“We are a community”
Ara Fitzgerald
Interviewed on August 24th, 2022
by Anabella Lenzu
Anabella: This is like a continuation of our coffee and our meetings. I’m so inspired by your life as an artist and as a mother. Before you had your kids you were dancing and creating, so this was a decision to become a mom. What made you become a mom? Tell me about the decision, as well as compare your creative work before and after being a mother.
Ara: The decision to have children? My husband and I made the decision to have children later in life. I had my first child at 36 and my second child at 39. Creative work did change, obviously, as those of us with children know. I felt I could wake up in the middle of the night worrying about one or two things, but not three. With a young family and a full time teaching job, I had to let artistic practice become quieter. Still the artistic impulse doesn’t go away. I began to realize that raising children and running a dance and theater department were choreographies in and of themselves. And that art is life and life is art and love, essential. Serving young people seemed to be no less important than making pure art, and that along with being a mother were what were being asked of me at that time. When my first child was 4 months old, I took him with me to the Edinburgh Festival. He was a wonderful little traveler. I performed with composer Wall Matthews in our collaboration based on Yeats’ Crazy Jane poems. Eight shows a week for 3 weeks and my 4-month-old with me, was the happiest I could ever have imagined –– to have a wonderful new being along with this incredible collaborator in Scotland and in performance. It was extraordinary. When the second child came along, it became more complicated. And I needed to work full-time to help support our family. Creative work was put on hold, though there was always something not quite right about not making pieces, even though I was consciously choosing to be in a loving obligation to my family and devoted to my work. In 1994, I was teaching and had a bodywork practice. I had a serious car accident. I found myself making a piece with original text and movement to absorb what had happened. Recently, I have been gathering together the scripts and drawings I’ve done over the years. I came across the story about the car accident and decided to put it back on its feet for the first time in 25 years. It’s fascinating to see what holds up and what doesn’t. What has changed. In the 1990’s I was not scared to send my kids to school. The piece is about a teacher, a dog and a child. It was inspired by a sentence one of my sons had written in a creative assignment at school. He wrote: “The car ran over the dog. The dog lay on the ground thinking of death.” The demolished car in the front yard and their mother in the neck brace, however lucky to walk away, had truly frightened them. So that was the inspiration for that piece. Did that answer your question?
Anabella: Yes because the conversation revolves around the before and after. Sometimes things need to become a bit dormant in a different way. Your journey as a creator changes. There are periods when you’re constantly on the move, taking your children here and there, having a full-time job; multitasking all of the time. Sometimes I think, “Oh I can’t do my art” and I feel so sad, but a lot of times it’s just about patience. I’d love to hear about your journey because it is so inspiring.
Ara: My husband had a good job which allowed me some time for creative work, but he lost his job. I am focused when I perform but in the middle of a performance at that time, I thought, I have a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old, and my husband without work. I cannot continue as a dance artist.. I need to get a full time job. It was absolutely clear that my family and earning a living were what was being asked of me. Like most artists, my inner need to create continued to ask for attention –– I don’t mean to say obligation should always be chosen over artistic voice –– but these were demanding times in my life and I do not regret having been focused on my children and the gratitude of finding full time teaching work. Still I did make some pieces, I never stopped entirely making work. That wasn’t possible. So now, putting these texts together in book form and seeing the words stick to the page is so exciting to me! And there’s a body of work, which I had nearly forgotten.
Anabella: Exactly! Perhaps it’s a way to capture the present and you can look back on the years and say “Oh that’s how that was,” and the journey of evolving as a human being. I also would like to talk about friends that don’t have kids. Do you notice a difference between them?
Ara: Yes! But, one thing I wanted to say –– I was a quirky body, an improvising dancer. I didn’t do the right thing all the time and didn’t always do precise repetitions. Dancers live with the pressure of the precision of the body and with quickly passing youth. I feel that it hampers us as a field in that we don’t have a place for people as they age. I’ve kept performing, now with language and movement, not the full force jumping dances I did as a young person, but gesture and movement, language and their interaction in a hybrid form. As we age, we have more stories to tell, more experience. To be in a field that does not have space for that is unfortunate. Writers continue to write, painters paint, musicians play, and tap dancers tap….
Anabella: Yes! It’s changing Ara, at least here in New York City. It’s an inspiration to see Bill T. Jones, for example. I complain that I can’t jump anymore, but I can do so many things.
Ara: Yes! I remember watching the Merce Cunningham Company and seeing Merce when he was older. When he would walk across the stage or do anything; he was all I could watch.
Anabella: Exactly! And as you mentioned earlier, we also make the community, we make the field. That’s why I feel it’s so important to share these testimonies for inspiration. Otherwise, you just see things on the stage, but what about the dialogue? So getting back to the difference you see in our friends and colleagues that don’t have kids. Do you see a difference in their art-making? Could you talk about this?
Ara: I think it's as different as individual artists are different. I don’t necessarily see something different in the art, but one thing that happens when you have children is that you realize you don’t really have control over your life in the way that you might think you do before having children. We’ve been broken open by these little people, and by the force of nature, and the need to support them economically, physically, and emotionally. If you don’t have children, you may not have been challenged in that way. Other things can do that I imagine, so again I can’t speak for anyone else. Occasionally, I’ve noticed there can be less of an ability to deal with things when they suddenly change. As mothers, we’re used to surprises and with young children, the world as a weapon. When they’re very young and when they’re teenagers, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen next. My kids are in their 30s now and our roles are beginning to shift. I feel their concern about me, their father and their stepfather and stepmother.. They’re beginning to realize that their parents, all four of us, are getting older now. They’re realizing they are getting ready to take care of us one day which I feel as an act of love on their part.
Anabella: Of course. And as you said, we as mothers are always prepared. I remember speaking with someone and they told me, “Don’t worry it will pass,” like the “terrible 2’s” when you can’t bring them anywhere. It ends up moving so quickly.
Ara: Absolutely, as soon as you think you understand a 2-year-old they become a 3-year-old. One of my kids was 2, the other wasn’t born yet, and we visited a friend, and on her coffee table was a book titled, “Your 3-year-old…Friend or Enemy?” And I thought to myself, “Oh no! I thought it was going to get easier!” (laughter)
Anabella: Speaking to you as a mother and as a teacher, how do you pass your respect for the art forms in general to your kids? My son, for example, doesn’t want anything to do with our art form. He’s a rebel, he wants to find his voice. He likes soccer, so I find myself watching soccer documentaries and watching soccer with him. I’ve never done that in my life, but I want to learn why he’s interested in it and support him in this journey. I know one of your kids is an actor/artist. Could you tell me a bit about this?
Ara: They’re both artists; the other is a writer. They were born like that, or at least discovered these passions very early. In teaching I was aware that students needed to find something that they were passionate about –– or a desire to help, change, or discover through curiosity or service. Those are the things that create the rutter on the sailboat, direct one’s life. Jake was always a writer and is teaching at a high school in New York and getting his master's in teaching from Columbia. He’s currently writing a novel and short stories. He worked as a sports writer as well. He’s a wonderful writer. When he put his college application in, I looked at it and there was a question asking, “What do you want to do?” and he simply wrote, “I am a writer,” and he’s doing that. Same thing with Hale, who’s my younger son and an actor. He said, “I have no plan B, this is what I’m doing.” He’s acting and writing and recording his songs. He’s performed in theatrical productions in New York and on television. So they’re both making their way. Jake realized teaching is definitely a part of his dedication and his work. Hale is dedicated to acting and making music.
Anabella: But you said they were born that way, what about you? You must have contributed to this in some way.
Ara: Well, my first performance was when I was 3, and I played a duck. I had my first dance classes because my grandfather, who was a lawyer, had clients who were Russian ballet dancers who couldn’t afford to pay him for his legal advice, so they said they would give ballet classes to someone in his family. That’s how I started dancing. Like a duck in water, I just had to keep doing it. As quirky as I was, I didn’t fit into any of the categories, but I couldn't not do it. I had to do it. That’s how I feel it is for my children; they have to do it. I’m not sure I contributed to it, though we supported their interests.
Anabella: I know you told me in the past that your son used to give you notes when you perform. (laughter)
Ara: I think he was 10 or 11. I was rehearsing a piece called “Yoga Beach” which was part of “The Adventures of the Ever Fragmenting Woman, (PG 35)” in the living room. Hale watched, pencil in hand, and wrote things like, “Move your legs faster when you’re upside down in the chair, turn your legs more to the left, and if you forget, just keep going no one will know.” Yes! I knew we were in deep trouble when we sent him to camp in the town where we were living, in Rockland County. The director of the program was Wendy Taucher, who’s an incredible director and artist. He came home from camp and said he wanted to audition for TADA! children’s theater in New York City. He decided then that he wanted to become an actor. Wendy told me he’d give her notes and sometimes he was right. We went to the audition and he got into the company. It was a demanding program. If you were late or missed a rehearsal, you were out of the company, because there were plenty of other people who wanted to do this. He met that challenge. He’d do his homework in the car on the way into rehearsal and he became very organized as a result of his need to be in TADA!
Anabella: Wow. My daughter used to go to that program before the pandemic. I love that program, they’re on the stage, it's great!
Ara: It’s good training. Teaching so many things –– physical skills, collaboration, presence, and being on time. Hitting your mark!
Anabella: Did you used to bring them to your rehearsals? Tell me about that. I remember one time I was trying to rehearse at CPR (Center for Performance Research) and my two kids were bouncing off the walls. I was rehearsing with 5 dancers who were trying to concentrate and I was trying to keep my mind sane. I couldn’t afford a babysitter, so I had to bring them with me.
Ara: When I was pregnant with my first child, I had to lie down for 4 months because of an issue with the placenta.. I made a solo for Lesley Farlow while sitting in a chair. Babysitting was not a problem. Some years later, when they were about 9 and 7, following a student performance at Manhattanville, they ran backstage in the crossover and smashed into each other. One of them had a black eye that changed colors for days. They came to all the department performances, and shared their notes on which piece they liked the best and why.
Anabella: They became little critics!
Ara: Yes they did! And appreciators of dance and theater.
Anabella: That’s what both of my kids do. Even my son that’s into sports, has an amazing eye because they’ve been exposed since they were little.
Ara: Be careful, because soccer is a beautiful ballet…except when they hit their heads on that ball. My partner now is Peter Cunningham, who I’ve known since I was 20, but we didn’t start our relationship until 10 years ago. We worked on shows in which I was the choreographer and he was the photographer. In 1985, my son, Jake, was brought to Peter’s studio where we were making pictures of a production. The babysitter clock ran out and Jake was dropped off at the photo shoot. After the cast left, Peter made pictures of Jake balanced on my knees. So there are photos of Jake flying on my knees, naked, holding a half eaten bagel. That photo has been in the family all of these years taken by the person who, nearly 30 years later, became my partner. It’s just crazy!
Anabella: Wow, magical! Tell me more about your project, the book, the script, and the drawing. How are you collecting everything, what are your future plans?
Ara: Since the mid 90's I have written monologues that I perform. Some of them you’ve seen. Peter suggested I gather them together and see if they might become a book. Looking at them on the page is so different from sharing them as performance and they seemed to hold up moving from stage to page. I was fortunate to have had a liberal arts education. I loved reading and literature. The pieces are original writing. I have always made drawings. I’m not a trained artist, but I make intuitive line drawings. I began to put some of them into the book. It has become like a choreographic process. Experimenting with cursive penmanship for the titles. What drawings work? What photographs are going to be in some of the pieces? What will be the order of the book? I’ve never written a book before so I have a beginner's mind. I’m working with Ola DeKorne on the design. We will print artist’s proofs of the book for a gallery show in 2023. Will I find a publisher? I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in it. As I said before, it’s an extraordinary thing as a dancer to be working on something that is an art object. That also happened making films with Peter.
Anabella: It’s a way to preserve it. What we do is always so intangible, something you can’t really capture, but when you’re making a film you’re choosing how to frame it and organize it. It will stay there, and in books, forever!
Ara: I love the idea that someone else can come along and use some of these texts and make something of their own with them.
Anabella: Amazing, keep us updated on this! We’ll add it to the website, it’s part of supporting your work. That’s what this is about –– creating this community for each other. As mothers, sometimes we feel we’re alone, but we’re not and that’s why we're connecting here. Tell me about how it was when your kids left the house. Did you have more time to create your art? How was this adjustment?
Ara: I was happy they were going off to college and leaving the house because that’s their life. Some mothers get so used to mothering that they can’t let go. I was not like that. My marriage ended, so I was alone, and that was shocking. I was in Ireland, outside of Dublin, during a sabbatical and I realized that nobody in the world knew where I was. I hadn’t experienced that in decades. My kids always knew where I was, whether I was at work or home, etc. but at that moment, no one knew where I was. So I called up one of my kids, just so someone knew where I was. There was a void for a time because we had always been so busy as a family. I continued working and commuting, and dealing with the passing of people in my family, and all that comes up. And it was fascinating to have more time and to watch how it fills. It’s not like I suddenly turned on a spigot and became the artist I wanted to be, now that the kids were gone. No, it’s the same difficult process as always. We don’t know where we are, we pick our way through the fog, very carefully, and wonder what we’re doing. Why are we doing it? Are we out of our minds? And yet we have to do it and keep doing it and something gets created and we wonder if anyone wants to see it. (laughter)
Anabella: Yes, I remember when I got my Masters and I had to leave my house for one month. My daughter was 2 ½ and my son was 6 ½ and I was alone in this bedroom at this university; I had to eat dinner and realized, wow what do I want to eat? It’s been so long since I’ve chosen to eat the things that I want. It was very silent and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went to the studio and laid on the floor. I thought to myself, “Oh this is me, it’s nice to meet you again,” but it was crazy that I didn’t know the food that I liked, or knew my natural rhythms because I’m so used to waking up with the kids. You give me hope that there will be a moment when it’ll just be me, but also it’s scary!
Ara: That’s right, it’s going to be just you again! It is scary because in a way, the organization of a family, children, and the deep need that is day-to-day physical, heart and head, organizes us. It gives us a reason for being every day. I retired, although we call it graduation around here, and that was another shock. Not to have the constant needs of students and department…you know it! That was another kind of surprise, and then the gift of having artistic curiosity, not a big career, not a known career, but artistic curiosity that held through all of those years. And to be now later in life and not organized so tightly by family and jobs, to have something that is asking for my attention and making me feel alive and interested in what’s happening. I’m so grateful for that.
Anabella: Wow, Ara, it’s life! We learn so much as moms, like generosity and patience. Everything will come at the right time, but at the same time, it takes longer because we have so much going on between students, work, and family. I was speaking today with an early mom and she expressed to me that she feels “off balance.” She said her only time to be alone is in the shower! So how were you able to nurture yourself with all of life going around you? What are the things that keep you alive? What’s your flame?
Ara: Some of it is the sense of the aesthetic, that there’s beauty around us. There’s something creative about making dinner for a family. I don’t mean this is without pain, because I remember it so well –– when the only time to be alone was in the shower. You asked earlier about people who don’t have children –– it’s explaining moments like this to them. That you have a being that is totally dependent on you and you can’t do anything unless someone you trust is caring for them. Another thing that’s so important is family, a parent, my mother. I always wished she was living next door. I was in a mother’s group where we met once a week at each other's place and brought the kids together. That saved me. We were there for each other when one of us had a job that we had to do and we couldn’t get help. I’ve said sometimes, jokingly, that I’d be dead without my girlfriends. And not to leave fathers out, but they have a different kind of choice to be present in a way.
Anabella: How did you find this group? Was it through school?
Ara: We were living in Rockland County, New York and there was a group of women who had moved up there from New York City. We were all living there, really amazing women; writers, filmmakers, choreographers. All of us figuring out this balance of raising children and who we are and where we are in all of it.
Anabella: Absolutely, it’s not coming to us so easily. Especially in New York City where it’s so diverse, not every mother has the same way of seeing things. We have to generate encounters to help one another.
Ara: I’m so glad you’re doing this, it’s very important.
Anabella: We need to do more, so that’s why this is the starting point. Ara, is there anything else you would like to add?
Ara: I’m really grateful that I had my sons. I never really thought I was going to have children. I didn’t think I was going to have a family. It was an extraordinary thing to have these two people that I love so much and that their dad loves and their step-parents love. Watching them grow is an extraordinary thing. It's a creative process and a challenging drudgery of a process. It called on what we knew as dancers, to physically persevere, communicate, create. But many of us had to give up the force of wanting to be known in the field. I had to let that all go and be with what I needed to attend to. It doesn’t stop, it’s marvelous, it just keeps going.
Anabella: That’s why I love talking to you!
Ara: I love talking to you too! I’m so proud of you for doing all of the things you do and making them happen, going after them and creating community! It’s really an amazing thing.
Anabella: Thank you! That’s why I’m here, otherwise, I’d be in Argentina. My dad was a wonderful man and he was in so many different clubs and associations, so I have him in my ear saying you need to give back to the community. Now that my kids are a bit older, I’ve been able to have a little more time to share what I love most. This pandemic made me realize I need to share what I love most and to talk to others like you. Otherwise, it’s just my dance, my art, my creation. We learn from each other, we push each other and inspire each other. That’s how we keep going.
Ara: There are a lot of complaints in the dance world that there’s no community, but I think we make our own community. We are a community, the people who are your interviewees are the community and I’m very proud to be a part of it.
Ara Fitzgerald grew up with a vaudevillian Grandmother who led an all-girl jazz band. Ara creates dance/theatre as a choreographer, writer, improviser, professor, and performer. She was a member of the Workgroup, Daniel Nagrin’s seminal improvisation company, The Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble, and Fitzgerald, Kramer, and Bean. Her work has been seen on and off Broadway, in dance spaces, museums and Zen centers. A graduate of Connecticut College (BA) and Wesleyan University (MALS), she taught at Connecticut College, The National Theatre Institute, and Trinity Square Conservatory, and served as Director of Dance and Theatre at Manhattanville College. Primarily known for solos with original text, she revels in ongoing collaborations with photographer/filmmaker Peter Cunningham; composer, Wall Matthews (Words for Music Perhaps to poetry of W.B. Yeats); Paris-based choreographer, Martha Moore, (pandemic zoom films: If I Get Frozen, You Keep Going and Face to Faceless), Pilgrimage (2015) with Clare Byrne, and the honor to perform reconstructions of Life of a Flower and Conversations with an Ant by dancer/clown, Lotte Goslar. She is on the boards of The American Dance Guild and The Mystic Paper Beasts. Ara and Stuart Pimsler compiled and edited, Martha Myers’ memoir, Don’t Sit Down. In these troubling times, one of Ara’s stage and film characters, The Ghost of P.T. Barnum, returns to haunt her in Watch the Bullies Dance (2016), The Sound of One Hand Slapping (2017) and The Invisible Circus of The Present Tense (2022). In addition to solo evenings combining live performances and film collaborations, she is at work on a book of her scripts and drawings, Slow Dancing Is Easy. Ara is the mother to Jake Appleman (a writer and teacher) and Hale Appleman (an actor and singer-songwriter) who continue to inspire her. https://www.arafitzgerald.com/
Anabella Lenzu: Originally from Argentina, Anabella Lenzu is a dancer, choreographer, scholar & educator with over 30 years of experience working in Argentina, Chile, Italy, and the USA. Lenzu directs her own company, Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama (ALDD), which since 2006 has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works, and performed at 100 venues, presenting thought-provoking and historically conscious dance-theater in NYC. As a choreographer, she has been commissioned all over the world for opera, TV programs, theatre productions, and by many dance companies. She has produced and directed several award-winning short dance films and screened her work in over 200 festivals both nationally and internationally.