A performance that gives birth to itself.
Four dancers attempt the impossible: to get the audience to partake of the experience of giving birth. They share their own personal stories and memories of being in labor, including bodily functions, traumatic and euphoric events. They try to turn everything inside out that happened to them in the unconscious realm: beyond closed eyes and beneath the skin. They use humor, powerful phisicality, words, images and sounds.
To everyone that was ever born and is still alive.
We don’t remember how we were born, and we won’t be able to tell the story of our dying. Giving birth is an equally elemental, borderline event, outside real space and time — an extraordinary experience.
ving birth is an equally elemental, borderline event, outside real space and time — an extraordinary experience.
The four dancers rely on their own personal memories of giving birth, including body functions, traumatic and euphoric events at the same time. They try to turn everything that happened to them in the unconscious realm inside out, beyond the closed eyes and beneath the skin.
Consciousness flees through the door of the maternity ward. Eyes shut tight. It’s the baby who calls the shots now. Mother crawls, stands up, climbs a few stairs, falls asleep, sideways or on her back, kneels down, finds something to grab. She expands and contracts back again. She pulses. She sweats. A new rubber material has been invented that can stretch to infinity and beyond, to the point closest to death. She turns back before the gates of the unknown. The sphynx are waving. Only the hair so far. Something ripping. Head first. Pause. Pauses and pushes: measures of evaporated time. Now a ninety-degree turn. A shoulder squeezes through. And then the rest slips out.
Director-choreographer: Réka Szabó
Choreographer’s assistant: Viktória Dányi
Dancers: Dóra Furulyás, Csilla Nagy, Melinda Virág, Viktória Dányi / Juli Huzella
Music: Zsolt Hammer, Ádám Jávorka
Dramaturgy: Sára Gábor
Visual design, creative technology: Glowing Bulbs, Bence Samu, Tóbiás Terebessy
Consultant: György Árvai
Light: Attila Szirtes
Costume: Edit Szűcs
Co-production partner: Trafó House of Contemporary Arts
