-daughter relationship. 

With her short work Odette, Lisa Wilkinson so generously shared the 15^th anniversary of her mother death with us as the Puaka Matariki stars rise. In the Gothic setting of one of Dunedin’s beautiful cathedrals, the audience watches from the sanctuary, looking back towards the doors, past a small alter set with a cruciform, flowers and candles. There is a simplicity in her black dress, sheet of black hair and white sneakers. The utilitarian seating and standing room belied by the richness of the stained-glass window and vaulting we look towards through the glinting altar.  Every detail of the staging and the way Lisa Wilkinson uses them underpins the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships and of the way we process and move back and forth through grief.

Lisa Wilkinson stands before us and begins with a spoken word poem about gathering apples – green, I’m not sure if she named them as green or they were green in my imagination. It’s a memory of a task and a conversation, of a moment passing, one of those moments that are nothing but everything and always something when a wave of grief tumbles over you.

She moves like a wave, ebbing and flowing, crashing and retreating, her motion tossing us like flotsam on an ocean of shared experience. Lisa holds her body exquisitely, a vessel for the memory of her mother, for her articulation of loss and grief, and for a deep empathy for that shared experience. 

She uses the space and the structures of the cathedral, back and forth, oscillating as she searches perhaps for her mother, perhaps for solace, perhaps for her own next steps. She draws the audience together, invites us to her altar and gives us space and peace to reflect. 

Experiencing Lisa Wilkinson’s beautiful choreography and movement, with the lyrics of Nick Cave’s Ghosteen so crystalline in the stillness of the church, and my own mother’s anniversary not so long past, I wept quietly throughout. 

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