MARY & HER MONSTER
Mary and Her Monster is a live performance and an ongoing series of conversations and gatherings about mothering, monsters, and the futures we’re being sold.
The Performance
Mothering asked me to nurture the future — at the very moment I could no longer see one.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a young mother, a year after losing her first baby. It's a story about creating life and then abandoning it. Two centuries later, tech companies promise to build our future — Utopia! Apocalypse! — while we doomscroll our way through it.
Born from my own postnatal anxiety. New mothers lie awake over what they've made. The men building our future sleep just fine, dreaming of new life, new worlds, and total control.
In the dark, among shifting sound and shadows, the audience share what keeps them up at night, hum half-remembered lullabies, and lay a hand on the monster to decide what it becomes and how we care for it. Together, we create a horror story and find our way back to dreaming up a future.
The Conversations
What would the future look like if it were shaped by collective care, creativity, and imagination, instead of Tech Bro Saviours?
Throughout 2026 - 27, I’m running workshops with people who are already doing the work of mothering the future: mothers with lived experience of postnatal mental health challenges, women and non-binary people in tech, and creatives fighting for fairer AI. What they share will shape what the audience do, and what the monster becomes.
I’m also in conversation with artists, community-builders, researchers, and thinkers whose work explores birth, surveillance, AI ethics, the stories Big Tech tells about the future, and what we’re losing while we listen. Together, we’re asking what we might build instead.
These conversations will be shared here through recordings and writing as the project unfolds, so keep an eye out.
Supported by
Arts Council England, Battersea Arts Centre, Camden People’s Theatre, The Pleasance, Rich Mix, and Stanley Arts.
Early experiments have been shared at Pleasance Futures Festival, CPT’s Calm Down Dear, and Omnibus Theatre.
DIAL-A-FUTURE
Dial-A-Future is an app-based interactive audio experience that invites you to reflect on the direction you’re going in life. Using game design and original music, the work offers an immersive guided meditation, in which a candid automated attendant guides you through a series of questions and personalised responses. Part coaching session, part existential comedy, Dial-A-Future raises questions about how to live most fully yourself, when the world demands otherwise.
Download the app
Mute your notifications.
Find someplace quiet and comfortable to sit, where you will be undisturbed.
Listen through your headphones.
Tap the screen to answer the questions.
July 2021 | Originally commissioned by Attenborough Arts Centre
Written, Conceived, + Performed - Catherine Duquette
Original Music + Sound Design - Casually Here
App Design + Programming - Ed Biden
#INSTALOVE
Using the construct of a live dating game and an original dating app, this playable show shamelessly leads us to reveal what we do for love – from the playful to the pathetic, the pragmatic to the passionate. Every show depends on the audience - the themes they want to explore and the honest, emotional risks they want to take.
“Absolutely loved @catduquette's #Instalove. Life changing theatre. What a talent. There's nothing else like this show.” Audience Tweet
“An exciting social experiment and effective artistic coup - Duquette has an impressive talent for motivating complete strangers to emotionally strip in the merciless stage light and for creating a space to project all possible preferences.” Der Tagesspiegel, Germany
“Catherine Duquette is a flawless improviser who transitions from her prepared monologues to riffing off the audience’s reactions seamlessly.” EdFringe Review
Aug 2017 | theSpaceUK, Edinburgh Fringe Festival
July 2017 & Oct 2017 | Premiered at English Theatre Berlin International Performing Arts Centre
Director - Ruth Sergel | Costumes - Rebekka Dornhege Reyes | App Design - Ed Biden | Video - Dian Zagorchinov | Video Editing - Joseph Campbell | Photos - Jerun Vahle
CELEBRITY BOUND
In this real-time bid for fame, Catherine works with the audience, trying anything, to become a star all the while challenging our role as celebrity spectator/creator. The result is a complex deconstruction of how fame is made and how it shapes our understanding of the world from a young age.
“Duquette unabashedly and disarmingly invites her audience into a goal as noble as it is sincere – to be celebrated for her invention of personally interactive art for(u)ms examining social issues.” Huffington Post
“Catherine said everything I haven’t had the courage to say, especially as a woman in the arts.” Audience Feedback
March 2017 | Camden People’s Theatre
Oct 2014 & 2015 | English Theatre Berlin International Performing Arts Centre
Director - Ruth Sergel | Video - Joseph Campbell
ON PAPER | ON PRESENCE
Using video and paper craft, this live art intervention grapples with what it means to put a work on paper from the perspective of a writer and the dangerous pursuit of grasping and creating self by transferring ideas to the page.
May 2013 | Group Show, MOMENTUM, Kunstquartier Bethanien | Month of Performance Art Berlin
Nov 2013 | Group Show, TRAFO Arts Centre Poland
SIX EASY PIECES
In this rhythmic, interactive inquiry on depression, Catherine creates six intimate and at times violent narratives in relation to six objects: Belts, Stairs, Mirrors, Hands, Eyes, and Bodies.
Feb 2013 | Sophiensaele, 100 Grad Festival | English Theatre Berlin, ExpatExpo Festival
THE CLIMB
Using video and text, this 10 min piece investigates the notion of “climbing to the top” and the politically troubling walls we create to organize chaos, to define space and shape identity.
Someone is always above; someone is always below; and they all need each other to sustain the wall. But what happens if one chooses not to climb? What happens if one pauses in the pursuit?
June 2015 | Let Me In Festival, Berlin
Nov 2015 | 18591KM Art Exhibition, Silent Green, Berlin
CONTACT
In this rapid-fire, improvised 10 min rant, Catherine eviscerates the formality of breaking into an arts scene, making real time observations, demanding honesty from her peers, and fulfilling a wish for audience contact without explicitly asking for it.
May 2014 | Month of Performance Art Berlin