“This is me, dancing very very fast and very very pregnant.”
Director, actress, and classically trained musician Anke Retzlaff – acclaimed by cinema, television, and theater alike – cuts a path through the thicket of audience voices together with her team. The topic? A primal experience that connects us all: birth – the most intensely intimate and at the same time socially monitored moment of life.
While pregnancy and birth could hardly be more personal, they are subject to a kind of constant social surveillance and boundary-crossing. The – potentially – pregnant body becomes a projection screen for others, and the person disappears behind her pregnancy: her body becomes a dance floor for society. In BIRTH FACTORY, texts by Kathrin Liess merge with personal stories woven into the music: voices from the audience telling of the desire for children, unsuccessful attempts to conceive, miscarriages and abortions, a wide range of birth experiences, fears, and existential moments at the threshold between life and death. Beneath it all, a bass throbs like a heartbeat.
With her music performance, Anke Retzlaff creates a space for a wide spectrum of experiences and emotions functioning somewhere between a club and a womb: “The experiences people have on the path toward or during pregnancy and birth are so intimate and existential. Yet many of these emotionally and physically challenging processes are taboo, associated with shame, fear, judgment, or exclusion, and take place in secrecy – which can lead to isolation and suffering. I long for a fearless, diverse, and at the same time much more attentive culture of exchange about this complex subject, especially about those experiences that often remain unheard. For me, BIRTH FACTORY serves as an artistic counterpoint to this silence.”
On viola da gamba, lute, and synthesizers, she plunges into the fray together with Peter Florian Berndt and Dominik Tremel. Come and be born!
