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 elementalborderline event, outside real space and time — a rarefied experience.
In their brand new production, The Symptoms attempt to recall, unravel and articulate this experience of childbirth, using body parts, words, and images.
The four dancers rely on their own personal memories of giving birth, including body functions, traumatic and euphoric at the same time. They try to turn inside out everything that happened to them inside the unconscious realm, beyond the closed eyes and beneath the skin.
“Consciousness fleets 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.”
