Sounding a multiplicity of breastfeeding experiences

Scholarship at the intersection of maternal studies and psychosocial theory has highlighted the problematic positioning of the mother within much psychoanalytical and philosophical thought as a figure who must be rejected in the process of subjectivity formation.Footnote ¹⁵ The mother becomes, as Lisa Baraitser suggests, ‘a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her’.Footnote ¹⁶ Countering this disappearance, Let Down placed mothers’ experiences centre stage in a duet for two lactating women – dancer and choreographer Paula O'Reilly and myself – that was in dialogue with both live and recorded sound and voice. Barbara Browning, following her own experience of breastfeeding, and writing about the significance of breastmilk in Afro-Brazilian curative dances, notes the ‘insufficiency, the meagreness of individual experience in grappling with political questions’ related to the topic of breastfeeding, and the need for an understanding of ‘the fluidity of cultural forms, as well as alternative models for understanding literal bodily fluids’.Footnote ¹⁷ Embracing this fluidity, and a desire to ‘move through and then beyond one's own embodied perspective’,Footnote ¹⁸ the development of the work's articulation of a quietening included verbatim excerpts from interviews conducted by sociologist Maria Herron with both breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding mothers across the island of Ireland and the UK.Footnote ¹⁹ The creative team was also granted access to unpublished Northern Ireland Public Health Authority qualitative research on breastfeeding through our collaboration with Hanratty at the Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation at Queen's University Belfast (QUB). The inclusion of recorded excerpts from this data allowed the voices of a wide range of women and their different breastfeeding (or non-breastfeeding) experiences to be present alongside the dance of Paula and myself.

Speaking of the phenomenological relationship between the auditory and the visual, Don Ihde suggests that ‘an inquiry into the auditory is also an inquiry into the invisible. Listening makes the invisible present in a way similar to the presence of the mute in vision’.Footnote ²⁰ Let Down experimented with using sound in several ways, including both the recorded soundscape and live, improvised sounds produced by babes-in-arms in the audience during the performance. Creating a performance of silenced maternal corporeality engages in what Uri McMillan argues to be a ‘sonic of dissent’, which, in its voicing of ordinarily concealed experience, produces ‘a form of embodied knowledge that momentarily trouble[s]’ existing narratives and ‘distinct circuits of spectatorship and performance’.Footnote ²¹ Let Down's soundscape employed this dissensual sonic approach to communicate mothers’ often concealed or untold affective experiences of public breastfeeding and breastmilk pumping, which can be, as Maggie Nelson suggests, a ‘sharply private activity … that is physically and emotionally challenging’, yet a necessary one for breastfeeding women who wish to (or must) continue to labour across both private and public spheres of their lives.Footnote ²² Through processes of transposition, digital augmentation and amplification, the piece created a sonic environment for the spectator that drew attention to both the corporeal labour required to breastfeed, and the contradictory societal expectations that women should breastfeed, but that this labour be kept silent and out of sight, especially in public.

Contextualizing the maternal across private and public spheres

In developing a methodology of quietening, this project is in conversation with recent research on the relationship between the performance and the maternal, which Lena Šimic and Emily Underwood-Lee identify as representing a search for ‘maternal performance aesthetics’ that question ‘the collision between the lived and the staged maternal artists’ processes and methodologies [and] the politics and ethics of “maternal performance making” and of making work while … looking after children’.Footnote ²³ It also seeks to contribute to the project, as articulated by Amber E. Kinser, Kryn Freehling-Burton and Terri Hawkes in Performing Motherhood (2014), of broadening academic and artistic interventions into the performance of motherhood, ‘to imagine, engage, and contest ways that social performance(s) and maternal life are mutually infusive’.Footnote ²⁴ Auto-ethnographic documentation of my own experience of breastfeeding and maternal subjectivity generated the embodied roots for the choreography of Let Down; I was a breastfeeding mother when I co-performed the work and am ‘still’ breastfeeding my five-year-old son at the time of writing this article.Footnote ²⁵ Choreographing a dance that placed my own subjective experience of breastfeeding at its heart was a tricky process, both from a practical perspective and from a political, personal viewpoint as an artist–mother working in academia. Rehearsals for, and performances of, Let Down took place at QUB, and Paula and I sometimes had to bring our toddlers, and all of their necessary accoutrements and unpredictable movements and sounds, into the university rehearsal studio. In addition to experiencing the usual difficulties of trying to find time to engage in PaR work as part of an academic workload, rehearsals for Let Down also made me acutely aware of institutional expectations, and my own internalized perceptions, of what kinds of identities (especially for female academics) and bodies (with their associated movements and sounds) are considered normal within the usually quiet research spaces of universities. As Laura Endacott points out, ‘The university environment is an unforgiving place … built on a male model of performance’,Footnote ²⁶ and a feeling of intrusion was one I continually worked with and against throughout the choreographic process for Let Down, both in my workplace and within the broader, societal context of breastfeeding in public.

Writing about how different people's corporealities define their experience of public space in Western societies, Amanda Barnes Cook notes that ‘the problematic imperative of the public sphere, policed through public norms, is that anyone is welcome – so long as they act like the ideal public actor: a heterosexual, white, able-bodied man’.Footnote ²⁷ Cook points out that this imperative is ‘especially pernicious’ for anyone not in the position to distance themselves from their bodies: ‘Breastfeeding mothers, pregnant women, disabled people, people of color, and queer people are all conspicuous in the public sphere because of their bodies and their bodily performance’.Footnote ²⁸ Unlike in many territories in the global South, or EU countries with more supportive cultures and legislation for breastfeeding, such as Sweden, Norway or Denmark, breastfeeding women are not commonly seen breastfeeding in public across the island of Ireland, underscoring this sense of conspicuousness for women (and their breastfeeding children) who do.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, laws explicitly addressing breastfeeding in public are becoming a relatively common phenomenon globally, with countries in the global South, such as India and Vietnam, leading the way in implementing legislation both to support mothers to breastfeed, and to regulate the marketing of breastmilk substitutes.Footnote ³⁰ However, Ireland and Northern Ireland lag behind in terms of explicit legislation for breastfeeding, a situation that raises troubling questions when the neo-liberal market context of infant formula being big business for the dairy industry is considered: infant formula represents 35 per cent of Ireland's total dairy exports, and the industry produces 10 per cent of all global infant formula, including 17 per cent of the infant formula consumed in China.Footnote ³¹ If more mothers breastfeed, fewer mothers require infant formula, resulting in lower profits for an important national industry.

Highlighting the similarly ‘spotty’ cover of public breastfeeding legislation that protects women from indecency charges in the US (where the production of infant formula is also a lucrative business), and considering further reasons for a reluctance to support public breastfeeding, Kukla points out that ‘new motherhood does not erase the sexualized status of the female breast in [Western] culture, nor does it mitigate women's sexual vulnerability in public spaces. Accordingly, breastfeeding opens women to offended, sexualized, and even violent and punitive gazes’.Footnote ³² Kukla also highlights that when breastfeeding in public, women can be seen to transgress the expected location of maternal labour in the domestic space, a space ‘characterized by a set of material arrangements, placements, and boundaries, but also by the social life and the kinds of bodies that inhabit it and give it its form, as well as by its segregation from work space and public gathering space’.Footnote ³³ The choreographic process for Let Down traversed these numerous contextual threads and their intricate web of concerns across both private and public spheres. In the following sections, I delve further into our creative process for the piece to analyse how a dialogue between the sonic and the corporeal assisted in the navigation of this complex terrain, and how focusing on the relation between movement and sound allowed for an exploration of the shaping and quietening of the breastfeeding maternal body.

Dancing decomposition: separating the sonic and the corporeal

In the poem cited above, Hollie McNish writes about feeling pressured to breastfeed her six-month-old baby in a toilet cubicle rather than in the public space of a café, articulating the corporeal internalization by a breastfeeding mother of societal feelings of embarrassment towards breastfeeding.Footnote ³⁵ In an attempt to make her public breastfeeding discreet and socially acceptable, the mother reconfigures her sonic and corporeal presence – she whispers and tiptoes. The sonic aspect of breastfeeding is one not usually thought of, but in the context of Let Down's exploration of the social stigma related to breastfeeding in public, and mothers’ experiences of shame, it became a crucial one. Breastfeeding infants can make many sounds as they feed, ranging from the tiny, aspirated ‘keh’ sound that new mothers are told to listen for to ensure that newborn babies are latching correctly and swallowing milk,Footnote ³⁶ to vocalizations of deep pleasure and appreciation, or screams of frustration and desperation if milk is flowing too quickly or not fast enough. Breastfeeding mothers also develop their own repertoire of sounds (and movements) to soothe, distract or lull their infants to sleep. In Let Down we focused on this sonic dimension of breastfeeding to capture the maternal body's function as a ‘material sound system’. In considering the relationship between music and the maternal in the mother–daughter relationship, Elizabeth Wood (following Irigaray) proposes that

She proposes the maternal body as a material sound system, approaching the task of ‘thinking back through the maternal body’ as an ‘act of decomposition: one that breaks up or disintegrates things already composite – things that have adhered or become coherent through the activity and experience of mother–daughter composition under patriarchy’.Footnote ³⁸ Although Let Down's focus was rooted in lending visibility to the mother's experience from her own perspective, rather than viewing the experience through the mother–child dyad, an embodied research process inevitably also necessitated an exploration of the relational aspects of breastfeeding, and, during the creation of the soundscape for Let Down, Wood's concept of decomposition became a key element.

To build the material sound system of the breastfeeding body, the composer and I made field recordings of the sounds of me breastfeeding my son in different locations, both inside and outside my home, and the resulting score was a constant soundscape element throughout the work, which the composer distorted electronically so that it was sometimes amplified, and sometimes barely audible when combined with other choreographic and sonic elements. These recordings of breastfeeding sounds became one of only two literal representations of breastfeeding in the piece (the other being projected images of Madonna Lactans (Nursing Madonna) paintings, discussed later), and their electronic manipulation and amplification in the soundscape functioned not only to challenge their quietening, but also to decouple the sounds of breastfeeding from the physical action that produced them. This act of decomposition – breaking up the coherence of usual patterns of activity – allowed the connection of these sounds with experiences of social stigma to be danced into view by the maternal body.

While searching for a way to embody the feelings experienced when breastfeeding in public during our rehearsal process, Paula and I took our cue from what we called the ‘shirt choreography’ that breastfeeding mothers dance while attempting to make their feeding socially acceptable to others – the small movements, often motivated by feelings of embarrassment and shame, that are performed to minimize the circumference of ‘that small piece of flesh’ on the breast that is visible around the infant's mouth while they feed,Footnote ³⁹ and the manoeuvres made to shield breastfeeding from unwanted gazes. To the accompaniment of the recorded breastfeeding sounds, this movement idea was developed into a series of multiple repetitions of tiny, simple adjustments to our clothing: slowly lifting a shirt off the shoulder by an inch and releasing it again; pulling at the bottom hem of a T-shirt to make it a little longer; making innumerable, minuscule tweaks to how a top sits across the breasts. This silent choreography of discomfort danced to a soundscape created from the material sound system of the breastfeeding body communicated an experience of breastfeeding in public without either visually representing breastfeeding or sonically indexing the maternal affective experience. In breaking up the composite, this act of choreographic decomposition, following Wood, sought to perform a new act of composition that ‘allows other possibilities or expansions of understanding and reciprocation to take place’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In breaking apart the expected relationship between sounds and movements of breastfeeding, we endeavoured to quieten debates and affects surrounding the act that would usually stick to its performance, offering the spectator an opportunity to view, and review, their effect on maternal corporeality.

Mechanical sounds of disconnect

Uncanny aspects of sonic and embodied experiences of breastfeeding, such as spontaneous lactation and the use of breast pumps, became another site of choreographic investigation, allowing biological and mechanical dimensions to be explored. The title of the work – Let Down – references both the lack of familial and societal support experienced by breastfeeding women communicated in the survey and interview data, and the biological reflex that occurs in the body to release milk from the breast:

When I first read this explanation of the let-down in the breastfeeding ‘bible’, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, before my son's birth, I was fascinated and also slightly perturbed. The process describes a wondrous dance at the heart of breastfeeding, a contraction of muscle cells followed by a ‘yawning’ release of milk. Contraction and release: the physiological fundamentals of movement. But there also seemed to be an odd positioning of the body apart from the self: ‘your body wants to breastfeed!’ This upbeat exclamation (or was it an exhortation?) presented the possibility that this new maternal body might have demands at odds with what ‘I’ wanted. Esther Leslie and Melanie Jackson, whose illuminating collaborative project on the topic of milk spans sculpture, animation, and gallery installations, note that, ‘Like the act of reproduction, lactation is the enactment of a splitting, of a formation of self and part-self that is to become other. It disrupts the dominant motif of the bounded body, of sovereign individuality’.Footnote ⁴² In addition to this disorienting experience of ‘splitting’, the thought of my body producing an uncontrollable flow of milk in response to any baby's sounds lent the process a strangely alien, mechanical slant. It became no less strange after my first experience of spontaneous lactation, as my son's cries from another room caused milk to flow with astonishing abundance before I could reach him. Browning writes of the ‘uncanny’ nature of her own experience of a let-down triggered by an emotional response: ‘My body is acting on its own. I am not moving, but I am performing a dance’.Footnote ⁴³ The triggering of a physical process by the sound of a baby's cry – the release of hormones, the cells contracting and opening, the production of milk – just like the effects of public shaming, all of this is experienced corporeally by the breastfeeding mother, but may be completely invisible to an observer. The experience of pumping breastmilk when apart from my son introduced a further mechanical dimension.

While pumping in my work office and in the toilets of the train on my daily commute, I became acutely sensitive to the mechanical sounds of my breast pump, whose adjustable rhythms (designed to simulate the rhythms of a baby's suckling) I never quite managed to ‘calibrate’ successfully, and whose advertised ‘discreet’ grinding whine I felt certain could nevertheless be heard in my colleagues’ neighbouring offices, or outside the train toilet door. The experience of having to publicly perform acts that social decorum confines to the domestic sphere brings to mind Homi Bhabha's discussion of the ‘unhomely moments’ created by the effects of ‘enforced social accommodation’ – an experience of ‘displacement’ in which ‘the border between home and world becomes confused, and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision as divided as it is disorienting’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bhabha suggests that in the ‘stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible’, and in articulating disorienting experiences of breastfeeding, Let Down made visible ‘another world’ experienced by breastfeeding mothers.Footnote ⁴⁵ In attempting to dance the breastfeeding body's autonomous response to a baby's cry, and the uncomfortable merging of body and machine while pumping, the dialogue between sound and body became the most creatively fruitful site to explore for finding a way to respond to, and try to communicate, these ‘unnatural’, unhomely, corporeal experiences. In our search for sonic articulation of the other world of the unhomely breast pump we moved beyond the material sound system of the breastfeeding mother's body. To foreground the mechanical aspects of pumping, we conducted field recordings of the sounds of my family car getting an oil change in a mechanic's garage. The composer then created a jarring, grinding rhythm from sounds of the garage lift being operated and an eerily melodic track of oil (milk) drips (catch the milk!) draining from the vehicle into a metal pan. The composition created from these loud procedures of mechanical maintenance, involving fluidic excretion from a metal body, served to transpose and amplify the affective experience of the use of breast pumps. The sonic body made communicable an uncanny experience that was otherwise difficult to express within the visual limitations of the maternal body in performance.

Sounding a lost corporeal history

The creation of the soundtrack of the unhomely pump inspired the development of movement articulating ‘unnatural’ aspects of breastfeeding. Consulting the interview data from Public Health Authority reports it became clear that due to the very low rate of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland, women felt disconnected from earlier generations of breastfeeding mothers and often had no real-life example of breastfeeding to observe.Footnote ⁴⁶ In her discussion of how the ‘naturalness’ of breastfeeding is, in fact, a cultural and political construct, Browning draws a connection with Marcel Mauss's writing on ‘Body Techniques’, in which he ‘urges European readers to denaturalize their understanding of a variety of cultural forms’, so that they realize that ‘things we find natural have a historical origin’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, Nancy Scheper-Hughes explains that ‘[b]reast-feeding is a form of body praxis. Like swimming, dancing, or making love, breast-feeding must be learned, and the knowledge of “how” to do it comfortably and well (though with many cultural variations) can be lost’.Footnote ⁴⁸ During our research process, we hunted for traces of this (often) lost thread of corporeal knowledge, and our dramaturge, Emily DeDakis, found historical representations of breastfeeding in the visual arts in the form of Madonna Lactans iconography: Catholic paintings dating from between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries that show Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus, or sometimes squirting breastmilk (across an impressive distance) into the mouth of a bishop, saint, or pontiff. As a contemporary viewer, I found these images to be unsettlingly paradoxical in that they carry the baggage of a long history of religious institutional oppression and abuse of women, especially in an Irish context, while simultaneously giving a glimpse of a time in which public breastfeeding was culturally acceptable.Footnote ⁴⁹ They also highlight how squeamish Western societies have become about images of breastfeeding, how it now seems almost impossible to escape a potentially sexualized reading of a breastfeeding image, and how visually quietened breastfeeding has become as a result.Footnote ⁵⁰ The image in Fig. 1 is a Madonna Lactans painting from 1598 by the Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola, which was widely admired and copied by contemporary artists for her ‘realistic’ depiction of breastfeeding.

Fig. 1

Sofonisba Anguissola (Cremona, Italy), Madonna and Child (1598). Currently part of the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

In her analysis of Anguissola's Madonna and Child, Naomi Yavneh argues that ‘[b]reastfeeding, mother and child share a ubiquitous quotidian act, and in so doing insist upon their own flesh and blood selves’.Footnote ⁵¹ While working with this and other Madonna Lactans images in the rehearsal room, we tried to re-member a lost celebration of breastfeeding as quotidian by mimicking the breastfeeding hand poses they depicted (Anguissola's painting depicts a ‘V-hold’, for example), in a knowingly doomed attempt to connect with some ghost of a historical corporeal knowledge commons. Our failures to replicate these poses in rehearsals prompted the idea for a dance prefaced by the projection of a series of rapidly changing Madonna Lactans images, which we tried, and failed, to accurately mirror in an improvised response. This approach also drew on findings from the interview data, and Paula's and my own personal experiences, which showed that many mothers struggle to learn breastfeeding holds through reading breastfeeding how-to books or trying to decipher illustrations from poorly photocopied handouts distributed at prenatal classes. Learning a corporeal technique through a textual representation of it, rather than through human-to-human interaction with supportive and guiding voice and touch, places a disconnecting and mechanically oriented structure at the heart of the breastfeeding learning experience for many mothers, especially those with no access to expensive lactation consultants or breastfeeding support groups. When breastfeeding does not work, mothers then blame themselves for not being able to perform this supposedly natural act, feeling that their bodies have failed themselves and their baby.Footnote ⁵² The shame connected with this experience of failure is, unsurprisingly, hard to articulate, and becomes another instance of self-quietening. The reality that breastfeeding can be difficult is also conspicuously absent and quietened in the predominant, promotional narratives of ‘breast is best’, and advertisement images of beatifically smiling mothers (reminiscent of the Madonna Lactans), ‘in white negligees or other bedroom garb, sitting in either a rocking chair or an upper-middle-class nursery, or … in an empty nonspace against a blank or abstract background’.Footnote ⁵³ Articulating these feelings of disconnect and corporeal/mechanical failure, our Madonna Lactans hold-dance was accompanied visually by technical images taken from car manuals, and sonically by the ‘unhomely pump’ field recordings of the oil change in a mechanic's garage (see Figs 2 and 3).

Figs. 2, 3

Images from the ‘hold-dance’ in Let Down showing the use of technical drawings from car engine manuals as a visual backdrop to the dancers’ attempts at imitating the breastfeeding holds represented in Madonna Lactans paintings (the author on the left and Paula O'Reilly on the right above, O'Reilly below). The ‘hold-dance’ was accompanied by a soundscape made with field recordings of an oil change being carried out on a car. Both images from the performance at the Being Human Festival, 24 November 2018, Brian Friel Theatre, Belfast. Photographs by Benjamin Lichtenberg.

This soundscape aimed to make audible both women's experiences of the mechanization of breastfeeding and the painful severance with the historical transference of breastfeeding knowledge through the body.Footnote ⁵⁴ In transposing the sounds of breastfeeding onto sounds of automation, Let Down attempted to reconstruct – in a self-consciously Frankenstein-like manner – a connection with a lost corporeal past. Susan Leigh Foster proposes that the dance historian's body

In our attempts to embody the vanished corporeal knowledge and history depicted in Madonna Lactans images we lent visibility to the contemporary quietening of the difficulties of breastfeeding. Simultaneously, the soundscape made audible an alternative history of breastfeeding that contradicts the ‘breastfeeding-is-natural’ mantra of breastfeeding literature and advertisements, sounding the quietened, unnatural realities of uncanny and mechanized elements. Jonathan Sterne, in his exploration of sound cultures and sound reproduction, argues that the construction of an audible past is connected with histories of ‘bodily experience’: ‘the history of sound implies a history of the body’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Let Down's experiments with an alternative sonic experience of breastfeeding drew attention to the cultural aspects of its historical development. As Sterne suggests, ‘The history of sound provides some of the best evidence for a dynamic history of the body because it traverses the nature/culture divide: it demonstrates that the transformation of people's physical attributes is part of cultural history.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The loud machine sounds in Let Down highlighted aspects of the cultural history of breastfeeding that are often untold, sounding women's perception of the inadmissibility – the quietening – of breastfeeding sounds in environments outside the domestic sphere.

Dancing time and sonic interruptions

Sarah Manguso, in her diary writing about the profound changes in subjectivity that occur through aspects of motherhood such as breastfeeding, reflects, ‘In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Focusing on the effects of repetition in this transition, Baraitser proposes that the ‘time of repetition’ in maternal caring becomes ‘the time of mattering , as opposed to the meaningless time of reproduction’, but that this time ‘can be felt as obdurate, distinctively uncertain in its outcome, both intensive and “empty”, and tethered by the pace of the development of another’.Footnote ⁵⁹ This tethering, and the experience of a shifting relationship with time, were embodied in a section of Let Down that included the projection onto a large scrim of a one-month excerpt of a breastfeeding diary that I obsessively kept for the first six months of my son's life. This document, created as a note on my phone, charted every detail of his defecation, urination, duration of sleep, and instances of reflux vomiting, and my own instances of blebs and mastitis.Footnote ⁶⁰ After I shared this document with the creative team, it became clear that, although essentially a factual list of corporeal events, the diary (including its liberal seasoning of emojis and expletives) also offered a mapping artefact of the emotional and psychological terrain experienced by a first-time mum dealing with the loss of control over her life as she knew it, and her (futile) search for some structure amidst the unknowns of a new reality. In this way it functioned like the artefacts of ‘self-documentation’ presented in Mary Kelly's seminal work Post-partum Document (1973–9), in which she exhibited (amongst other objects) analysed faecal stains and infant-formula feeding charts of her son – not, as Kelly explains, to represent some ‘unified, transcendental subject of autobiography’, but rather as documentation of a ‘de-centered, socially constituted subject of a mutual discourse’.Footnote ⁶¹ The breastfeeding diary in Let Down performed discursively in its echoing of findings from the interview data showing the societal pressures felt by breastfeeding mothers to provide evidence of how much breastmilk their babies are drinking – an impossible quantifying task for a breastfeeding mother.

In performance, the breastfeeding diary entries scrolled past in a crawl-text fashion, extending up and beyond legibility into the endless time and space of a white-out. While the text progressed, Paula stood in front of it, silently and motionlessly, reading with the audience (see Fig. 4). Time was seen to be measured solely through the actions of my son, in the durations of his breastfeeds (on left or right breast), and durations of his sleep across a continuous twenty-four-hour span that collapsed any difference between night and day, with the many typos evidencing my exhaustion and one-handed phone-writing moves made at odd, breastfeeding-constricted angles.

Fig. 4

Paula O'Reilly at the moment the breastfeeding diary excerpt begins to scroll in Let Down. Performance at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Festival, Belfast, 9 December 2018. Photograph by Benjamin Lichtenberg.

The soundscape at this point was generated from the field recordings of single oil drips, played at irregular intervals at a very low volume. This monotonous, almost-but-not-quite silence referenced the endlessly long, never-silent nights of the early days of breastfeeding. It also served to amplify the live soundscape contributions of babies in the audience. Not wanting parents and carers in the audience to have to worry about any sounds their babies might make during the show, we decided to include babies’ spontaneous sounds as an integral – if unpredictable – part of the soundscape, with all of their sounds becoming a generative, improvisatory element that affected the movements of Paula and myself.Footnote ⁶² In this breastfeeding diary section, Paula would react to sounds made by babies with small adjustments to her stance, which ultimately moved her from an upright standing position with her back to the audience, through an excruciatingly slow back-bend, to me catching her at the last second before she fell out of the bend to the floor. The timing for this drawn-out transition was dictated by the sounds made by the babies in the audience, and was an attempt to embody a response to Didier Anzieu's concept of the ‘sonorous envelope’ – the corporeal ‘sound bath’ experienced by a child when it cries and is comforted by a mother – from the perspective of the mother or carer.Footnote ⁶³ As Baraitser points out, ‘something inevitably has been skimmed over and lost’ in Anzieu's focus on the infant's experience of this sound bath, which makes no consideration of the mother's experience.Footnote ⁶⁴ Baraitser asks of the interruption experienced by mothers when they hear their baby's cry,

Let Down's placement of focus on the mother's experience through interruption and improvisation embodied the skimmed-over and lost maternal experience of this sonic relationship between mother and child. Keeping the sonic and corporeal elements of an improvised choreography of this relationship at a distance from one another through their respective placement in the audience and onstage allowed the experience of the mother to be isolated and foregrounded. The fitful progression of the precarious back-bend became a corporealization of the effects of an infant's sonic interruptions on the mother, and the inclusion of infants’ cries, gurgles and coos became a participatory soundscape for improvisation, highlighting quietened aspects of maternal experience.

Conclusion: ‘quietening’ as an invitation for dialogue

Woods argues that paying attention to the sounds that emanate from a body's materiality ‘can provide a point of entry or access to the body and an important and powerful coding system, one that allows women to stake a claim in the highly politicized struggle to define … the maternal body’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Through Let Down's experimentation with how to make quietened aspects of maternal corporeality visible through sound and movement, a choreographic methodology was developed that contributes a potential dual process of self- and social redefinition of how maternal corporeal experience is communicated. Separating sonic and corporeal elements of breastfeeding experiences in performance allowed the combined representation of, and dialogue between, interior (invisible/untold/quietened) and exterior (visible/communicated/public) aspects. In Sterne's writing on the relationship between sound and the body, he ‘turns away’ from ‘attempts to recover and describe people's interior experience of listening – an auditory past – toward the social and cultural grounds of sonic experience’.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Let Down, we found a way to communicate precisely this interior experience while placing it in conversation with the sociocultural context of breastfeeding in Northern Ireland. Thinking through Sterne's distinction between the audible and the auditory was useful in developing a methodology of quietening in the choreographic process, as it helped give shape to the interweaving of self-quietening and social silencing of breastfeeding experience from both a sonic and a corporeal perspective. Sterne notes that ‘the elusive inside world of sound – the sonorous, the auditory, the heard, the very density of sonic experience – emerges and becomes perceptible only through its exteriors’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Let Down, PaR dance investigations created a dynamic and disruptive site for experimenting with the communication of this merging of the interior and exterior of corporeal and sonic experience. Bringing attention to the sonic experience of breastfeeding from the perspective of the sound environment experienced by the breastfeeding mother allowed the creation of a sounding body that could be separated from the dancing body and placed in dialogue with it.

In his discussion of the ‘gap’ between the auditory and the visual in certain dance works, Jeroen Peeters considers Jean-Luc Nancy's reflection on painted portraits: ‘A portrait is deprived of the person's voice, but makes the sonority of silence heard that reminds us of the irreducible “not-totality” of the arts. The latter opens up an endless resonance between different media’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In its experiments with the subtraction of sounds produced by breastfeeding from the moving body dancing about breastfeeding, Let Down created a dialogue between sound and movement that harnessed the resonance between the two media. This quietening of the maternal body – the uncoupling of expected relations between the sonic and corporeal in its performance, and resultant uncoupling, through an act of decomposition, from narratives of shame, blame and failure – produced a ‘sonority of silence’ for the movements of the breastfeeding dancers, with silence understood, as Nancy proposes, ‘not as a privation, but as an arrangement of resonance’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The resonance between dance and sound in Let Down offered a different view and sonic experience of the maternal body – a break with the expected – in which both a quietening of usual societal judgements and debates could occur, and in which unheard affective experience of breastfeeding mothers could be seen and amplified.

Attending to the material sound system of the body through a methodology of quietening offers an alternative approach to the choreography of affective experience. Through its refiguring of intermedial relations between the sonic and the corporeal in performance, quietening offers a feminist dramaturgy of disruption that works to destabilize enduring and seemingly ineradicable societal perceptions and judgements. It allows participants to listen to a sonic reimagining of personal, corporeal experience, while simultaneously viewing the corporeal reconfigurations that this experience necessitates. Through this tactic of uncoupling – dismantling and refiguring – quietening affords evasion of affective residues and narratives that would stick to a solely visually oriented representation, allowing the unheard to matter. Quietening also dwells in the unhomely collisions of social and private spheres, exposing the complex terrain of restrictive societal rules and expectations that maternal, and all ‘othered’, corporealities must navigate. The often discomforting resonances that emerge from this process raise further questions about aesthetic representations of the maternal (from the sanitized to the monstrous), and representations of female corporeality in performance and visual media more broadly. The sonic–corporeal dialogue of quietening generates a shared, intermedial space for these questions, in which quietened disruptive and cacophonous realities of embodied female experience can be acknowledged and sounded.