Theatre Review: Mother Of Compost tackles ethics of having children in a climate crisis

Mother Of Compost (Advisory 16)

Noemie Huttner-Koros

Esplanade Theatre Studio
Wednesday, 8pm

Eco-art can often suffer from too much solemnity. But Australian performer Noemie Huttner-Koros’ take on making babies in the current crisis is a case made for more playful climate stories. At least until the room starts getting too serious again.

In the popular imagination, climate activists are disruptors – think tomato soup splashed on a van Gogh – but this queer, Jewish activist excels at projecting quite the opposite image: Huttner-Koros is an affable host to strangers and to strange ideas. 

The self-designated, titular mother of compost wants the audience to be kin, the studio to be a womb and the production to be a form of queer reproduction.

At a time when young people are going on “birth strikes” in response to rising sea levels, it is refreshing to hear this young performer profess a love of babies and a desire to live in a world surrounded by their tiny feet. Huttner-Koros voices a stubborn, childlike optimism that refuses to throw the baby out with the overheating bath water. 

This marks a quirky, delightful start to the 50-minute journey through the room’s collective baby-making – assuredly not the standard fare of coupled reproduction. Cleverly, the show divides itself up into phases from mating, fertilising, birthing, living to surviving in order to subvert their well-trodden definitions. 

Huttner-Koros’ performance is liveliest in the first half when the opportunity to ad-lib and interact with the audience lends the performer the immediate conviviality of a newfound relative. 

Pre-show, Huttner-Koros had been warming audience members up with banter while leading them from the foyer into the theatre.

In the show, some audience members were tasked to recite from a placard that detailed an evolutionary biologist’s take on sexual diversity – from “non-monogamous birds” to “homosexual lizards”. All this while, Huttner-Koros performs a campy, pheromone-charged mating ritual set to a funky electronic beat.

In another moment of animal drag, an audience member steps gamely onto the stage to improvise a slug dance duet.

The audiovisual design by Edwin Sitt certainly amps up the weird. There is a constant backdrop of unidentifiable close-up patterns and flesh projected onto the set’s five cloths hanging from the ceiling, and even a boppy remix of scientific talk.

In these moments, the show exudes the joy of reconnecting humanity with the teeming world. Humour earns the seriousness of the revelation that animals, bacteria, microbes – all seemingly stranger to our human selves – sustain homo sapiens without so much as an announcement. 

Yet somewhere past the show’s midpoint, the audience is aborted from the baby-making process and that is where Mother Of Compost starts to sag. 

Huttner-Koros the speech-maker is nowhere near as magnetic as Huttner-Koros the host.

A tale from the Talmud and citations from the Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta – while undeniably worthy references – were delivered without the zany energy of the first half, leaving this reviewer’s senses disengaged. 

Huttner-Koros cleans up a plastic fruit-littered floor all alone, but seems to forget that the audience too can get their hands dirty – and have.

Towards the end, when the audience is asked to repeat the mantra, “you are our mother, we are your children”, the people in the next seat felt less like they were the provisional chosen family at the start and more like reluctant children obeying a relative’s instructions. 

For a piece that wanted its audience to “grow and entangle” – at least according to the artist statement – it felt a pity to tilt in favour of didacticism as the show wraps. The weirdness, too, decomposes. 

Still, this is a labour of love by queer artists that, at its naughtiest, shows how much our stale vocabulary for the climate can be composted and made fertile again if seen aslant. 

Book It/Mother Of Compost

Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: Today, 8pm
Admission: $32 or $24 (concession) 
Info: str.sg/wFZ3