Radical Mother

Radical Mother was a music project that combined contemporary multi-vocal singing, improvisation, electronic sound, poetic, and verbatim text.

It combined climate research, environmental philosophy, singing, and sound, together with input from its audience, to build a fierce manifesto in answer to the crisis in our natural world. At the heart of the project was the concept of kinship and parenthood. Can we extend our understanding of those human experiences beyond immediate family, species, and gender norms, and build a more just future society for each other and our biosphere?

The project constructed a future-facing landscape of social thinking and feeling, through performance, writing, conversation, activism, street singing, composition, and provocation.

The ideas for the work were founded on Melanie’s ongoing explorations in ecology, feminism, and the future. She fused her highly-skilled approach to theatre-making with contemporary theories of compassion and community from philosophy (Timothy Morton), political theory (William Ophuls), eco-feminism (Donna Harraway), ecology (Dark Mountain), and climate change research. Melanie collaborated with environmental psychologist Dr. Stuart Capstick (Cardiff University) on the project, who studied human behaviour in relation to climate change.

The project appeared at Pulse Festival and Coastal Currents Festival in 2018, Latitude Festival 2019, and TEDx Bristol in 2019.

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