Intuition and Play: Joining the Mundane & Mystical through the Lens of Childhood
On the work of Luna Izpisua Rodriguez.
Karolina Kwasniak as Lucius in the final scene of Luna's interpretation of Titus Andronicus
The Angel, Karolina Kwasniak, sings Deu Vos Salve, a medieval choral number taken from the original play, in El Misterio
Claudia Dockery playing the Virgin Mary in the final scene of El Misterio
How can play and humor unite the mundane and the mystical, breaking down the limitations of fixed identity formation?
In Bandoneon, Working with Pina Bausch (1), Raimund Hoghe notes the parallel between Walter Benjamin and Pina Bausch’s work in looking at childhood as “ a period of profound, sensuous knowledge…unashamed and curious...” highlighting the tools and adopting the child’s viewpoint that serves in “picking up seemingly innocuous, trivial details to say something revealing about the adults’ world…” In this vein, we find the indelible performances of Luna Izpisua Rodriguez, 2023 award winner of The Princess Grace Honoraria in Theater, who begins each of her pieces with a certain path, soon reverted and abandoned for unbarred exploration. To find the meeting point of mystical and mundane, she utilizes performance as a deft medium to present something familiar, gradually turning our initial perception on its head. Among her recent works: A Tiny Little Star is Born, Asleep and Dancing in the Rainforest, El Misterio, and Wealth and Hellness. These pieces explore themes as divergent as 70- year-old religious rituals, mother-daughter dynamics, and Southern California aesthetics, but are joined by a thread that elevates intuitive humor, and the child-lens as a guide towards negotiating increasingly transient, fluid constructions of identity within our inherited social contracts. Each piece finds meeting points: the playful and the serious, the sacred and the profane, and the ancestral with apparently impersonal, disposable modes of modern communication, continuously exploring new ways of witnessing and constructing ourselves and our perceived roles. By blurring the boundaries of disciplines and social compartmentalization, Izpisua Rodriguez questions restrictive masks of adulthood we precariously wear to veil trauma, fear, and doubt. Izpisua Rodriguez’s performances mischievously question the created self in a mediated world that demands a sufficiently labeled, neat paradigm of existence.
Born to a painter mother and a scientist father, Izpisua Rodriguez grew up between family homes in Barcelona and San Diego. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry and Masters in Industrial Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, deftly using her interpretation of scientific methods in several of her plays and performances. Her recent work has been shown at the Pauline Kael-Jess Gallery, Counterpulse, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the Modular Theater as well as various homes and parks, carefully chosen settings that are incorporated into the work itself. At the heart of her practice are site-specific performances that question the expectations of an institution and the legitimacy of the White Cube instead preferencing the intimate and the everyday. There is a Perec-esque play to the way Izpisua Rodriguez contemplates these settings, altering our perception of a formal presentation or the divisions of the public and private spheres, so that anyone can join in a public play or feel warmly welcome in a family home they have not previously entered. As mentioned by Izpisua Rodriguez over a phone interview, she aims to treat the tragic with an essence of play inspired by Greek choruses, with clear references to danah boyd’s theory of Context Collapse and the lived reality of grief and actualization of self as disordetly and non-linear.
Izpisua Rodriguez draws heavy inspiration from passed-down methods of storytelling traced to her Hispano-Romani ancestry, incorporating mythology and natural elements into the movement and text as the piece is constructed. The process of the piece is its own content, and as such, the piece is in continual flux. This can be seen most potently in El Misterio, 2022, in which she adapts the 700-year-old Spanish liturgical drama “Misteri d’Elx” which depicts the dormition, assumption, and coronation of the Virgin Mary. El Misterio uses the original medieval narrative as a framework for investigating modern rites of human connectivity, spirituality, and embodiment in a technologically-mediated world, portraying the creation of modern media and cults. In a similar vein of reinterpretation, her most recent piece Wealth and Hellness began as a loose adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” but soon departed from this initial reference. Set in an affluent coastal community reminiscent of La Jolla, in this version, the cry to be “part of that world” is interpreted at the cost of buying into the wealth and access that historically pertain to the Southern California coast. To delve into this, Izpisua Rodriguez draws upon fantasy and reality TV, constructing a myth with romance, surfing, race cars, and real estate.
From the outset of her work, Izpisua Rodriguez began utilizing the lens of children and spontaneous child-like humor as a freeing element, acknowledging the ways we seek to present ourselves and be recognized, as well as the ways these limited presentations of identity sporadically elicit a certain internal crisis, no matter how successfully we uphold our chosen social roles. This a reality often grappled with in exaggerated ways by the performers in her pieces, as humor and conviviality with classic stories morph into an elevated sense of pathos. Utilizing this approach within the child-like realm of the absurd, mixed with exaggerated movement and sound, the literal can turn mystical while fixed hierarchies and characterizations become malleable. In the portals of these reinterpretations, it is possible for moments of grief and pain to become over-the-top or playful, and for a piece which begins in simplified ecstasy to transform into a critique of digital labor undertaken to soothe our longing to connect to ancestry, place, and to each other. The blend of longing, internal exile, and the ludic is illuminated in a playful, intuitive manner by creating microcosmos that reflect our collective consciousness.
As Benjamin saw it:
“...children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked upon. They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the fact that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship. Children thus produce their own small world of things within a greater one.”(2)
By abandoning the construction of linear narrative or “logical” use of introduced props and materials, Izpisua Rodriguez engages with the intuitive, organic glow of sui generis development, like a child’s original game. Her process starts with moments of visual inspiration, eventually strung together through movement and intuitive rehearsal - like a perfected version of child play.
As movement is essential to her narratives, Izpisua Rodriguez collaborates with dancers early in the process and it is through their found movement that the story unfolds, connections forged around flashes of the ingredients Izpisua Rogriguez brings to the table. Among these: familial ties, unfixed memories, and an equal mix of mundane and sentimental objects. Rather than being bound to a specific genre or materiality, these performances complicate and unsettle the viewer by introducing ambivalence towards set fixtures and demarcations, with unexpected emancipation from circumscribed territories of a single location, history and home. Simultaneously, the work is conscious and makes mention of the inescapable imprint these factors leave on the psyche. Transient and evasive, we find the unexpected ability in the uncertain space of play to assess dynamic and profoundly active sources of intrigue within - fathers, mothers, grandmothers, pets, little voices of insecurity, the moon, stars, and faded dreams of shame and desire are some of the echoed refrains. The often repressed elements of loss, lack of connection, and the exiled soul become a communal, fertile experience of movement, instead of a sterile, barren box of definitions. There is no answer to what these figures mean to us, but their potential expands beyond what we previously considered.
Within Izpisua Rodriguez’s pieces, marginal characters invert the landscape by renouncing their place at its shores and edges, grappling with the complexities of context collapse within a modern public-private sphere. In A Little Tiny Star is Born, this is manifested by the artist’s mother yelling advice in Spanish through a megaphone to an English-speaking audience, seated with their backs turned to her, as the corps de ballet move to obscure the “principal dancer.” She is not heard or understood, though she continues to demand recognition. Meanwhile, the “protagonists,” who in Izpisa Rodriguez’s work often represent someone born into a highly globalized context, struggle to recognize their place at “center stage” confused by the role assigned to them. In this realm, performers claim a unique identity and in contrast to expectation, they become willing to negotiate it, reacting to their evolving surroundings.
Computational media researcher danah boyd describes the concept of “context collapse” in reference to the online phenomenon in which a lack of spatial and temporal boundaries causes otherwise distinct social groups to act and exist in one space, often resulting in polarization and conflict within the digital sphere. boyd (2008) (3) delves into a modern interaction structure resulting from the mediated form of sociality that are “networked publics,” blurring the supposedly private sphere with the public, with the key interaction media being social network sites, interaction structures defined as ‘‘web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate(s) a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (boyd and Ellison 2007). The content generated within network publics serves as a data set/sphere of interconnected dynamics where the content is produced, shared, and consumed constantly in a shareable and searchable manner. Within this paradigm, the participants of a networked public navigate an invisible but ever-present audience, and the blurring of private and public complicates the definition of authentic expression (boyd 2010) (4). Izpisua Rodriguez’s work elaborates on personal diasporic themes of belonging to place and position through the broader notion of context collapse, as her performances exist within a live context that transforms this collapse into a utopia of sorts, as narrative time becomes synchronic and hierarchies are flattened. In an early piece by Izpisua Rodriguez titled Cami, she wears a flamenco dress and an iPod shuffle necklace, embodying a character seeking to connect with her followers through the deprivatization of their data. The character initially appears to be a harmless, slightly frivolous influencer, but it is progressively revealed that she is developing a populist and extremist political platform. In Predicting Love, a performance formulated as a data study, Izpisua Rodríguez created an algorithmic model that attempts to predict who will be the artist's new romantic partner, using color as a main feature of analysis and the photos in her Iphone as a data set. In, HVAC directed by Surabhi Saraf, with the libretto written in collaboration with Izpisua Rodriguez and Christian Nagler, white-collar workers from the global North are reunited with their ancestors from the global South after forgetting to turn on their HVAC systems. A common element in all these work is the reconception of boundaries and borders created by globalization. Objects and settings begin to exchange positions within distributions of power and social hierarchies not meant to interface, recalling the way setting and characters shift in child-play, melding humor and dramatization.
Izpisua Rodriguez’s works often relate to the actual space where the performance will take place, taking into account the history of the location, blending this reality with visual moments that inevitably transform during rehearsals. Rehearsals incorporate community performances involving neighbors, family, unknown civilians, and of course: children. This is collective play, where roles are continuously malleable and the boundaries and realities of space and time are simultaneously acknowledged and tampered with. A Little Tiny Star is Born was performed in Bolinas, California at filmmaker Walter Murch’s residence, and heavily incorporated the house’s history of matriarchal equine ties, referencing an oft-repeated myth about the original owner's mother chasing away a thief on horseback. The performance began with one of Izpisua Rodrigueze’s usual set-ups: live performers interacting with a film projection in an outdoor setting. The central elements included the projection, a pianist, and a singer wearing a sculptural dress made out of chicken wire and paper mache, elevating the mundane as fantastical in the spirit of “playing pretend.” The video projected during the performance featured mothers of the actual performers sharing their life advice, including the artists own mother dressed in a flamenco dress, and a mother with a squirt gun yelling life advice at her daughter while the daughter gallops on a horse.
Location and family were also central to Asleep and Dancing in the Rainforest, which follows the impossibility of a vacation from the generations before us, after us, our loves, appearances, habits, objects, and selves utilizing the setting of a hot tub in the rainforest. The performance took place at the Pauline Kael-Jess Murals Gallery in Berkeley in the outdoor setting, and throughout the work Izpisua Rodríguez maintained a central element of fluidity and negotiation of self. Through Asleep and Dancing, the artist delves into her grandmother’s memory loss due to Alzheimer's and Izpisua Rodriguez’s complex relationship to her father through achingly vulnerable and literal visual elements.
These include Luna Izpisua Rodriguez’s mother reading a poem to the artist, concerning the artist’s relationship with her father. In real-time, the artist translates the Spanish words into English for the audience, and it is in this scene that mother and daughter literally arm wrestle over the contested family truth. This is an image simultaneously specific and personal, yet universal in a way that one can’t help but find painfully aching, amusing communion with.
Throughout the piece, dancers and performers take on shifting roles, echoing the context collapse of modern identity formation in a manner that equally mimics and references playtime. In the performance, a photo on the beach taken during a rehearsal of the "parachute dancer" opens as the "screen" for a projected slideshow which illuminates the initially static. As the slideshow concludes, a single dancer peeks her head out of the top of the parachute and the object transforms into a dancing figure. Gradually it becomes clear this is not one being, but several figures under the fabric: an amalgam of limbs morph into contorting shape skin to an organic architecture, as five dancers from the San Francisco Ballet move underneath the original parachute. Here we witness the barrier of what is deemed logical or static being broken and expanded upon in quick succession.
Children open and return at several moments of Asleep and Dancing to guide or reorient the piece. At the start, sounds of the rainforest fill the space as Maggie Weirech, the “central” dancer from the San Francisco ballet, rolls around alone in a hot tub. Izpisua Rodriguez repeats certain phrases that are as malleable as everything within the piece. “Today, day to day to data (day-tuh) data, data, dadda, data, dad, dad, dad, daddy, daddy dad. Who will outlive who?” she demands, layered with the voice of a two-year-old girl mumbling sounds as children circle around her. More children hand out chocolate guava cakes and beers to the audience, placed under a tent made from another parachute, accidentally skipping or forgetting certain rows. Izpisua Rodriguez’s voice moves on to text relating to her grandmother, and how she fell in love with her caretaker after losing her memory; superimposed with images of children wrapped in sheets projected onto the parachute. The evocation of memory-loss and the barriers broken as language collapses, elevates the rhythm that persists in this work and others: a confessional genre manifested through movement and repetition, rendering a hermetic maze of seemingly straightforward conditions of identity. The dancers eventually march up to the hot tub in slow motion, scored to the track Pines of Rome. They climb inside the hot tub, where everyone begins to embrace and kiss. Maggie remains an outsider, finding no pair: the exiled self in a world that produces meanings and positions that are regulated and contained. Eventually, she is launched out of the hot tub by the intertwined bodies, landing on the floor of the main stage. There, she remains crumpled on the floor in a silent moment of agony, as the voice of Dulce Lopez begins to reverberate through the space, and with these sounds, Maggie’s body begins to writhe. Her lone dance becomes one of sickly desperation, while Dulce Lopez shouts Paloma Negra. At the last line, she collapses, with a kind of perennial exhaustion. The children reappear now, and approach Maggie’s unmoving body, surrounding her, carefully, raising her from the dead for a delirious moment, before they too collapse.
Text from Asleep and Dancing:
“Luna: I wake up and I hear the toucans outside my window. The Church bells are ringing. My eyes are still closed and I think I am in Spain, squished into la Tita's coffin, with my grandpa underneath us. My great-grandpa's bones are in a bag lying on top of us. This is what you do in Spain, you bury families in the same casket. My uncle said that when he buried his mom, la Yaya, he first had to take out his grandma, my great-grandmother. She was not much more than bones and dust. But he said you could still recognize her. Actually, everyone says I look like my great-grandmother did. I wonder if I would also remind everyone of a pile of bones and dust.”
In Izpisua Rodriguez’s realms, play is the method, and humor is the gate: guiding us to the limbo wherein grief emerges and opens undetermined doors of uncertainty, examining the precarity of our delineations and masks that attempt to depict a completed selfhood. This approach serves to break illusions of actualization present in modern interaction networks, dramatizing disconnection or non-resolution present therein, delving into traumas small and large we keep deep within ourselves. This is work where the performer and audience alike enter a shared experience of exile (by disorienting the familiar) only to find communion in being alone together, within deeply intimate moments of sensorial exploration, which bypass demanding structural identity formations. The narrative, or non-narratives within come alive through intersecting timelines and sounds that form an integrated exploratory and collaborative environs, expanding the production of space and presented identity. Countering narrative and fixed self and inhabiting a space of uncertainty, the notion is introduced that there may be an infinity of unexplored ways to forge connections outside of the formulated, edited, and displayed self molded to societal expectations and the ties of cultural and ancestral structures.
In this work, what appears as uncertainty can be the precondition of a post-trauma, post-media, post-colonial hybridity. There is no clear answer or end, instead leaving threads of possibility untied, inviting the viewer to incorporate such transience into their navigation of life, without restraint.
––
(1) Hoghe, Raimund, et al. pp 42-34 Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch. Oberon Books, 2016.
(2) Op.cit
(3) boyd, danah. ” Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications.” Pp. 39-58 in A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, edited by Z. Papacharissi. New York: routledge, 2010
(4) Op.cit
A LITTLE TINY STAR IS BORN:
Performers Maggie Weirich, courtesy of the SF Ballet Skyla Schreter, courtesy of the SF BalletJ oseph Warton, courtesy of the SF Ballet Cara Connor Charlotte Taylor Hannah Clevenger Alina Çelik Kristal Çelik Nancie Çelik Mary Kay Brewster Connie Yost Conchita Rodriguez Conchita Esteban Tate Kim 5 little kids
Costumes Sophia Fish
Music Jakob Karstens
Sound + Lights Justin Kay Matt Visco
Food Evan ColburnChandler DavisHannah Clevenger
Poster Tate Kim
Director + Writer Luna Izpisua Rodriguez
ASLEEP AND DANCING IN THE RAINFOREST:
Performers Maggie Weirich, courtesy of the SF BalletJoseph Warton, courtesy of the SF Ballet Alexandre Cagnat, courtesy of the SF Ballet
Dulce Lopez Cara Connor Charlotte Taylor Conchita Rodriguez Esteban Griffin Stepanek Matthew Daubner Evan Colburn Chandler Davis Will Mervau Callum Gilchrist 8 little kids
Sound Design Dylan Fitzgibbons
Piano Jakob Karstens
Lights Matt Visco
Food Evan Colburn, Chandler Davis
Photography and Video Alexandre Cagnat
Producer Paris Cotz
Director + Writer Luna Izpisua Rodriguez
WEALTH AND HELLNESS:
Arieli: Tristan Samson
Sluv: Rio Rasch
Mackenzie: Bella Marie Andrew
Joey: Paul Sohm
Dr. Brittney: Kayla Ayler-McCormick
Erik: Elie Korio
Dave: Kody Nelson
Chichi: Claudia Dockery
Lacy: Kelli English
Teddy: Freddy Fu Affambi
Writer/Director/Video Designer: Luna Izpisua Rodriguez
Scenic Designer: Jane Hamor
Lighting Designer: Max Okst
Sound Designer: Nick DePinto
Costume Designer: Tara Froehlich
Video Design Associate and Programmer: Zoë Lappin
Technical Director: Trevor Desai
Intimacy Coordinator: Emily Barasch
Producer: Elizabeth Price
Associate Production Supervisor: Elizabeth Price
Stage Manager: Elizabeth Zaragoza
Assistant Scenic Designer: Aje Soberekon
Assistant Lightning Designer: Emma Mcmanus
Assistant Costume Designer: Starlyn Meyer
Assistant Technical Director: I-Hua Huang
Associate Producer: Fina Zhou
Assistant Stage Manager: Valery Tinajero
Rehearsal Stage Manager: Max Kunke
Deck Captain: Logan Masters
“Holocene” Dance Choreographer: Brianna Sanchez
Opening Video: Simone Forti
Culture Bearer Consultant: Dennis Garcia
Additional Video Performers: Tate Kim, Nico Nathanson
EL MISTERIO:
Bull: Kelli English, Oliver Gifford, Daniel Newman-Lessler
Gethsemane Lake: Avi Glover
Gethsemane Tree: Elie Korio
Holy Sepulcher: Sebastian Rosales
Holy Tree: Olivia Xing
James: Grant Garcia
James the Little: Michael Lanham
Jesus: Oliver Gifford
John: Beverly Steel
Paul: Kyle DiGiorgio
Peter: Kody Nelson
Mary Jacobe: Nina Malinow
Mary Salome: Gary Cook
The Angel: Karolina Kwaśniak
The Virgin Mary: Claudia Dockery
Virtuous Leader: Fred Affambi/Liangliang Fu
Voices of Mary Salome and Mary Jacobe: Natalee Hapeniewski, Eva Clare Hendricks, Venice Mountain-Zona, Daniel Newman-Lessler
Voice of the Stations of the Cross: Daniel Newman-Lessler
Voice of Virgin Mary: Karolina Kwaśniak
Full Choir: Sophie Alter, Bella Marie Andrews, Carolyn Avenger, Alec Boyd, Samuel Buroker, Kayla Dobbs, Kelli English, Sylka Feliciano, Olivia Fogel, MaryKate Glenn, Elizabeth Goldmane, Natalee Hapaniewski, Eva Clare Hendricks, Taylor Ice, Romy Kim, Venice Mountain-Zona, Ayla Noel, Jordan Oakley, Gia Ochsenbein, Stella Pappas, Sydney Rahilly, Olivia Ross, Jordyn Ryan, Sage Michael Stone, Amelia Whitney, Aaron Zucker
Chamber Choir: Sophie Alter, Bella Marie Andrews, Kayla Dobbs, Kelli English, Ben Formella, MaryKate Glenn, Elizabeth Goldmane, Natalee Hapaniewski, Eva Clare Hendricks, Taylor Ice, Romy Kim, Venice Mountain-Zona, Kody Nelson, Jordan Oakley, Gia Ochsenbein, Sydney Rahilly
Director: Luna Izpisua de Kissel
Scenic Designer: Benny Pitt
Costume Designer: Danica Martino
Lighting Designer: W. Alejandro Melendez
Sound Designer: Nick DePinto
Video Designer: Natalie Nicholas
Music Director/Organist: Daniel Newman-Lessler
Assistant Music Director: Michael Lanham
Assistant Scenic Designer: Holly Joy Webb
Assistant Scenic Designer: Ariel Ling-An Huang
Assistant Costume Designer: Emily Unthank
Assistant Lighting Designer: Jackson Funke
Master Electrician: Jack Cannon
Assistant Video Designer: Wei-Fang Chang
Vocal Coach: Rafael Lopez-Barrantes
Movement Consultant: Annalee Traylor
Producer: Gefei Liu
Assistant Producer: Vladimir Tuaev
Associate Production Manager: Katherine Paez Froehlich
Stage Manager: Sami Hansen
Assistant Stage Manager: Mia Condon
Deck Assistant Stage Manager: Liz Zaragoza
Technical Director: Sam DuBois
Assistant Technical Director: Sophia Prothero
Graphic Design: Luna Izpisua de Kissel, with photography by Natalie Nicholas