Laughing Gas - solo
Creative team
Conceived, written and performed by Vanio Papadelli
Dramaturg: Natalie Katsou
Sound artist: Michael Picknett
Oxytocin festival May 2023
Venue: Middlesex University
Laughing Gas is an autoethnographic performance research project that reflects on the complex realities of the use of language and physical handling in maternity care settings, predominantly in the UK and abroad. It advocates for treating childbirth as a life-affirming rite of passage against the often highly medicalised, invasive, patronising and sexist approaches to the birthing person or mother.
Presented as a site-responsive solo performance installation at Oxytocin festival (May 2023), Laughing Gas combined movement, text as audio, objects and audience interaction. It became a palimpsest of untold moments of violence enmeshed with immense joy and wildness that have taken place in real and imaginary maternity wards and birthing sites. By blurring metaphor with lived experience, human with more-than-human perspectives, it was shared as a meditative reflection on intergenerational memory and trauma. Part imaginary letter to a midwife, part surreal dreamscape, part confession and intimate interaction with the audience, the piece blurred the ‘I’ with the ‘You’ as a merging of interiorities, states and voices.
Testimonial
' Vanio presented a visually arresting and engaging participatory performance of Laughing Gas at Oxytocin Collective Care 2023. Her work poetically asks us to stop, listen and pay attention to the flaws of the birthing system and the consequences falling on birthing people. ' SLQS, Producer at Oxytocin Collective Care 2023 for Procreate Project.
Other outputs that have emerged through my research for Laughing Gas include slideshow material for research and teaching, two conference papers and a visual essay (upcoming publication).
Clarence Mews residency, 2019: presented as a work-in-progress for invited audience with the title Deer Mother
Arts&Health Hub online sharing of draft video 2021
Mothers who Make online sharing of performative slideshow 2021
Oxytocin festival, 13th May 2023 (Middlesex University, London): public performance installation
Laughing Gas: multimodal processes of writing for autobiographical performance' May 2023: online paper for the online research symposium 'Multimodal translation in the arts: (multi)modalities, languages and codes in/as translation?'
A reimagining of a maternity ward, February 2024: online paper for the international conference 'Interdisciplinary hybrid conference ‘Performing Care and Carelessness’
The next phase of the project's development aims to include material from stories of other women and birthing people from diverse cultural, ethnic and economic backgrounds. I have already facilitated one-to-one R&D online movement and writing sessions with women who shared their experiences in creative ways (July 2023) and will continue running more sessions in the near future.
Feedback from participants.
"...tackling the complex experience of labor through movement and writing and in an organic relation to the body through practice, proved to be an invaluable tool to deal with and reflect on the non-verbal and irrational aspects of labor, linking body, mind and heart. Sharing her own experience as a mother and utilizing various techniques from her artistic practice, Vanio’s sessions contained moments of revelation for me, both on a personal and artistic level. The care and attention she brought to every indication and her precision and clarity in formulating every request provided me with confidence and ease and helped me dig into unknown places. The choices she made in the procession of each of the three sessions and the links she created with the natural world and the arts were very inspiring.
I am grateful to have had the chance to work with Vanio on this topic, and look forward to connecting with her more deeply in the future."
"What a unique gift! We shared stories, we listened to each other, we danced and laughed and moved together... AND I was given a chance to go back in time and really delve deep into the beginning of it all: the birth of my child and my birth as a mother."
Images by Katie Edwards
Image by Katie Edwards
Laughing Gas promo video - Oxytocin 2023
When I arrived at the hospital to give birth to my son, I had an encounter with a senior midwife that left a bitter and painful taste staying with me long after birth. Her words:
"You are not supposed to be crying, you’re supposed to be laughing. We gave you laughing gas.”
And later…
“You can’t be in as much pain as you’re describing. Only a few women experience that much pain this early in labour.”
Laughing Gas is a reparative adventure and a wild act of empathy and love.
Drawing strength from a long lineage of women who have given birth under harsh circumstances, in the wild, unprotected, powerful forces of nature, my small story feels enhanced by an ancestral knowledge inscribed on a more-than-human level.
How can trauma that petrifies and alienates, divides and contracts melt the edges and be subverted into a space for connection? Can caring and loving be perceived as action, as a verb, as a practice for freedom (bell hooks) within and beyond the scope of the labour ward?
Painogram. Mixed media collage: still of egg on computer screen. Vanio Papadelli (2024)