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.