About

“Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.”

Allyson Darakjian // Performance, sound, costume, 2022

“A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language — and it has always been so” - Julia Kristeva

I remember reading the book Goodnight Moon to my first child when he was only a few months old. Even though he couldn’t understand the words, the pressure to engage my child constantly in meaningful ways, like reading books to him, was ever present. As an exhausted, lonely new mother one evening I read Goodnight Moon and got to the page, “goodnight nobody, goodnight mush,” and cried because it expressed the isolation and sadness I felt. This performance was born at that moment. This work is about the experience of maternity as a shift of the self in which one becomes disembodied and the feeling of motherhood always being on the precipice of nonsense.

The character Goodnight Mother is made up of elements directly relating to the book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. The costume components act as metaphors and symbols of the physical restrictions and limits imposed on my pregnant and postpartum body. I play with humor, absurdity, dissonance, and oddity, mirroring the repetitive, rhythmic pattern of the book. The intersubjective space of my maternal body, and the limited time of pregnancy, is a physical extension of my desire to create something between form and language, between performance and painting, between logical and illogical, between text and wordlessness.

The framework of these explorations exist as an extension of the two-dimensional plane, a middle space between performance and painting. Using my whole body as a constant measure of how to explore the work or questions, I have created a multi-sensory experience inspired by the re-telling of my own relationship to the story Goodnight Moon. By creating a character adorned and dressed using elements from the children’s book, I am further abstracting the text and combining my own physical body in it’s reenactment as a bridge between personal interpretation of the text, my own experience of relating it to motherhood, creating a unique alternate, present embodied emotional response.