a duet by Banning Bouldin

in collaboration with Madison Brott & Phylicia Roybal

Echo Mother is the Banning’s latest work, inspired by her lived experience as a parent living with a disability, Echo Mother builds a world where two women move as if they are both builders and inhabitants of the same body. Their actions—washing, folding, lifting, soothing—recur like unfinished tasks, accumulating until movement dissolves into abstraction. The duet conjures a dwelling made not of walls but of gestures, where every touch leaves an imprint and every task multiplies.

At times the mothers/dancers mirror one another; at others, they fuse into a multi-limbed creature, a body with too many hands, too many legs—simultaneously tender, burdened, and uncanny. Moving through sculptural tableaus, they evoke the physical tropes of childcare and housework while reshaping them into a private, almost subconscious vocabulary.

The work traces the blurred line between self and other, labor and love, exhaustion and resilience, unfolding as a dialogue between presence and memory, between what is voiced and what remains unsaid. In Echo Mother, motherhood emerges not only as labor but as language: a tongue carried in muscle, a grammar written in hands, an inheritance both intimate and haunting.

Choreographed and performed by Banning Bouldin with Madison Brott and Phylicia Roybal
Music by Barbara, Jon Hopkins, JS Bach, and The Books
Runtime 20-25 minutes

Initial rehearsals for the duet began at Cenntennial Performing Arts Center.
The work was then performed, as a first iteration, during a residency inside Bastion, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Nashville.
Further rehearsals were conducted at Morgan Park Community Center.
And in May 2026, the duet, now known as Echo Mother, premiered at the Wortham Center in Asheville, North Carolina.