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.  

Vangeline's Story

 -- By Tom Phillips 

"The Slowest Wave"  Photo by Michael Blase 

Butoh began in the ruins of post-war Japan as the "dance of utter darkness."  Today it is performed and taught all over the world, and increasingly influential in other techniques and styles. 

No one is more responsible for this than Vangeline, founder and director of the New York Butoh Institute, which marks its 20th anniversary in 2023. After many years on the margins of the dance world, this year she is flooded in fellowships – including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study the brain waves of Butoh dancers.     

Vangeline was born in 1970 in France, and came to New York in 1992. She told us her life story recently while sitting and stretching on the floor of her dance studio, near the banks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

TP:  What was your reason for coming to New York at age 22?   

Vangeline:  I came to do an internship at the UN — a diplomatic visa, all the doors were open, red carpet.  Then two months into it I decided to quit and just become a dancer, to my parents’ great chagrin!  I lost my visa, I lost my status, and I became an underground performer.  So that was my switch, my commitment, my landing into New York and saying No – this is the life I’m going to lead.  And I followed my path kind of stubbornly ever since.