W.O.M.B. (Worth of My Body)

Becoming a mother brings many changes: the relationship to your body, to time and material things, to the sense of identity and heritage. Dancer, choreographer and artist Julienne Doko invites us to reflect on the body’s ability to change through the different cultural perceptions of motherhood in a performative work that celebrates the body that bears signs of having created life. In English, the term ‘stretch mark’ shows a negative assessment of body changes. In Doko’s native language, Gbaya from the Central African Republic, the marks are called ‘ancestral tattoo’, a word charged with pride in the continuation and transmission of life.