Listen to your Mother

--  By Tom Phillips 

It's a work in progress, and it has a long way to go, so this is not a review.  Just the facts. 

On the evening of January 18, 2023, dancer-choreographer-teacher-mother Annabella Lenzu took two saturated sponges, placed them on her breasts and squeezed until water ran down her slip and onto the floor at the LGBTQ Center in Greenwich Village. 

This demonstration of what it feels like to be full of milk was just one of the indelible images left by her half-hour showing of "Listen to Your Mother," a feminist rant about the problems of being an artist and a mother -- an impossible combination of callings.  It's almost too much to bear -- but Lenzu bears it, so we have no way out.  

She enters crawling under a bag of burdens, babbling incoherently, to a chorus of crying babies on the soundtrack.  She quotes theatrical director Jerzy Grotowski on the purpose of theater -- to make the invisible visible --- and then curses him out: "How much child care and housework did Grotowski do??"

She stands up, puts on her glasses, empties the contents of her handbag on the floor -- her life, objectified -- and talks to us grownups about what makes a good artist, and what makes a good parent.  It's the same thing, of course: love, and the instinct to give it away, to communicate.  

It's a masculine archetype, she says, that creates  the impossible demand to be simultaneously independent and submissive.  She feels guilty for taking even an hour of time for herself.  For once, we husbands and fathers are red in the face, knowing that we take time whenever we need it.  Our arts are not subject to the screams of infants.  

The wonder is that women artists are outdoing men today -- and Lenzu is among them.  Her project is still in its infancy; she's interviewing  immigrant mothers like herself on the contents of their bags and their lives.  

And it's good to know, amid all this woe, that the guy taking pictures, who made the soundtrack and shot the five-minute movie "In Between" featuring Lenzu as a body in constant use -- is her husband and long-time collaborator Todd Carroll.  I bet he even takes care of the kids sometimes.  But he'll never be dripping with milk. 

-- Copyright 2023 by Tom Phillips 
Photos by Todd Carroll