MARIA SWISHER
"...but would I rather be the mother of endangered moths and salamaders?"
THE STORY
ALL THE CHILDREN I NEVER HAD is a solo performance ritual, visceral multimedia experience, and interconnected laboratory exploring the radical choice to have children in the Anthropocene. Set during a 2024 egg retrieval in Mexico City, the narrative documents a real-time confrontation with fertility as body-horror documentary bleeds into a hormone-induced fever-dream.
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Guided by a gender-fluid, archetypal doppelgänger and an ethereal Axolotl psychopomp, Maria navigates a "magical psychosis" where the boundaries between biology and the environment dissolve. ATCINH interrogates the lives that could have been in the parallel universes where Maria chose motherhood, transforming a clinical procedure into a mythic journey through the Earth's 6th Great Extinction Event.
THE VISION
Merging radical embodiment with visceral ecology, the piece leans into dark humor and absurdist spectacle to face existential dread head-on. This is an immersive collision of documentary footage, live performance, and raw, heightened physicality—a "Theatre of Panic" for a new century.
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By utilizing experimental puppetry and surreal imagery to bring the subconscious to life, the production blurs the lines between clinical reality and mythic ritual. The work seeks to break through systemic numbness and find a new kind of visceral power in the wreckage.
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Development Status: Currently in development for a 2026/2027 premiere.