Paintings swallow people whole. Sketches bleed. Sculptures spring to life. On the gallery walls, madonnas routinely disappear, replaced by self-portraits of men. Art has a life of its own.

This is the world of Mother, created by Peeping Tom, a company capable of crawling right under your skin. The Belgium-based dance-theatre group, led by real-life partners Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, create work that defies logic. Their productions swirl with strange, surreal images. They swing from silly to unsettling in a few steps, until audiences are bamboozled. These are shows that refuse to be shaken off.

Last time they came to London, with 32 Rue Vandenbranden, Carrizo and Chartier won the Olivier award for best new dance production. Mother brings them back to the Barbican for the London international mime festival. Set in a shifting, amorphous art gallery with white walls and windowed rooms, it shows us a strange spectrum of motherhood. Pregnant women flail around in high heels. Cleaners splosh in flooded rooms. A coffee machine becomes a lover and a child lives her whole life in an incubator. All the way through, birth jostles with death; illness with care; machines with human creation. Its overload of imagery means it swims with ideas and, when I saw it in Helsinki last September, it left me rattled.

Mother is the second part of a trilogy. After 15 years collaborating, Chartier and Carrizo agreed to work alone for the first time. He would create a piece around fatherhood and she would make one about motherhood, before reuniting, in 2019, for a piece called Child. Chartier’s show Father, set in a nursing home, is just as jangling a watch. Janitors sweep the stage like zombies and pensioners are wheeled around like prisoners.

Both shows stemmed from the same thing: that moment in middle-age when one sees the full spectrum of life. Carrizo had recently lost her mother, and Chartier’s father is in care. Both felt the dynamic of parenthood flip on its axis. “When I was taking care of my mother, I felt time passing through me,” Carrizo recalls. “In seconds, you become the care-giver. Your parents are like children and suddenly you’re in the other role. This cycle of life exerts itself.” You see that in the shows themselves: death rattles roll into birth pangs, and middle-aged men and women are repeatedly infantilised.

This isn’t their first family trilogy. Peeping Tom began with three shows set across the rooms of a family home: garden, sitting room and finally, a crypt-like cellar as a proxy for death. Their daughter, then still an infant, appeared in one show. “The notion of family has always been there – right from the start,” says Carrizo. Chartier mulls over a reason: “Maybe because we don’t have a family close.” Both left theirs – in Argentina and France respectively – to make one of their own in Belgium. “We’re a bit alone in Brussels. Maybe we miss something.”



The two met as dancers in Alain Platel’s company Les Ballets C de la B, only to find themselves drawn together by what Chartier calls “the need to go deeply into character and story”. From the start, they sought something more theatrical, and in their very first show, Caravana, a travelling piece made for a real mobile home, everyday chores fizzed into explosive movement sequences. It imagined David Bowie’s estranged children holidaying together after meeting online and, in its blend of the banal and the fantastical, it keyed into the same twisted, Lynchian aesthetic as Shunt’s site-specific shows in London. From its success, the couple founded Peeping Tom in 2000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Twisted theatre … Peeping Tom’s Father. Photograph: Oleg Degtiarov

Dance-theatre, for them, is deliberately free-form. Sometimes scenes burst into full-blown dance routines. “It’s not dance or theatre,” Carrizo explains. “I don’t believe in this border. It’s just a thing: physicality, image, content.” The aim, always, is feeling and the point is that it goes beyond language. “I believe in telepathy,” says Chartier. “There’s something contagious about movement and dance.”

Peeping Tom’s choreographic style stems from that. It disavows beauty and elegance for something stranger; be it silly, entrancing or unsettling. “We try to destroy the classical ways of being virtuosic,” says Chartier, “but we’re still always looking for a ‘wow’ moment.” 32 Rue Vandenbranden, for instance, is full of contortions and over-extensions; bodies behaving in ways that beggar belief. At times, you’d swear someone was about to snap. The show just happened to have a super supple cast – including an ex-Olympic gymnast. “You’re always looking for extremities. You have to push the body to its limits – but bodies can go much further than you think.” It’s why Peeping Tom’s performers so rarely conform to dancerly norms and physical ideals. “It’s more touching if it’s a normal, non-dancer’s body,” explains Chartier. “There’s an identification with that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yi-Chun Liu in Peeping Tom’s Mother. Photograph: Herman Sorgeloos

Each of their shows starts with its setting. “It’s essential,” says Chartier, “We need to know where we are, then we look for who we are. If we have the situation, we can start to look for a quality of movement.” The aim, though, is always to make that space strange. Exploring community dynamics in 32 Rue Vandenbranden, they set their mobile-home village on a snowy mountain. Father’s nursing home is high-walled, like a subterranean prison. Mother’s museum is a shifting space – here a maternity ward, there a funeral parlour.

Devising shows over a period of months, the emphasis is on discovery and surprise. For Carrizo, it’s critical to “follow the process” wherever it leads. “You take a boat, knowing there’s a continent out there, but not knowing exactly where you’ll land. That feeling of not knowing is interesting.”

It’s why the pair split up professionally to make Mother and Father. It meant relearning their process; a fresh challenge for successful mid-career artists. “We always try to destabilise ourselves as artists and make something we don’t know how to make,” says Chartier. The art, you might say, has a life of its own.