Words by Katie Hagan.
This week, Amarnah Ufuoma Cleopatra and Stefania Pinato will present WOMB PARTY, a new dance theatre work that celebrates choice, bodily autonomy and womb consciousness.
I was very fortunate enough to see an early version of this work back when Amarnah and Stefania did their first round of research and development at The Place’s artist development programme, Choreodrome, back in 2022.
Three years on, I caught up with Amarnah and Stefania about how to create a party in the womb, vulva set designs, and why it’s important to use art to platform reproductive rights…
Q: Tell us about WOMB PARTY?
Amarnah: WOMB PARTY is a dance theatre piece inspired by our experience in abortion. We really wanted to think about how we could use our skills as artists to destigmatise the topic, as both of us have had our own experiences, and felt shame, stigma and guilt at various times in our journey through abortion.
Being able to talk to each other about our own experiences helped us feel lighter about our choices. Over the course of our research and development, we realised there were other people who have these feelings, and we wanted to think about abortion as a way to celebrate choice and bodily autonomy, as opposed to something that you should be ashamed or scared to talk about.
So we considered what is the container to hold a place where we can celebrate choice, where we can talk about bodily autonomy, and where we can also be caring to ourselves and the people that experience the show.
Stefania: The arc of WOMB PARTY is a potential real life journey finding out that you’re pregnant, weighing the pros and cons if you want to be pregnant or not.
Amarnah: We worked with a script writer – Andrea Heaton – and during a big brainstorm, one of the ideas was to create a party. And what if it was inside the womb? And what if pregnancy was an unexpected guest?
So the premise of WOMB PARTY is that everyone is invited to a party in our womb, and we (Fanny and Gina) are trying to make it successful. But we keep on getting interrupted, with pregnancy being the first uninvited guest, and then Patrick, the patriarchy, the second. All these things encroach on our womb space, our womb consciousness, so much so that it changes our experience of being inside our womb. We get angry because all these external things are making us feel rubbish about ourselves, when we know deep down that what we want to do is ask pregnancy to leave. It’s about celebrating the power that we have to make a choice that is right for us.
Q: How have current legislations and anti-abortion laws and propaganda fed into this work?
Stefania: In the first phase of R&D, we were focusing on gathering information about abortion and reproductive rights mainly in the UK, but also looking worldwide. It was important to put ourselves in the perspective of what’s going on everywhere else, and where also the UK could potentially go, because it’s a continuously shifting scenario.
So as we were researching, all of the conservatism, abortion laws and anti-abortion propaganda were coming through in North America and South America. And it prompted us to dig deep into the history of abortion to look at how certain societies have got there. We looked at the history of abortion, the first records of abortions, ancient abortion methods. And then the social intentions behind abortion.
Amarnah: It feels very necessary to make WOMB PARTY from a privileged position of being based in the UK. We are the ones that can help the wider fight for reproductive rights by putting it in front of more audiences.
Audiences might come away feeling in solidarity. They might feel more prepared if they have an abortion in the future. But also, they might feel like they have a bit more knowledge of the topic, to be able to speak about it and stand up for those rights. So WOMB PARTY feels like a necessary kindness, which is also the title of a book about abortion.
Q: How did you also take care of yourselves during the process after going through abortion yourselves?
Amarnah: That was a really important strand of it. We had dance breaks where we just put on some music and danced. We worked with an energy work healer. We had a social justice practitioner to help ground us and give us confidence.
Obviously me and Stefania had quite different journeys, but just by coming together, it made us realise we also had different needs and responses. So it was really important that we just built our own space and respected what each other needed. It was really empowering to have that choice.
We listened to other stories, read other people’s stories, and spoke to our friends about their stories. As soon as I talked to my mum about the show, I found out she’d had that experience too. That gave me more fuel to foster this need to talk about abortion. I had my abortion when I was 16, and if I knew, if my mother told me about her experience, then I would have told her. But it took me more than 10 years to tell her.
Q: Who else are you working with?
Stefania: We realised quite early on in the process that we couldn’t do this alone. We wanted this work to include as many voices as possible. So as well as working with Andrea, we have worked with Lea Tirabasso who helped with the choreographic process. Emma Williams, a costume and set designer based in Leeds, has designed costumes and our set, which, among other things, features a big vulva outside of the door. Barnaby Booth is doing the lighting design. And we’ve got Johanna Bramli and Ed Chivers as sound designers and music composers.
Q: What role does humour have in the work?
Amarnah: I think it’s a good way to gently and softly invite people into the topic. What we realised with our research was that more often than not, having an abortion gave so much relief, space for joy, space for agency. So there’s a lot of ways that we celebrate that.
I also think it’s a way to find common ground. I think humour and laughter is a release, as much as crying, but laughter is a way that can help us release and allow energy to move through us.
Stefania: We have put a lot of care into this humour and have done it in a way that provides a cushion of comfort and safety. We could have pursued a more serious approach, yet humour felt the most natural to us. In the sharings that we did a lot of people said that humour was the better direction.
Amarnah: We really want people to feel impassioned to take a stand or support others, or to talk about their own story. But I think most importantly, we want people to leave feeling celebrated, and that women or people with wombs are something to celebrate.
In a world where there are so many things that disempower us or try to make us small, or try to control what we do, let’s try and take as many opportunities as we can to take up space, to practice freedom, to offer people a chance to feel empowered themselves.
Q: How will WOMB PARTY evolve?
Amarnah: Touring WOMB PARTY would be amazing! But another really important thing to mention is that when we were doing the research, we realised how little information there is about dancers returning to work after experiencing an abortion. As dancers, it is very unlikely you will be able to go back to the physical requirements that our work demands from us after two days, which is the statutory amount of time to return to “normal” activity. Doing abs for a living isn’t the kind of thing that you can do two days after an abortion! Many people had to do that, and suffered in silence at work, not being able to tell their employer they needed time off. That’s not ok! We should be able to have that conversation without fears.
As we were very public with the research we were doing, our friends asked us for advice if they had an abortion and then an audition / workshop / tour date the next day. And it was like, wow, we need to do something about it. So we got in touch with One Dance UK, and we’re in the final stages of creating a guide: Navigating Abortion and Returning to Physical Activity. This document needs to be easily accessible for all dance schools, organisations and independent artists in the UK.
WOMB PARTY runs this week at The Place from 25-26 April. Visit here to book.