Бабушка | BAb(oo)shka is an interdisciplinary performance that begins with my grandmother telling a true story—chosen by her—in Russian onstage. Her humorous anecdotes about Jewish oppression are then contemporaneously translated into gibberish, into klezmer music, and into a puppet melodrama. These retellings weave together to create a meta-conversation on the act of translation and historicization, exposing the realities of Jewish life in the Soviet Union and how those experiences transform across generations and migrations.
Created in collaboration with: Tatiana Lublina, Marianna Baker, Julia Danitz, Elena Rose Light, Julia Cavagna, Marina Gasparyan, Irina Gorovaia, Julia Gu, Julian Hernandez, Sarah White, Lim Mui
Composition by: Julia Danitz
Choreography by: Elena Rose Light
Video: https://vimeo.com/370892889/0e81cf69dd
PAST PERFORMANCE
September 26-October 6, 2019: The 14th St Y
In Russian and English, Anya and Babushka struggle to communicate their Jewish identities via The Sims, a computer game simulating real life. The pair re-enact Babushka's memories of anti-semitism in the USSR, moving from joy to rage and back again. Their buried family history emerges as an imperfect patchwork of Soviet-Jewish aesthetics, melding puppetry, klezmer music, and dance theater.
Created in collaboration with: Julia Cavagna, Julia Danitz, Marina Gasparyan, Irina Gorovaia, Julia Gu, Julian Hernandez, Elena Rose Light, Lim Mui, Amy Wang
Composition: Julia Danitz
Choreography and Dramaturgy: Elena Rose Light
Video: https://vimeo.com/344462202
PAST PERFORMANCE:
May 30-June 2, 2019: St. Ann’s Warehouse Labapalooza!
June 7, 2019: Blast Off! Performance at The Old American Can Factory
May 1, 2019: A Night for Babushka at The Old American Can Factory
This project, developed as part of COJECO BluePrint Fellowship supported by COJECO and Genesis Philanthropy Group, has also engaged the Russian-speaking Jewish community through intergenerational puppetry workshops. Бабушка | BAb(oo)shka has received a work-in-progress performance at the Old American Can Factory in fall 2018 and will be presented, in part, at Labapalooza at St. Ann’s Warehouse in May 2019 and as a part of the Undiscovered Countries Blast Off! Performance on June 2019. The piece will premiere at the 14th St. Y September 26- October 6, 2019.
Бабушка | BAb(oo)shka is an interdisciplinary performance rooted in the liberating potential of queer translation. Three non-Russian-speaking performers live-translate a series of impassioned anecdotes told by my Soviet Jewish grandmother. Their retellings emerge as an imperfect patchwork of interpretation incorporating dance and physical theater. Ultimately, BAb(oo)shka asks: what grows out of the fraught space of miscommunication?
Created in collaboration with: Shubrah Prakash, Bianca Lau, Anna Slate with help from Amy Wiley, Cora Walters, and Elena Rose Light
PAST PERFORMANCE:
November 16-17, 2018: Old American Can Factory, NY
July 14, 2018: BarnArts Residency (Maine)
Photos by Effy Grey
Video by Alex Romania
The Gay Science (titled after Nietzsche's nihilist text) is a work of dance-theater exploring the malleability of self in all its uncanny, mediated, 21st-century iterations. This work embraces puppet aesthetics in order to explore these themes in an analog world of 2-D limbs.
Puppets and Direction by Anna Lublina
Choreography by Elena Rose Light
Music Composed by Lilly Kaplan
Performed by Julia Cavagna & José Rivera Jr.
PAST PERFORMANCE
April 5, 2019: CPR Spring Movement Festival
October 4-5: The Tank Theater (New York, NY) as a part of Puppet Playlist
Photos and Video courtesy of Sinking Ship Productions & Kathryn Butler Photography
Cruisical: A Lesbian Musical is an anachronistic musical comedy bringing together six queer women whose lives we wish had intersected over the last 150 years. Luckily, these six women—Mercedes de Acosta, Moms Mabley, Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, and Esther Eng—find themselves magically transported to the year 2018, where they have landed on an all-inclusive lesbian cruise. Hearts and lives become entangled over piña coladas by the pool, as these women deal with petty interpersonal disputes and larger misunderstandings of 21st-century queerness. With a libretto pulling from their real-life correspondences and diaries, and a campy musical theater soundtrack informed by their respective eras, these women fall in love—and overboard—in this farcical romp. Inspired by queer theater companies Split Britches and The Five Lesbian Brothers, our collaborative team of queer women pays earnest homage to our foremothers, who lived and loved out loud at great personal risk. In Cruisical, we give them the tropical lesbian vacation they deserved.
Written by Anna Lublina & Elena Rose Light
Music Composed by Lilly Kaplan
Directed by Anna Lublina
Choreographed by Elena Rose Light
Performed by:
Esther Eng: Becca Co
Mercedes De Acosta: Julia Cavagna
Moms Mabley: Maritza Bostic
Violet Trefusis: Anna Slate
Virginia Woolf: lim mui
Vita Sackville-West: Sarah White
PAST Performance:
July 24th, 9:30pm: Dixon Place (NYC) as a part of the Hot! Festival
Photo edited by Elena Rose Light
Photos by Effy Grey
The Story of the Orca’s Silver Tongue as Told by the Manager of the Only Taco Bell in Juno follows the epic tale of a whale god named Murder, the Manager of the only Taco Bell in Juno, and Frankie Bottomless, the former BFF who stole their gorgeous sparkling tongue and ran away to San Francisco. This narrative of shifting selves manifests as a transdisciplinary performance with a projected video essay, puppetry, and live choral soundscape. The cast assumes new bodies with each encounter, assembling a queer utopian world that envisions new modes for friendship, lust, and solitude.
Poem by Nina Budabin McQuown, adapted for stage by Anna Lublina, Lim Mui, Lilly Kaplan, and Nina Budabin McQuown
Music Composed by: Lilly Kaplan
Cast:
Lilly Kaplan
Christopher Delacruz
Anqi Zhang
Anna Slate
PAST PERFORMANCES:
January 23-24, 2018: The Tank (NYC) as a part of the Exponential Festival
July 25, 2017: Dixon Place (NYC) as a part of the Hot! Festival
June 15-22, 2017: Vital Joint (NYC) as a part of the Interrobang:New Works Festival
Previous Collaborators: Nina Budabin McQuown, Lilliana Kaplan, Ruthie Natanzon
Previous Cast:
Lim Mui
Annie-Sage Whitehurst
Christopher Delacruz
Gabby Harrison
Anqi Zhang
Photo Credit: Effy Grey and Scott Shaw
