ANABELLA LENZU

Listen to Your Mother, (World Premiere), a performance artwork, choreographed and performed by Anabella Lenzu, explored spoken word, movement, and media at the La MaMa Moves! Festival.

Lenzu combined her many talents as a choreographer, visual artist, scholar, and performer in this tightly woven, intricate work, revealing the inner landscape of women, the female body, motherhood’s complexities, working women artists, and the significance of live theater. The collaboration of her husband, Todd Carroll as tech, sound, and visual designer, and daughter, Fiamma Lenzu-Carroll, performer, added to the significance of her artistic investigation of motherhood. 

She introduces the piece by lecturing the audience at a podium, quoting theorist Jerzy Grotowski: “Theater is a place where the invisible… a deeper reality can appear.”  Transforming from the lecturer to choreographer-performer, Lenzu explores her own deeper reality. She trudges across the back with weighted, workmanlike steps, carrying a heavy burden on her head, depicting the labor involved in creating an exquisite mosaic design presented on a screen behind her. 

The mother/artist identity is realized with the soundtrack of a baby crying relentlessly while her voluptuous, well-endowed body rises and falls to heavy breathing, hair covering her face. She traces her body parts with chalk: breasts, knees, belly… her body now an art form, while the domestic sounds continue to resonate and jar her movements. 

Soon, Lenzu reorganizes, switching roles again, walking back to the lectern to ask: “What makes a good mother?” “What makes a good artist?”

Returning to the stage, spiralling onto the floor, then sitting, she laughs with deep sighs as the relentless sound of the crying baby continues; then she cries, reflecting the ambiguity and anguish of her many roles. “Motherhood is not sexy,” she says. 

Referencing her knowledge and reverence of dance history, she now performs an eloquent, poignant solo by Isadora Duncan, Mother (1921), a dance about Duncan’s grief after the deaths of two of her children, but also about any mother’s grief over “letting go” of a child who matures and leaves the nest. 

This solo beautifully segues as her ten-year-old daughter appears on stage in a white gown, dancing a balletic solo to Franz Liszt’s Dream of Love. Anabella, as choreographer and mother, watches from the side, gently approving, then joining at the end, walking together to the back of the stage to look at the projected art, proud mother/teacher and talented daughter.

Many voices of female artists (Anabella interviewed as research) are now heard talking of “courage,” “a force of nature,” “it wasn’t a sacrifice, it was an investment,” ”having a child is humbling,” while Lenzu invades the audience with a microphone, directing it to anonymous viewers as if they are the ones speaking these universal confessions. 

Lastly, her daughter reappears on stage, this time in a red gown with a red scarf, as Anabella joins her in an elegant duet to samba music by Mercedes Sosa. (Anabella passes the artistic torch to her daughter). 

Lenzu takes great risks in this profoundly original, tour de force work, revealing her own body, semi-nude, in awkward, sometimes sexual displays; while simultaneously voicing the struggles, deep loneliness, and pleasures that often accompany the labors of creation in motherhood and artwork. 

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman