Birth of a Nation: A Belly Review
New Britain’s Hole in the Wall Theater brings the production of a choreopoem called Belly: An American Love Story to Connecticut audiences. This collection of performed poetry, written by Haile Eshe Cole, PhD, and directed by Lauria Maria Cabral, highlights Black women’s reproductive experiences across American history—uplifting the woes of enslaved African and African American women forced to birth America’s profit while nursing the next generation of slavers—also noting more current occurrences of Black Maternal Mortality and the real crisis that it is.
The cast, Rachel Ellis, Elizabeth Reynolds, Chryss Webster-Levine, and T’challa Williams, tell the stories too common to enslaved women in America, their bodies likened to livestock as acknowledged in the piece “In the Belly of the Beast.” Themes of pain beyond childbirth are prevalent, reflecting, in pieces like “A Childless Mother,” the truths of children separated from their mothers and sold—separately.
Cut to reflections of the Black Maternal Mortality epidemic, where Black women’s images are policed, as pieces like “On Respectability” unpack. They are deemed unsafe, as seen in “The Most Dangerous Place…” And they are 3-4 times more at risk of dying in childbirth, a truth that disturbingly reflects the histories of children being stripped from their enslaved mothers and giving rise to generations of motherless children. These themes, as weighty as they are, are necessary to acknowledge in the straightforward conversations and campaigns that champion them, as well as in the art that creates palatable depictions of the stories the statistics give way to.
The elements of this production, while slightly different from that of a standard theatrical production, still require attention to the intricacies of storytelling—lighting (Hilary Lang, Lighting Design) and sound (John Bosco and Laurie Maria Cabral, Sound Design) accent the actresses in the delivery of their poems and in the transitions between them. Choreography (Leslie Bivans, Choreographer) outlines the nuances of the stories that are shared. This and other volunteer-run productions assembled for the viewing public by Hole in the Wall Theater serve not only as a place for members of the creative community to share their work, but also offer a beautiful element—opportunities for the viewing public to volunteer to help the stories get told.
This run of Belly: An American Love Story ends on August 22nd, but be sure to check in with Hole in the Wall Theater to see what else is in store. For tickets, visit https://hitw.org/
