By Anabella Lenzu
During my MFA at Wilson College, PA in Summer 2017, I started using drawings to leave vestiges of my body and my movements on paper, using crayons, chalk and pastels.
Being a performance artist the remains of my dance have historically lived on as videos, photos, or simply in the memories of my spectators. The drawings that I left behind during the creative process of (and made during) my show “No More Beautiful Dances” were a precious treasure for me to come back to and remember the ephemeral moments of my live performance. (see some example drawings below)
Besides these drawings, I also started to think about the intimate personal landscapes where my dances develop, in the mouth and the mucus of the vagina. Research brought me to discover, and come back to images of my artistic feminine idols, including Venus and sculptures that celebrate feminine energy, fertility and maternity. When I lived and worked in Italy from 2002-2005, I frequently visited places like the Museo Provinciale Campano di Capua, Pozzo Sacro di Santa Cristina (Sardegna), The Nuraghi, and the Napoli Archeological Museum among many others. Being there and experiencing the energy of these places and images deeply influenced me for this new project “Listen to Your Mother”.
Back in the Summers of 2017 and 2018, my studio time was spent choreographing and drawing mouths, vaginas, uteri, vulvas, animals, and floorplans of magical places in Italy. I chose to work in watercolor, and created a body of work consisting of overlapping images, shapes, and colors that are a record of my response and synthesis of these visual ideas. Additionally, I also experimented with tracing the contour of my body parts ( hands, feet, head, breast, legs, etc).
I was interested in outlining the shape of this overlapping amalgamation, producing a kind of logo or sticker.
Exploring and improvising in choreography, I decided to enlarge and print these drawings to become masks. In rehearsal, I explored how these masks could cover not just my face but also different body parts. It did not work. No matter what I did, the result looked like something akin to a high school project… so I let the mask/drawings rest for a couple of years while I created and performed two more shows: “No More Beautiful dances” (2018) and “The night that you stopped acting/ La noche que dejaste de actuar” (2022).
Fast forward to Spring and Summer 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, where I found myself again researching and feeling a strong desire to draw more about these icons of feminine figures.
Drawing for me is a study of line, shape, texture, and empty spaces.
With repetition and re-exploration, my eye for detail grew sharper and new shapes emerged for me. I returned to water color because of the tonality and textures I can create.
This time the work needed to be larger. Drawing these feminine images at a different scale had the sense of invoking a sacred energy that I needed to capture. They took on a totem-like quality, like vertical objects to venerate.
During the Fall 2022, I asked my husband and photographer Todd Carroll to enlarge some of my drawings and produce them as large inkjet prints, so I could use them to perform, dancing over them, adding some writing, color, additional shape and texture during the live performances.
During 2023, I presented 3 work-in-progress performances at the 2023 Snug Harbor Dance Festival, Movement Research at the Judson Church and at OUT Front Fest at The LGBT Center in NYC. I was also selected as Artist In residence at Carroll Hall during 2023, where I created new and bigger drawings, some of them made on top of some self-portrait photos. After a month of residency, I presented an installation that May.
How did the drawings become projections? During my 2022 Parent Artist in Residency at Movement Research, I started creating new choreographic material for “Listen to Your Mother”. During this residency, I continued creating body-mapping images each rehearsal, but something changed…. The drawings became my inner landscapes, but it didn’t make sense to me for them to persist in a physical space. No, this did not work for me.
The drawings needed to appear and disappear, like thoughts and emotions that evaporate… so the video was the answer. The drawings needed to move, transform, metamorphose, lose the constraining outline and become volatile!
Todd Carroll and I worked together through much trial and error to make this possible. The drawings became the emotional environment I needed, inviting me to swim (and dance/perform) in an intangible space, where anything can appear or disappear.
On the road of this creative process, I need the environment first in order to be able to inhabit and experience it. The projections and the sound design (also Todd’s contribution) came before the dance this time. (A first for me – usually the dance is born first, and then costumes, set, and music…)
The sounds helped me to get in a specific mood. I needed to create my nest, rather than start out alone. Thanks Todd for creating it!
During the winter of 2024, “Listen to Your Mother” evolved drastically. The props and objects that I used in previous work-in-progress performances also disappeared. I did not want material things in the space. The only material thing I needed was my own flesh, my own body – and the projections.
I started using projections on my body in the section “Madres y mendigas/ Mothers & beggars?” In the previous showings, I used make-up crayons to trace lines and words on my body. It was a physical act.
In this new version, all this disappeared. The light of the projections create something that resembles tattoos on my body, fleeting illusions on my flesh. This interaction makes me feel like my body is transparent, that the drawings are ideas that stain my skin. Drawings of Skeletons also appeared on the stage, as custodians, like dogs guarding our memories and illusions and our deepest fears.
The first projection/drawing that opens the show is a drawing that looks like a piece of stained glass that you might see in churches that describe biblical stories. In my case, it’s the history of my body, from my first memories as a child, being bulimic, being deported, being handcuffed, having my kids, and suffering from panic attacks, all of these buried under bright colors under the colorful surface.
Additional AI images were generated by Todd for the scenes “Fogata de amor” and “Mother’s Interviews”.
“Listen to Your Mother” will be premiered at La Mama Moves Dance Festival in NYC, from May 16th-19th, 2024. Save the dates and get your tickets!
https://www.anabellalenzu.com/listen-to-your-mother
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