How Emma Sandall’s fertility journey inspired a bold new cabaret

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE

When Emma Sandall read Sheila Heti’s bestselling book Motherhood, she resonated with its themes. Living in America, the writer and award-winning dancer had started to think about what her own story might look like — a story of fertility and IVF; of the choices that women make throughout their lives, and the pressures they face along the way. And what she envisioned was a “leg swinging, arm swinging” cabaret with music composed by Elena Kats-Chernin and performed by pianist Yanghee Kim.

Emma’s show An Ambivalent Woman of 37 is now showing as part of Sydney Fringe, and we caught up with the performer to learn more about her candid musical exploration of identity as inspired by Motherhood.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell us when you first came across Heti’s Motherhood.

I first came across Heti’s Motherhood in 2018. A dear friend who knew that I was going through a lot of motherhood questioning, and even IVF, suggested that I read the book because she’d read about it in The New York Times. I think she sent me that review and I ordered the book.

I was a female artist at the end of my childbearing years. And all the questions that Heti investigates, and all the dilemmas – be they social or in your relationship, or psychological or biological – they all resonated with me.

Not all of Heti’s story is my story. Her family is a Jewish family, and her grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz. So that’s not my story. The deep philosophical questions she raises about bringing a person into the world were all things that resonated with me.

When you introduced this work to me, you told me that the author was like a ‘key to your truth’. Emma, what is your truth?

I was in a relationship with someone. I had been pregnant several times. I was investigating IVF, but my heart wasn’t entirely in it. And this book became like a life raft for me. And turning it into the show has been like the process of getting myself to the other side of my fertility, if you will, which is in a way what Heti uses her book for as well.

Did you ever think it would be nice not to have to make a cabaret show about what women choose to do with their bodies? That is, how do you feel about the fact women are still being judged about their personal decisions

Yes. Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because this is just the time that I am living in.

We’re all born into different times. The times that my mother was born into, she often speaks about as being ‘the post-war years’. She was born in 1944, and she said that a lot of women were childless because men died in the war. So women found themselves spinsters and that was the reality. So she feels as though those women were perhaps judged less harshly than people like myself today when we’re in a world where it seems like women can ‘have it all’. There seems to be plenty of men around to choose from, and you have the choice to have a child or not.

So it seems like all throughout history, it’s going to change, isn’t it? How women’s bodies are treated, and how women who do not have children are viewed. Being currently the only physical entity that can produce another life, because we are the ones with the wombs. Perhaps society will always feel that it has its hands on our bodies. Perhaps that’s never going to change.

So tell me about this cabaret. You get up there on stage – what happens next?

I get up there on stage and I start telling the story, as it were. This is a total collaboration with text and music. The words throughout are almost like lyrics. In Elena’s score, sometimes they pop out independently, other times they’re embedded within it. I’ve written two songs that are loosely based on some of Heti’s ideas and some of my own, and Elena’s composed those songs.

What else? You know, I’m a dancer. There’s going to be a lot of leg swinging, arm swinging, gesticulating. And the other component is that throughout one of the things I found – this was one of the big inspirations of Heti’s book – is she’s a very visual writer. I find her imagery incredibly visual. It immediately for me inspires crazy animations, which is what my little brain does. I love to make animation. I love to move images around a screen and juxtapose images and do stupid things with images. I think that might be just because I’m deeply influenced by Monty Python, having watched a hell of a lot as a kid. And maybe, growing up as a kid in the 1980s, we watched a lot of cartoons. Maybe that’s something that’s embedded in my psyche. So when I read through Heti’s book and a lot of the scenes – the dreams that she has, all these things that she uses as sort of fascia throughout the book to bind the book together – I’ve done the same thing with my projections and my animations.

What was it like to work with Elena on those songs?

Absolutely amazing. Elena is absolutely incredible. She’s my kind of creator. She and I work at a very fast rate together. Ideas fly.

We take things in new directions spontaneously…I just wish that that had been filmed, the way those songs came about. She is incredibly smart and incredibly professional about her craft. She knows timing, she knows cadence, she knows dynamics. She gets a sense of when there’s too much music, when there’s too little music; she gets a sense of how the story needs to be moved along through the music. So her collaboration has been just an utter joy.

You were working in America when you collaborated with Elena. How did being in America at this time affect your creative output, and how do you feel those ideas carry into Australia?

Very, very interesting question. I was wondering this when I came back after my divorce – how this story would fit into Australia. Because in America it was very present and it still is, obviously. And I was living in Nashville, in the South, even. And I am taking the play back to Nashville just after the election this year, so that’s going to be very interesting too.

But I have found that even if it is not at the very forefront of topics as it is in America, it’s just beneath the surface here. It’s still something that touches us very profoundly. You just have to take a little peek and there it is…This is a topic that resonates very strongly with Australian women as well. And Australian men, honestly.

Dare I follow up – what will Australian men get out of the cabaret about this deeply personal story?

That’s a good question. I have performed this in front of men, and it does touch men. I think it’s eye-opening.

Being the sex that grows the life inside it – and dealing with the hormones associated with that, and the pressures associated with that – it’s obviously not something that a man will ever experience or understand in his life.

With my experience of my hormones and my desires, my sexuality, I’ve noticed that there’s a divide of trying to help the other – the partner – understand what you’re going through. And I think that this show will help men understand what women – what their partners, if they’re in a heterosexual relationship – what their partners are going through.

But this isn’t just for heterosexual couples…my main collaborator is a gay man in America. He’s my associate director. His name’s Paul Vasterling. And this story touches him profoundly. He thinks about it in relation to his mother as well. Because at the end of the day, I think this also helps us understand our mothers and what they’ve gone through, and our mothers’ mothers.

I think men will get a lot out of the show.

How do you hope to expand people’s minds or hearts through your show?

I think it is interesting some people read Heti’s book and were deeply frustrated with the central character, and that’s some people’s experience of this story and of this dilemma. But when you’ve got a body on stage that’s talking to you – and that’s guiding you through it, and that’s expressing it physically and emotionally and with humour – that’s a different way to experience this dilemma.

Some people might hate it, some people might love it. But I do hope that it elucidates what this is, what it feels like.