Care and Symmetry: Beth Gill’s Electric Midwife
Challenging us to see how symmetry can manifest care, Beth Gill’s 2013 dance piece, Electric Midwife, performed at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX, features women, stillness and water, uniting what is symmetrical in all our lives—the need for care of body and communion with others. This review must acknowledge that the performance was filmed and as such, the experiential impact of being in close proximity with these moving and breathing bodies was lost. However, that same limitation created an opportunity to understand an exclusively female experience episodically. Distanced from the immediacy of primal, bodily need, it was easier to abstract and therefore contemplate fully what proximity does to bodies in motion who have needs and those who wish to care for them.
Set in a blank, proscenium, box space, there are two parallel black lines painted on the center of the floor, dividing the stage in half and creating what seems like an endless pathway. The audience, intentionally kept small (only fourteen people), faces this area. The six performers are grouped in pairs. Each pair has a movement trajectory, and each dancer has her own partner on the other side of the center lines matching her course. The performers take us silently through sequences that underscore what it is to witness and support a woman during labor. There are gentle, repeated movement cycles at first, the dancers remaining in close proximity center stage. Later, one pair becomes the focal point. Are they, perhaps, representing the Woman herself?
They move with a strength that initiates the others’ sequences. There are frequent pauses in which the group stands in stillness, waiting, anticipative of the next sequence. And then the Woman pair moves down stage, leading the group to expand their movements as the pace quickens and the space they create grows. They breathe through these “contractions” as a supported yet independent unit. The mechanical, electrically produced score, performed live by Jon Moniaci, begins halfway through, accompanying the movement with stark, that comes in waves of single tones that feel as if it will go on indefinitely. When this sound later returns, it is accompanied by a vamping electric piano chord. A cacophony of larger, quicker sequences culminates in one pair retreating, another finding water, and the Woman pair squatting center stage, alone. How much this can say about birth is without limit. It conjures many memories and underscores how regardless of the caring persons that may surround her, the birthing woman must do what she must do on her own. It can’t be done for her. The end brings all the performers to resting poses in the semi-darkness, some lying on the floor, some sitting but all still present, with us and with each other, as though bonded in a silent agreement to stay with the Woman’s experience, to the end.