Mama Anabella

Distance / decay / by Pioneers Go East Collective
Anabella Lenzu, choreographer/performance artist
Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, director & filmmaker
LaMama Experimental Theatre Club
New York, New York
May 8, 2026
--- By Tom Phillips 

In the unlikely event that women ever achieve equal rights in America, someone should put up a statue of Anabella Lenzu. In her new solo, she dances the full scope of humanity in female form.  

Distance /decay / begins in captivity. To a sound track of solitary, sad poetry by the late Argentine feminist Alejandra Pizarnik, Lenzu adds the scratch of a live microphone on her tight sequined party dress. She circles her breasts and digs into her belly, searching for the life within. She strips off the glitz, down to a leotard and bare legs, but then has to tear up a series of pictures and diagrams that cover her torso and face. Gaining strength with each false image that falls to the floor, Lenzu picks up a huge megaphone, shouts into it, but abruptly gives up and covers her head with it.

What follows is a demonstration of the power of dance drama. Lenzu dons a deep red cape and performs a slow, fierce tango. Then she straps her legs like a Roman gladiator and marches with soaring battements across the stage, slashing the air with her cape like a bullfighter. Rocked back in our seats, struck dumb, we watch as she exits and a minute later returns with a sweet smile and a modest bow—once again a mother, teacher, artist and friend..

A double immigrant from Argentina and Italy, Lenzu radiates the warrior ethos of ancient Rome and the steely dignity of flamenco and the bull ring, without losing a drop of her maternal warmth and intelligence. Grazie, Anabella. We get it.

Masculine Feminine Vangeline

 MAN WOMAN 
Directed, choreographed, and performed by Vangeline
Costumes by Machine Dazzle
Music by Ray Barragan Sweeten
Lighting by Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa
LaMama Moves! Festival at LaMama Experimental Theater, New York
April 18, 2026

-- By Tom Phillips 

Butoh artiste Vangeline continues to amaze and delight.  Last year she was synching brain waves with a male Japanese dancer in a piece (which I didn’t see) called Man/Woman. This year she has dispensed with punctuation and partner, and become a complete being —male and female, animal, vegetable and mineral, down to earth and out of time. She calls it Man Woman.

This world premiere began with an image of woman weighed down with the colossal couture of a male-dominated world. All that’s visible of her is a pretty face encased in an enormous wad of robes, ruffles, and feathers – a trophy queen topped with a fanned-out black cockade, imprisoned by imperial edict. Left alone, she wrinkles her nose, puckers her chin – then discovers her hands amid the feathers, and tortuously works herself free, limb by limb.

A Woman in Full: Sexual Symbolism in Jane Austen's EMMA

 

It’s a Big Birthday, a Sestercentennial celebration.  Jane Austen turned 250 December 16, 2025, with her reputation at an all-time high, her face now on Britain's ten-pound note, back-to-back with the King.  

Born in 1775, the second daughter and seventh child of a country clergyman, farmer and teacher, Austen began writing around the age of ten and never stopped until her death at 41. She lived in a time of colonial turmoil and imperial warfare; her male characters include swashbuckling naval officers, a slave-owning patriarch, and members of parliament. But her scenes are set in the quiet English countryside, and her focus is inward, and female.  

Austen revolutionized the art of fiction — turning it inside out with a deceptively informal technique that became known as free indirect discourse. From a perch within her characters’ sense and sensibilities, she chronicled and commented on their thoughts and feelings, creating a dialectic between narrator and character.  She knew not only what they knew but also what they didn’t know about themselves, i.e. their unconscious drives and motives. And among these was sexual desire — a subject out of bounds for a female writer of Austen’s day, but as ubiquitous in a 19th-Century English village as anywhere in the world.

Little is known about Austen’s private life; her sister Cassandra burned most of her letters. However, one can hardly grow up with naval officers — her brothers — and share a bedroom with a sophisticated elder sister, without learning the ways of the world. And the world of Regency England was a school for scandal. While still a young woman, Austen spent five years in the urbane society of Bath, and displayed a keen knowledge of its dancing rooms and dating rituals in Northanger Abbey. She returned to the countryside a woman in full, and the novels of her mature period, beginning with Mansfield Park and Emma, reflect not just literary brilliance but depth of emotional experience.

Destiny's Dance: Willa Cather's MY ANTONIA as American History and Revelation

 

Photo:  Jorn Olsen

-- By Tom Phillips  
 Originally published in The Willa Cather Review, Vol. 66, number 2.  Summer 2025

        Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is often read as a lyrical meditation on America’s frontier past. However, Cather defended herself stoutly against charges of escapism, or “supine Romanticism.”  She believed in Art as Revelation.  Alongside her paean to the prairie is a sharp critique of middle-American society and a vision of the conflicts that would roil this country to this day, over issues of ancestry, color, gender, language, and class.

The story of the Shimerdas illustrates the paradox of immigration–America’s xenophobic openness, a “nation of immigrants” that fears and shuns foreigners. This is the context of Ántonia’s father’s suicide, and her own hard-won independence. In the end she builds a little Bohemia, a burgeoning family farm at a distance from town. Speaking her native language with her children, she is worn down but not defeated by her struggles with the English-speaking establishment of Black Hawk, Nebraska. Meanwhile, Jim Burden’s retreat to the East--to Harvard Law and moneyed Manhattan–conveys the chasm between coastal elites and the agricultural heartland.  The legacy of slavery also makes a central appearance in the plot. And the whole is shadowed by an indigenous civilization all but erased by America’s “manifest destiny.”

At the same time, the long, loopy romance between Jim and Ántonia--unconsummated but never abandoned–suggests the potential for reconciliation. And Cather’s constant evocation of the landscape places all her characters on common ground. As Lena Lingard says, “it ain’t my prairie.” The beauty and mystery of the land belongs to all; sun and wind diffuse the strains of a pluralist culture where change is rapid and trust often fleeting.                                       

Air Boxing in Brooklyn

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Photo: Lisabel Leon 

No one who has seen a championship boxing match, and watched the fighters fall into each others' arms at the final bell, can doubt the emotional power and depth of boxing.  No sport offers a better metaphor for life, in all its glory and humiliation.  

Shadowboxing is something else.  It's punching the air, the only target being an image of yourself.  In boxing, it's an essential training exercise.  As a metaphor for life, it runs the risk of self-obsession.  That seems to be case with "Shadowboxing in Blue," an all-female production of music, dance, theater, boxing, and psychology, that will disappoint fans of all five disciplines. 

Calling 9/11 Again

---By Tom Phillips 

I wrote this in 2021, re-read it today, and didn't change a single word.  

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Photo by Jesse Mills

Out for a late-night walk this week, I saw what’s become a familiar sight in September — a beacon shining up from the former site of the World Trade Center. This lonely blue beam seemed a symbol of the narrow view Americans have taken on the events of twenty years ago.

I knew people who were killed in the World Trade Center that day, and others who barely escaped. The thousands of civilians who died were victims of an atrocious war crime. Even so, I agree with those who say it’s time to re-examine what happened and why.

The 9/11 assault on America was not an isolated act of “terrorism.” It was a shot heard round the world, as momentous as Lexington and Concord — -the opening battle in a clash of civilizations. It’s a war that was long in coming, still going on, and which we are inexorably losing.

The George W. Bush administration was warned of the 9/11 attacks by US intelligence which it chose to ignore. But the public had been warned much earlier— in a 1993 essay by a Harvard historian. In the journal Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote that the next world war would be a “clash of civilizations” — a counter-raid by conservative Muslim and Confucian societies against America’s world empire.

Huntington’s essay was hastily dismissed by other historians. In a follow-up issue of Foreign Affairs, middle-east maven Fouad Ajami insisted that world wars could only be fought by state powers. Ajami later became a supporter of the US invasion of Iraq, which was in line with his theory but detached from reality. The reality is that the United States is the leader not of a free world, but a failed world, and its enemies are those who don’t want to live in it.

Our nation was founded on a unique phrase — the “pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s declaration was based on English philosopher John Locke, who argued for the rights of “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson preferred a final phrase so vague that it could inspire both a runaway slave and the bounty-hunter chasing him through the woods.

Thus we have pursued happiness for nearly 250 years, and wound up more miserable than we began. As F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in The Great Gatsby — “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

Happiness has taken the form of outsize property holdings, low taxes, racial privilege, gouging the environment, exploitation of labor, disregard for the poor, and a glut of consumer products, from salty snacks to SUVs, designed to addict their users — -all wrapped in an avalanche of plastic waste. We’ve had our ups and downs, but starting on 9/11, the world delivered its verdict on the American empire.

Thumbs down.

-- Copyright 2021, 2025 by Tom Phillips 

Dancing the Future: AI at the Battery

 --By Tom Phillips 

Battery Dance in Frontiers: Photo by Steven Pisano

“Why do they all look so mean and weird?” whispered my companion as we watched six black-clad dancers writhe and scuttle, spin and splay on a stage by the Hudson River. “Maybe they’re zombies?” I guessed.

No, it’s worse, I later thought. These are not the undead, because they were never alive. These are our new companions, beings who are not and have never been.  In a twist, "Frontiers" shows us human beings dancing like AI creations.  

The Theatre of Life: Jill Johnston

 

Jill Johnston, c. 1970    

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Edited by Clare Croft

Duke University Press, 2024

Everyone knows that post-modern dance began at Judson Memorial Church in the early 1960s, but few people today remember what actually happened there. Luckily, the Village Voice was on the story, 

and sent its most daring critic to cover it. Jill Johnston’s columns of the 1960s and 70s have now been collected in a book, an invaluable chronicle of dance in the context of a social/sexual/political sea change.   

Columbia 2025: The Students' Turn to Roar

-- By Tom Phillips 

B'way and 114th  

Students held the upper hand yesterday in the first big protest of the school year at Columbia.   Acting president Claire Shipman was forced to call the NYPD to clear a pro-Palestinian occupation of Butler Library, and at least two people were carried out on stretchers among 75 arrested.  Hundreds of students then staged angry protests at both ends of 114th Street, cursing the officers who pushed them off the blocked streets and onto the sidewalk.  Students on Amsterdam then made an end run down to 111th Street, turned right,  and marched up the middle of Broadway with exhausted police bringing up the rear.  

The scene was in sharp contrast to last year's bust at Hamilton Hall, carried out by an army of cops who blocked off the entire campus, clambered into Hamilton as if it were a medieval fortress under siege, and then occupied the university for the rest of the academic year.   

This year, things are different.  

• Shipman makes no sense when she claims that non-Columbia people were among the occupiers of Butler Library: there's no way anyone gets onto the locked-down campus without a Columbia ID.  The chief security guard at 116th Street last night described Shipman's claim as "false information."  
• The students clearly hold the moral high ground, alongside Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as they contend with illegal detentions by an increasingly unpopular Trump regime.  
• Columbia's crackdown on faculty and student speech looks cowardly in the light of Harvard's stand against government intrusion,   
• Israel's war crimes in Gaza justify the protests, and expose the Republican campaign against campus antisemitism as exactly what  Claire Shipman originally called it: "Capitol Hill nonsense."  

Shipman is out of options. With students on their high horse, another police occupation would be a bloodbath.  It's too late to join Harvard's resistance.   All she has left are lies --- the protesters aren't Columbians, the problem is antisemitism, ICE is nice, etc.  As a former TV journalist who believes none of this nonsense, elected to make the medieval trustees look modern, Shipman's best course is to resign before they axe her.  And then? 

Listen up, Columbia, here is an idea that could save you: 

Let the University Senate choose the next President.  Let it be a president with academic stature,  committed to academic freedom.  Give the University back to its rightful stewards: faculty, staff, and students.  Roar, Lions, Roar.  

 

Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips 

 

The Dance a Coup Couldn't Cancel

US Patriots at the Pyramids 

The White House’s first wave of assaults on government-funded programs left many defunct or disabled. But at least one group managed to carry out its plans, without federal funds and in defiance of an order to stop. These intrepid and inspired artists are the performers of Time Lapse Dance, led by New York choreographer Jody Sperling (center, above).

With a grant from the US Embassy in Cairo, the company spent three years planning a tour--- to perform for children and young people at Egypt’s Hakawy International Arts Festival. On Sunday, January 26th, the day before they were to depart, Sperling woke up to a message from the State Department: her grant was terminated and she must stop the program immediately.  It was a short phone call, she says. She was in shock.  The costumes were all packed, the plane tickets purchased.  She began a frantic round of fund-raising, and re-negotiating contracts with her Egyptian hosts.  “They can’t stop us from going,” she said.  Long story short: the cancelled tour went on. 

Obsessed with Light

 

Loie Fuller 

                                                                    
                                    

"God said, 'Let there be light.'  And there was light."  Genesis 1:3

"Edison's here to stay."  The Bee Gees 

"We don't know what light is.  We can't even see it until it strikes something."   Jennifer Tipton 

The last of these quotes comes from the New York's leading theatrical lighting director.  And it represents the mystery at the heart of a dazzling new documentary, "Obsessed with Light." The film is about an obscure character in the history of dance -- Loie Fuller, a "western gal" from Kansas who became a sensation in Paris a hundred years ago.  But ultimately it is about the miracle of human creation -- what we do with the light God gave us, and the light we make for ourselves. 

Fuller created exotic dances that she and her company performed in outsize costumes, with a home-made apparatus that extended their arms into wings.  And she lit them with early electric light, through a hand-painted color wheel.  The poet William Butler Yeats was mesmerized:        

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound 
A shining web. a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air 
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round 
Or hurried them off on its own furious path... 
                              --- Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen   

Yeats's poem was about a world gone wrong -- emerging from the disaster of World War One only to whirl heedlessly into even greater catastrophes. And today, as we hurtle into the second coming of  President Trump, Loie lives.  

Her mantle, her floating ribbon of cloth, has been picked up by New York choreographer Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse Dance company.  They bring Loie to life in the film, performing new works and lighting them with contemporary technology that Fuller could only dream of.  The finale is a dazzling solo by Sperling in which the dancer disappears and all we see is light playing on her whirling robe. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, wrote Yeats in his "Second Coming."  Turning is what Sperling and her dancers do, turning themselves into instruments of fabric and light, a light that is not overcome by the darkness.  Time Lapse Dance has taken up the cause of the Earth.  They dance as trees, or wind, or covered with plastic bags, as garbage.  Sperling calls them "eco-artists," in residence at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a nearly 150-year-old organization that stubbornly clings to its dreams of creating a better world.  Following in Loie Fuller's footsteps, Sperling and her troupe will be touring and teaching in Egypt next month at the invitation of the US Embassy in Cairo.   

Fuller's apparatus, made of wood, serves to bridge the gap between humanity and nature--- doubling the reach of human beings, endowing them with godlike presence.  In the shadow of the pyramids, Time Lapse Dance will be dancing for civilization to survive its obsessions, for humanity to save its home.    

Meanwhile "Obsessed with Light" -- a labor of love by directors Sabine Krayenbuhl amd Zeva Oelbaum -- has been picked up for distribution in the US and Canada, and held over at the New Plaza Cinema in New York.  It is exhaustively researched, elegantly shot in its interviews with Tipton and other artists inspired by Fuller, and most of all brilliantly edited, mixing new material with snippets of Fuller in black and white and color.  Loie would be thrilled, and so will anyone who cares about dance, film, life, light, and this world.   

-- Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
 

Hip-Hop Conquers K-Pop

"Trivial Perfection" Photo by Richard Termine

Japan Society’s 2025 Contemporary Dance Festival offered a gender sandwich Saturday night, reflecting some of the current cultural turmoil in east Asia. An all-male troupe from Korea opened the program, and an all-female ensemble from Japan ended it. In between was a pas de deux from Taiwan, with a twist or two.

The K-boys — five guys who call themselves C.Sense, short for crude sensibility —won the audience and the night hands down, or rather hands up, with a precision workout they called “Trivial Perfection.” In T-shirts and gym shorts, they turned simple movements into complex forms and moving shapes — pyramids, spirals, implosions and explosions. They started with finger-flexing, proceeded to arm-flapping and hand-slapping and then body-slamming — chest to chest like football players. The wild card was the fifth guy, an androgynous musician who sat quietly at a keyboard for most of the piece, creating a background stew of hums and pings. Toward the end he picked up an electric guitar and broke into a corrosive, heavy metal blues break a la Jimi Hendrix. The four dancers responded, each with his own break-dance variation. It was like self-expressive American culture breaking into the traditional collectivism of east Asia. Hip-hop has conquered the world, and K-pop has embraced it.

“Nobody takes ballet any more,” sighed my companion, a former dancer, during the break after the first piece. “All they do is jump around and roll on the floor.” And sure enough, the pas de deux from Taiwan titled “…and, or…” featured acrobatic tumbles and off-balance leaps and lifts. The plot was familiar: boy chases girl and girl chases boy through every conceivable approach and avoidance. They share a nice little hug toward the end, but the conclusion is almost as ambivalent as the beginning. The innovation was in the casting —choreographer I-Ling Liu deliberately chose a small man and a taller woman — going not for gender reversal, she said, but gender equality. And in fact they seemed to be of equal strength, and were able to lift and throw each other around in turn. The dance was fast-moving, the moves were difficult and pulled off with elan, and it was performed successfully without any music. Liu said she wanted to challenge the audience to just watch the dance. We were up to it.

Japanese choreographer Ruri Mito and her eight-woman troupe closed the program on an ambitious but ambiguous note. In “Where we were Born,” Mito said she was trying to re-create the origins of life. In murky light, the women formed a moving blob that surged and swayed, peaked and fell, briefly broke up and quickly reformed. According to Mito the piece was made to be seen in the round, and it suffered on the square proscenium stage at Japan Society.  It looked like the psycho-pathology of Japanese womanhood--- non-individuals lumped together, living a primitive existence in the dark.   

I longed for the lights to come up and individual dancers to step out, but it wasn’t going to happen. So we saw one side of a blob that remains a mystery. Once again the ensemble dancing was impressive, a bit like an English sword dance where dancers are linked together, never let go and must move as a unit. But here you had little idea of what was going on inside the blob.   

"Where we were born"  Photo by Richard Termine 

         

As always, the program curated by Japan Society’s artistic director Yoko Shioya was on point — top quality dancing that reflected the current cultural turmoil of east Asia. Some Korean women are refusing to have anything to do with men, and Japan’s birth rate is cratering. Things may be more normal in Taiwan, at least until the Chinese invade. But whatever happens, hip-hop’s not going away.

Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips 

Future News: The End of Plastic

 

Earth with Plastic Rings:  Image by Gemini 

Last night I had the strangest dream
Clear and yet fantastic --
I dreamed the the world had found a way 
To say farewell to plastic.

Aboard the Flying Saucer X
January 8, 2030

The world’s richest man has a new scheme and a new company that promises to end the problem of excess plastic waste. Elong Mush wants to shoot it into space, and make it a celestial tourist attraction rivaling the rings of Saturn. Beyond that, he says orbiting trash can also solve the world’s climate crisis

“Let’s stop kidding ourselves,” Mush told reporters at a news conference aboard his personal space station, Flying Saucer X. “Ninety-nine percent of the plastic junk we put in recycling bins ends up in landfill. And with the seas rising a foot a year, we are rapidly running out of land to fill.”

Mush’s new company is called XS, and will be run by his nine-year-old son X. The two unveiled plans to use battery-powered garbage compacters to crush plastic waste into huge cylinders, which would be shot into orbit daily by Mush’s Space-X rockets. The cylinders would be painted silver and gold to reflect the sun’s rays back into space. 

Within ten years, claims Mush, the orbiting cylinders would appear as rings around the earth — “a golden diadem for our gentle blue giant,” said X Mush, reading from a press release. The rings would be visible from any point in the universe, according to the nine-year-old, who received a replica of the Hubble space telescope as a Christmas present from his father.

X also predicted the plastic rings would reduce sunlight on earth by up to ten percent, and lower global temperatures by 2.5 degrees Celsius, solving the climate crisis. Elong Mush said the plan has the full blessing of King Donald and the royal family. He added that Prince Barron is eager to press the button that will launch the first plastic refuse into orbit. At that point, X interrupted his father, arguing that as CEO of XS, he should get to go first.  An altercation ensued and the news conference was cut short.

The remainder of this article has been redacted by the US Ministry of Culture.

-- Copyright 2030 by Tom Phillips 

Plastic Waste

Elon Musk

Space

Climate Change

Donald Trump

Truth and Tinsel

 - By Tom Phillips

If you want to test the authenticity of a performing artist, a good place to look is the cutting room floor — in the outtakes. There you see how an artist works, and what they're aiming for.  Outtakes are the raw material for a deep and funny dive into he world of performance, about to disappear from view at the tiny Tank theater in midtown Manhattan.   

What Would Kahane Do?

 

Back in the Day, I worked in a New York TV newsroom where “if it bled, it led.” During the late Sixties and early Seventies, one of our most reliable sources of organized mayhem was the Jewish Defense League, led by the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Meir Kahane. He preached a violent form of Zionism, and sent black-clad young thugs out to attack opponents of Israel. I vividly recall one incident when JDL members broke up a small pro-Palestinian march near the UN, screaming “There is no Palestine, Arab dog!”

The Gaza Elephant

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Photo:  NY Daily News 

We all know the expression “an elephant in the room.” It means a subject everyone is afraid to talk about, but which is too big and important to go away. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side today, a herd of elephants is in the room, and on each of their their enormous sides, in dripping red, four letters are inscribed. GAZA.

The Israel Lobby and Us

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Columbia University’s Law Review was taken offline Monday after its editors published an article that said Palestinians are living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” by Israel that amounts to a crime against humanity. As of Wednesday night, the Review’s website said only that it was “under maintenance.”  By week’s end, the website was back online, with the complete fall issue including the article, titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” It was accompanied by a statement from the review’s Board of Directors, complaining that not everyone had a chance to read the article before it was published.  The Board said for now it would “memorialize” its concern with the process, and continue to review it.

This was the latest iteration of a story that has been going on for decades. In 2012, after the Occupy Wall Street protests, I wrote about it, offending some people. But 90 percent of what I wrote then is relevant today — and more important than ever. At the certain risk of offending more people, I invite you to read “Across the Barricades 2: The Israel Lobby.” originally published here in January, 2012.

Occupying Wall Street, 2011

Last year’s occupiers of Wall Street included protesters against not just the financial and banking lobby, but other powerful interest groups that dominate political life in America.   And the harshest criticism from across the barricades was directed not at people like me denouncing corporate greed, but against a lone fellow with a sign protesting U-S aid to Israel – billions of dollars in annual aid to a modern, prosperous country, far more than anything we give to any of the world’s poor nations.  He was subjected to long, heated lectures from passersby offended by the idea that the U.S should not provide such extraordinary support to its special friend in the Middle East.   I sympathized with him, and told him so, because I’ve been through it.

In fifty years as a journalist, I learned that criticizing Israel is a risky business in America – it can cost you friendships, reputation, career, or political office.  For example, in the current presidential campaign, no candidate including the President has questioned U.S. support for Israel, even as Israel has repeatedly threatened to ignite a disastrous war by attacking Iran’s nuclear program.  They haven’t because to do so would guarantee a storm of protest from one of the most powerful interest groups in America, known as the Israel lobby.

Columbia 4 :Inside Agitators

Student protesters were camped on a campus lawn again over the weekend, after taking over a big tent set up for Columbia University's Alumni Reunion.

"We're Back, Bitches!" read one sign. "While your're earning, Rafah is Burning!" said another. Students want Columbia to divest from companies aiding Israel's assault on Gaza.

Meanwhile, some faculty members and graduate teaching assistants are on a "grade strike" -- withholding grades to pressure the university to address the protesters' demands.

The campus remains on lockdown, closed to the public.

-- Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips