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Kestrel Leah: Together (there) and Happy (here)

Kestrel Leah interviewed two different makers in two very different locations. Both identify as female, both are mothers, and both use autobiography in their work but with distinctly different approaches. She attended Lia Haraki’s rehearsal of her latest work, “Mazi (Together)” in Limassol, Cyprus in August, and sat in on actress Cristina Fernandez's rehearsal of her first solo show, “I'm just happy to be here”, which was presented as a Work-in- Process at LAPP's Word of Mouth, in Los Angeles in September.

Missive From Cyprus: Kestrel Leah encounters Lia Haraki

I tell Lia I’m not sure what time we’ll make it to rehearsal. I don’t drive in Cyprus—I’ve never driven on the left side of the road and I don’t have an international license. Here, I’m completely dependent on my partner to drive me everywhere, and with our sixteen-month-old in tow, this means my commitments revolve around naptime. Lia, a single mother of two, tells me to bring everyone to rehearsal. We enter the studio (late) to a room full of grins with a wide-eyed toddler in their midst. My partner shuffles our daughter to a corner, where she sits quietly mesmerized throughout rehearsal, mouth gaped open, at times tightly squeezing her papa’s hand.

Lia and her dancers are playing a beautiful game, it seems. Lia uses a made-up language of onomatopoeia to give direction, driving them with sounds like DJAH! DJAAAH! WA-WA-WAAAH! “I find numbers limiting,” she says, “One, two—what is that word?—because I think the sounds of some made up words have the energy of what you want.” Her collaborator Arianna Marcoulides comments that Lia has a special connection with voice, and rhythm, and how the voice vibrates the organs. This doesn’t give the whole picture. In 3 For Random, for example, Lia and Arianna improvise a non-stop vocal choreography of word-play, transforming text through relentless repetition while following verbal tempo-rhythms and psychological associations with their bodies as accomplices. Lia’s most recent work, Body Unmuted, is a sound installation where she only appears at the end.

The dancer’s faces are willing, open to receiving her, and without stress, as they feel their way through clunky hand movements, oozing ensemble gestures and primal murmurs. She is among them, animated by the rhapsody of inter-body collaboration, coaxing them towards unfamiliar depths of body and mind, but with a light hand. She’s giving direction as if she cares more that each individual feels what she’s getting at, rather than whether she gets to see it from the outside. One thing she’s sure of these days, she tells me, is that she’s a sharer. The title of the piece is Mazi (Together).

Meanwhile, it’s 40°C in Limassol and Lorca’s thirsty. As she grabs at my boob to feed, Lia’s face lights up. All she wants to do after rehearsal, she says, is put her boobies in the sea. Lia was recently diagnosed with stage one breast cancer, and had the operation to remove part of her breast. She wasn’t a good patient, she told me—she had a performance the week after her operation. Nevertheless, she’s taking it all as a lesson, she says—something she refers to as the transformation. “Big alarm. Big. I was in a space where I was not totally loving myself, and it was like, c’mon—it’s now or never. I was crying but … saying goodbye, to previous trauma, to previous selves, and at the end of these goodbyes … I knew there was so much happiness of what is to come.”

It’s no accident that this is what Mazi is about. Lia is transparent that each of her works is a reflection of what’s happening to her at the time. “This is the healing process,“ she says. “I can’t divide, I’m a very open person—whatever is happening in my life, that’s what it’s about.” Even though, to hear her talk about process, this isn’t a conscious decision: “What’s useful to me about the past few years is that we create intuitively, with the trust that later we’ll be able to understand what it’s about, so for me lately it’s a reverse process to what I was used to. It’s not a mental process. It’s a calling … It’s as if the piece is in another realm and we’re downloading it.”

As unearthly as this sounds, Lia’s work never feels out of reach. I first met her during last summer’s Athens Festival when I visited her pop-up The Performance Shop for a participatory one-on-one encounter called SKIN. Blindfolded, I was danced, spun, and seamlessly led by an undefinable number of limbs and mouths (a duo, only, it turned out) through a tour of my senses, using merely everyday stimuli like water, breath, pop music. Three months into the heightened psycho-physical state that caring for a newborn dictates, the total body surrender SKIN offered was exactly what I craved, as if the whole thing was just for me. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was a common response to Lia’s work. It seems that whatever the unique nature of each piece, through the candid personal narrative, through the profound playfulness, there is always an invitation to feel, and set free, something we don’t normally permit ourselves to—relief, pain, a dirty joke.

LIA: Why are people so emotional?

ARIANNA: I dunno … we gave them the space. It’s not something they’re offered, or that they ask for.

LIA: In rehearsal.

ARIANNA: I think maybe generally, in their life.

Kestrel Leah in conversation

with Cristina Fernandez

I made a thing.

I hope you like it.

I hope I like it.

I focus on the taped-off vinyl floor occupying a corner of the warehouse, and the few things it contains: an empty mic stand, the microphone casually snaking across the floor, a swath of purple fabric draped over a generic plastic chair. The magic potentiality contained within a dormant stage composition is one of the things that make theater, and waiting for theater to happen, feel like a ritual undertaking. Even in rehearsal. Or especially in rehearsal. Did I mention, there are unlit candles, and an invitation to light one.

(At this moment I cluelessly stumble over Jennie’s glass flask of water, turning it into a treacherous mess under our bare feet. Several-months-pregnant Jennie, graciously, marvels at how it was supposed to be shatter-proof, and we all agree we’ve gotten far clumsier since giving birth.)

Cristina too, begins as a threat of action. In a racy dance leotard and tights getup, she displays upon a small crate, every so often melting from one Olympian-like posture to another. Eventually, she slithers off her makeshift podium and hesitantly fingers the microphone. Once her lips receive it, it’s a soft “Hi.” “Hello.” Then a nasal “Hiyeeeeeeeee . . .” as if greeting the audience is to be rehearsed in perpetuity. Words shuffle and morph until Spanish starts to flow out of her, and she breaks into another, distinctly maternal voice. Again more repetition, again more neurosis: “I made a thing. I hope you like it. I hope I like it.”

This may or may not be a piece about making, but the struggle to make is present—maybe also the struggle to be—and with it a potential catharsis for maker and audience.

CRISTINA: I was excited, honestly, to tackle the solo—all of the tropes, and all of the magical things that can come from it. Literally conquering the solo. It’s just you on stage—but are you really alone? It’s so collaborative, you almost cannot do it alone. If you’re asking someone to do anything, to operate anything …

I think when I’m doing stand-up I’m trying to get at something more like this. It doesn’t have to be like “punchline, punchline, punchline,” there’s something really exciting about creating something new. I keep thinking so much about what you said, which is “You’re just gonna have to get in a room”. You were like, “Maybe the way you’re going to work hasn’t been invented yet”, and that was really true, there’s something about attempting that. Remember that?

The word-play and improvisation take more form and more force once Cristina lands at the microphone stand. I see the stand-up artist revealed, but she’s shape-shifting, toying with expectations and identity. Chatty quips roll out in an improvised auto-fiction that hints at geopolitics through a very personal lens. Sometimes tentative, sometimes gritty, here she finds her feet—literally and figuratively—and her voice.

WHAT IS GOING ON???

I read an article in the New York Times …

Do NOT go to the rainforest!

I AM GOING TO THE RAINFOREST!!!!!!

I’ll just strap my babies on my back!

It’s all about the gear!

CRISTINA: Yeh, there are these set markers, but there’s a lot of improvisation. It’s scary and super vulnerable … but there’s like a deepness to it, because it’s really all of the ways you are with other people all the things you’re performing, in your life. You’re bringing all this stuff from the subconscious and even you don’t realize how much of you it’s revealing until you see how someone is receiving it. You’re like, oh, other people are thinking about these things, we’re all just kind of coping …

I went back to my writing from when the hurricane had hit—I had forgotten about that—my mom was the face of something that was on the news … I’m thinking about Puerto Rico … I’m thinking about everything that’s happening … legacy and patterns and loops … and of course being a mom is in there. But in a larger sense, where am I coming from? And what am I leaving behind? That connection to Puerto Rico is getting really loud because I feel far away. I think there is this need to pass on to my kids some of that beauty and some of those traditions but also let go of some other ones.

When Cristina leaves the microphone, it’s as though she has exorcised fragments of a conversation in her head that is very much unfinished, and still waiting for its audience. In silence, she slips into a pair of sneakers, and perfunctorily begins to make rounds of merengue-salsa combinations that squeak and squeal across the vinyl. Gradually her hip-swiveling becomes more assertive, more concentrated, and with each loop of the dance floor she grows in intensity. The steps become exaggerated—not exactly expressive—but demanding. She tires herself, looking like this is something to get through, and dances right off the dance floor, making her exit.

CRISTINA: Work-in-progress is a tricky one because there’s an element of feeling not ready but allowing people to come in. The work is a practice—even if you’re opening the doors, how do you treat it as a continuation of that? There’s definitely the hangover afterwards where you’re like, “Performing is insane”. You reveal a part of yourself … and then there’s this wave of “What IS this?” But I’m excited to keep delving in. You’re touching on something, and then the audience is touching it, and you know it has some power.

I feel young in making my work, I’m really just a toddler. And, who cares? Who cares? I mean really, “Who cares?” is a good one. The time is now. It’s fleeting, it’s going to go away. It feels so important—and it is important—and it’s not important. You’re going to take yourself seriously, but not too seriously.

photos by Kestrel Leah

Kestrel Leah is a Los Angeles-based performer and director who loves documenting other artists' work.

#performance riting #kestrelleah #liaharaki #cristinafernandez

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