“Yoga for People with Toddlers”
Cara Hagan
Interviewed on December 1st, 2022
by Anabella Lenzu
Anabella: Thank you very much, Cara, for making time to talk about what it is to be a mother, an artist, and an educator. How do you juggle your life between being a mother, a creator, and an educator?
Cara: I don't know that balance is actually a thing. We end up sliding our energy to where we feel we need to at the moment, and something else gets less of our energy. When your family needs you, you're not doing as much of your art. You still do what you need to do in your job, but you're not going above and beyond. When your job needs you, sometimes, your family suffers because you're not at home as much. When you're really in your art process, it feels like a constant negotiation of what's at the top of the list, and it's always changing from moment to moment. I'm not balancing anything.
Anabella: What do you think makes a “good mother,” and what makes a “good artist”?
Cara: That's a hard question because we're getting all of these messages about what a “good parent” is and especially what a “good mother” is because we know it's sexist. The messaging that men and male presenting folks get as parents is really different from what female and female presenting folks get as parents. If you are the mother in the scenario, the woman, you are expected to hold so much information, even with really supportive partners. How many times has your male partner made the doctor's appointment for the kid? How many times has the daycare called and asked for the father, even if both numbers are on the sheet that you gave them? Do you know what I mean? There is this idea that the moms are always “Johnny on the spot,” to the extent that we internalize this. For myself, and this is just my personality, I try to be prepared for everything. For example, I was so proud of myself because I made a Mom’s car cleanup kit, knowing that my kid was going to barf in the car, spill stuff in the car, and track mud and dog poop into the car. All of those things have happened in my car, and every time I'm so grateful that I had the forethought to put this car kit in my trunk. I have plastic bags, wet wipes, car cleaning spray, and extra clothing. Dudes would never think of that. Maybe that's a generalization because some dudes would, but not the ones that I know.
So what makes a “good mom” is somebody who is incredibly nurturing, who is always prepared, and overly enthusiastic about every moment of every day, even when your kid is having a bad day and flopping on the floor, having a big tantrum. As a “good mom,” you need to remind them that it's okay, and you plaster on a big smile and do what you have to do. If you could, you would have a temper tantrum because you're human. It can be really crazy and frustrating when you can't figure out what your child needs at the moment. I have a toddler, and we're still at that place where she says things that I don't quite understand what she means.
Anabella: How old is your daughter?
Cara: She'll be three in just a few weeks. She is speaking in full sentences, but she still pronounces things a little weird. For example, some of them are super cute, she'll say, “Echo turn on the *inaudible language*, which means “Echo turn on the television,” but she calls it something else, and I didn’t know what she was saying. Sometimes you have these very real frustrations from this person who needs something from you, and they cannot quite communicate it to you in a way that you can understand, so you have to decipher, which can be really, really hard to do. I guess what I'm trying to do, in terms of being a “good parent,” is I try not to feel guilty about every time I think I've done something wrong, which is every day. Every day I go to sleep and think, “Wow, I really fucked that up,” whatever that was. I’m trying to do my very best in every moment and know that as long as I am doing it, in the spirit of wanting to be a loving, supportive parent, even if there's something that I need to try again and again, like approaching a situation in a different way, it’s okay for it to be good enough. I'm really super trying and thinking about generational traumas and patterns that I'm trying to break. Just trying to do my best little human job and that's all we can ask for. It's not gonna be perfect.
In terms of being a “good artist”, that's also fraught. As artists, we’re constantly fed this message that it's a competition and there are only so many resources, and all artists are competing for those resources, so you better be a badass. You better be really good at what you do, or you're not getting anything. It's so demeaning that you're suffering a punishment all the time just for being an artist.
Anabella: The guilt as a mother and the guilt as an artist. What are your thoughts on that?
Cara: Some of that has to do with being a woman-identifying person, who's in the arts, where historically, women have been told you really shouldn't be doing this. We’ve been interrogated with questions like, “What business do you have spending time away from your family, to do what? To paint? To dance? To make music? Who does that? You can do that at home with your kids. Just make some crafts.” This idea that if you don't get to a certain level of recognition, for lack of a better word, because it isn't necessarily about celebrity for me, it's about being able to access the resources to do the stuff that I wanna do. Maybe this story will be a good example. When I was pregnant and started showing, I had a male colleague, who's not an artist by the way, who worked at the same university as me, and we were good acquaintances. We were with a group of people having coffee before class and he said to me, “Oh, you're pregnant? This means you're not doing art anymore?” Then I said, “Are you serious? We're not friends anymore.” Why? Why would he say that? That's societal conditioning, right? To be a “good female artist,” you have to be so good that nobody questions your presence in the artistic landscape and that is a huge amount of pressure.
I don't know if I'm the only one who feels this because it's something I struggle with, personally Sometimes, I say to myself “You're spinning your wheels, but what are you actually doing? You've only done this and you haven't done that, so people aren't going to let you in the door anymore if you don't keep producing at the same level of production.” Obviously, there's been a shift: I had a kid, and literally weeks after I had my child, COVID-19 started. I was 11 weeks into being a parent when everything shut down. I was just kind of sorta like getting my bearings, like, “Oh, I'm a parent now, this is weird.” And then everything shut down. So of course the momentum halted. How could it not? And then trying to start back up again in a new job. I made two big moves over COVID, unplanned. Ending up here was actually not in my life plan, like, it's cool, but like, it wasn't what I thought I would be doing two years ago when COVID first came about. But I think a lot of people shifted and like nobody's where you left them physically or emotionally after COVID. Suffice it to say, a lot happened for me and my family during COVID, that I don't necessarily need to share, but just there was a lot that happened and I'm now in this place where I'm like, “Oh, I really need to be doing my art, but gosh, I don't know that I really have anything to show for these past two years. Oh no, have I lost my place? Are they gonna let me back in?” And feeling like what I made over the pandemic was not my best work. It's not like I didn't make anything. I made some things, but I can't say that I feel like they were at the top of my abilities for many reasons. I know a lot of people experienced that, but I feel like at this moment, the “good artist” is such an elusive and damaging thing and it consumes much of my brain space.
Anabella: That's why we need to create this community. I feel there is not enough dialogue about these topics. As mothers sometimes, we need to put on a superhero suit, but sometimes the environment/conditions or the institution aren’t working to help us prosper. For you, what is the role of a female right now in the world? How do you define yourself?
Cara: I'll say first that I use both she/her, and they/them pronouns. Yes, I identify as a woman, but I also identify as somebody who often feels agender, especially in the artistic space; this idea that as human beings, we have access to this spectrum of experience and identity. Of course, I'm very much a female present and in many areas and parts of my life, I do identify that way. And, like you said, nothing changed for me. Especially once you become a mother, because once people see you as a female-presenting person who has a child attached to them there's really nothing you can do about that. You can be who you are in your own home all day long and you can try to impart to your child this idea that they and everyone gets to tell everyone else who they are. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of the time you don't get to speak up and say who you are.
Society sees me as a black woman with a child and there's a lot attached to that. There's a lot that, when I step out of my home, I can’t do very much about. In fact, I actually have to protect myself. Even in 2022, we have to explain away the fact that we are responsible for keeping somebody alive. If my kid has a fever and I don't take them to urgent care, do you know what I mean? This thing that I would actually be neglectful of my child for the sake of somebody who signs my paycheck? I don't think so. I have to draw the line at that kind of stuff. I talk about my kid all the time at work. I tell people, “Sorry I have to leave this meeting early. I need to go pick up my kid. I’ll follow up, thanks so much”. I just recognize that I have to work on a slightly different timeline than all of my colleagues who don't have children. And this is the thing too, and I said this in another interview because for some reason I find myself doing a lot of these, a lot of people are asking me to do interviews about being a mom.
Anyway, before I had children, I thought that I was being sensitive to the needs of parents. I assumed that I was being a good person, by doing whatever it was that I was doing and assuming that people had the time that they had or didn't have, and being accommodating but not nearly accommodating enough. I had no idea and people have no idea, until they actually are in it what it actually means. And the fact that 99% of us, even those of us who have the best intentions, are total jerks when it comes to understanding the needs of people who are keeping other people alive.
Anabella: What are your support systems?
Cara: There's a website called Sitter City and you can interview babysitters in any city in the U.S. So, if I'm traveling somewhere, that means that I've packed my kid into the car. I've driven five hours, I've gotten to the hotel, I've gotten us, into our space, and I've done all that. So that's already a huge thing, I'm already tired, I'm already exhausted just from that. Then I've gotten this person who I've interviewed beforehand, to meet me at the conference space, to hang out with my kid in the hallway and play with her and read to her while I give my presentation. Then I leave the presentation, I hand the babysitter $50, and then I go take her (my kid) to lunch in a playground and all this other stuff. I don't get to see anybody else's things. It's that kind of work: dipping in and dipping out, and having to be literally in two places at once. And then you pack everything up and you go home and you're tired again. Like that's what I've done it multiple times, on the one hand, I'm happy to bring her because I love her. I want her around, but also it’s really hard work and work, mind you, that my husband hasn't done. He's never brought her to a conference. Now he works in a completely different sector than I do. And there are actually things about it: like he could not bring her into a production truck. He works in broadcast; he's a production engineer, and he can't bring her into the equipment. I get that. But here’s the thing, like I have literally figured out how to travel with this child multiple times and it's not even something that it would even enter his brain to like, like “Oh, I'm gonna travel to this thing with her.” He's working the Super Bowl this year. She's not coming with him, she's staying home with me. I have a gig at another college and I'm bringing her to the gig with me while he's working the Super Bowl. Like, okay I see how this goes. And no shade to my husband. He's great. But also, this is how things work.
Anabella: Thinking about the female lineage, what is your legacy to your daughter?
Cara: Many things. People who know me well know that I'm a ritualist and that ritual is a huge part of my life, and not just in my art. My art is a ritual, but also just in my regular everyday life. We celebrate the solstice, for example. I do moon rituals. I've had her do moon rituals with me. This part of me feels incredibly connected to the feminine energies. This ritual side of me has always been a part of me. I've been doing moon rituals since I was five. Nobody taught me how, I just started doing them. This kind of nature-based ritual, that's something that I want to pass on to her. It's been a really important part of my life. People who don't know me probably kind of poo-poo it and laugh it off or whatever, but it's actually a part of my movement work.
And by movement work, I mean socio-cultural, socio-political movement struggle work. I'm actually working on a book right now that talks about the intersections of ritual and social justice activism. I want to pass that on to her. I would very much love to pass on to her this irreverence for all the things that I didn't have the awareness of or the vocabulary to be irreverent about when I was young–like in my twenties, like in my early twenties. I'm in the second half of my thirties, and I'm looking back and I'm like, “Wow, I really didn't see these things.” How they were working on me when I was young. And sometimes I say to myself, “Gosh, I wish I were more irreverent when I was a teenager and in my early twenties.” I was good and by good, I mean that I did what was expected of me. I worked, and I supported myself, which of course are things that you should do, but always in a way that outwardly, was like, “Okay she's doing exactly what she needs to do. She knows her place. She's respectable.” Everything that I did was super respectable and still is, quite frankly. I just wish that I'd pushed back on that a bit.
Anabella: What are the things that you’ve gotten passed on to you from your mother or your grandmother?
Cara: I never met my great-grandmother. But I did have a relationship with my grandmother on my dad's side. Not with my grandmother on my mom's side because she had passed away by the time I was born. But I spent a lot of time with my Nan and she was pretty cool if you asked me. We used to watch all the daytime soaps together. She was one of those people who would “kiki”. There was just a lot to talk about and she was always talking about it and that was super fun.
Actually, in terms of her feelings on motherhood, I get the feeling that she was super ambivalent about it. And that was not something that anybody was allowed to express at any point. Obviously, she loved her children so much, but also she was stressed and depressed and a lot of other things that you weren't allowed to be. Especially at that time in the 1960s when she was having kids. In the fifties and sixties, that wasn't what you were supposed to do. That wasn't what you were supposed to be and she had five of them. I'm a struggle bus over here with one, and I'm like, “You had five?” I know that my mom worked through a lot of things that she felt went wrong in her childhood. And I greatly appreciate all of the efforts that she made to support my sister and me, trying to be the parent that she felt like she didn't quite have. She was my age in the eighties and nineties, and she worked in a corporate setting, where a lot of men worked. She was an archivist, but she was working for a corporation. Keeping all their records and everything, and the ways that she had to contort herself to be in that space. But she was also really upfront about having a family. She never hid the fact that we were around and made it very clear, “I'm here to support my family. They exist, not sorry.” And I definitely have taken that from her too.
Anabella: What things do you want to pass on to your daughter?
Cara: I definitely want to pass on to her this fierce dedication to what it is that feeds your soul. My mom is also a creative person and though she waited, she was always trying to get there. I remember when I was about eight years old, she wanted to go get her master's degree. And she actually didn't end up doing it because she felt like it was too big of a juggle to do. I remember thinking back on it. The reason was because my sister and I were like, “Well, Mom, you're gone. Mom, you're gone.” And there was never a conversation from my dad saying, “You know mom really needs to do this thing for her and we're gonna support her.” That was not the conversation and some of that is just the time that it was. That was like 1990 something. Your mom doesn't go back to school. Who does that? But, she did end up going back to school when she was 50 and got two Master's degrees. And has since written three books and she's 65 now. She always said, “Well, you can have it all just maybe not in the time that you wanna have it in.” And maybe that's true and I push up against that a little bit because Dad really should have sat us down and said, “Mom needs to do this for her and we're gonna support her as a family.” I guess those are some of the things that I push up against because I feel like my parents are a product of their generation, even though they say that they're not in alignment with a lot of the misogynistic ways that we've been living, but I also have to remember that feminism looked different in my mom's day. I try to be compassionate, but there are also some things that I'm just like, “Wow, that was really kind of messed up.”
Anabella: How did your training in dance shape your motherhood? And vice versa?
Cara: There are some negative ways and positive ways. Anybody who ended up having conservatory training during their formative years, which I did, has some things to unlearn. I have had body issues, issues with food, and things like that, that I've not always shared but are there. Just in the past couple of years, I've really come into focus, saying to myself, “Actually Cara, that was really messed up. That, actually, was an issue that you weren't actually willing to look at and say is an issue because it was being supported and lauded in those spaces.” Like, “Oh, look what self-control you have.”, “Oh, that's fabulous. Look at your body.”, “Oh, that's the only thing that's interesting about you.” Those are the things that I have worked really hard to push aside. But the things that I have wanted to keep are those pieces and parts that are about joy and about moving through life in a way that's flexible and fluid and improvisatory. I've leaned much more into my improvisational practice these past years than I have earlier in my life when I was more attached to being a certain way. To be seen in a certain way within the community. And in some ways, especially because my work is interdisciplinary, I feel like I've stepped out of the community, and that I actually am not exactly a part of it.
If that makes sense…and even today I really wonder like, “Okay, where does my dancing actually fit?” What I'm doing most right now is tap improv. I'm tap dancing a lot these days. I am mostly studying improv with wonderful people, one wonderful person in particular who's been mentoring me. That feels really good and right and true to be thinking about rhythm and groove and how I can situate myself within it. Also working on things that are more about movement, as I understand it to exist in the world, and not just movement as I understand it to exist in my body. I guess at this point I am not concerned with movement invention. I actually don't think it exists. Like this idea that you invent movement; “No, we didn't invent anything. We organize things.” I don't even know that I necessarily consider myself a choreographer in that way anymore. In the space that I'm in right now, given the past two and a half years that I've been through, I have a lot of questions about dance and my dancing. And what I'm actually doing within the dance landscape and within the community. And do I belong or do I not belong in what's happening? That's just my stuff. Well, speaking back to that improvisatory part again. Because I'm in that toddler stage, it's just letting things unfold. Like honestly, my kid can make any mess and I'm in a place where I'm like, okay, she's learning and I will clean it up. Just allowing whatever is unfolding in every moment to unfold. This idea that we can create our own fun. We've been in different times when we haven't been able to leave the apartment; for example, if it's just really crappy weather outside and we can't go to the playground across the street, I'll just take out sheets and towels. I'll move the furniture and just make the entire living room like a mess-proof space. I'll put down paper and paint and markers and water and bubbles and let her go crazy. And then I just gather the towels and put them in the laundry afterward. That’s where we are. And it's fitting that I'm doing so much improv work right now because it really speaks to where I am with my parenting journey. If my child was older and we were doing the like, “Okay, get to school, do your homework, do this, this, and this.” It's not like there are no scheduled things that we have to adhere to. Because I still gotta go to work and all those kinds of things. And we keep it moving. There's definitely some routine that we stick to, but the improvisatory part feels salient right now and I actually hadn't thought about it until you asked the question. So thank you for helping me understand that.
Anabella: Dance informs the way that you are as a mother, but also your child informs your work as well. Can you talk about how being a mother has changed seeing dance and all of your work?
Cara: Obviously there's inspiration through and through. I get a lot of inspiration from our experiences together, like when we're outside looking at nature and all of a sudden she picks up something and she thinks it's beautiful and she goes, “Oh, mama, it's so pretty”. And I'm like, “Oh, what about this is pretty?” And just seeing things through her lens is really inspiring. The time constraints; I've always been a spurt worker. When I'm in it, I'm fast and hard, and it's go, go, go, go, go. Okay, we're done. But it brings that into focus a little bit more. That way of working is not just a choice now; I gotta do it that way. I have been thinking more about motherhood in my art. I started a piece while I was in Ohio last year. I may or may not get a chance to finish it. I've been applying for residencies there. I had started it as a visual art piece where I was pouring unfinished cups of tea onto watercolor paper as a way of thinking about and talking about time that is not my own. But in those slivers of time that I would have to myself when she was like napping or I had a moment before I went to go pick her up from daycare or whatever, I would do actual watercolors as a representation of my inner life and my desire to still employ that part of myself. I started moving with the images that I'd created in these collections.
Something interesting that I have found personally, I don't know that people are all that interested in supporting and watching art that is about motherhood. It feels really trivial to people, but the thing about it is that it's a really big deal. I made a fucking human and I'm keeping that human alive and I'm loving that human and that human is teaching me about love. Why would we not wanna talk about this?
I’ve started a little series on my Instagram and my TikTok called, “Yoga for People with Toddlers”. I've been a yoga person for a long time. I've been doing yoga since I was 19, and I'm a certified instructor, even though I don't teach in studios. That's a whole other thing about the violence of commercial yoga. Anyway, I've started doing this series of very short, five-minute practices for people who are caring for toddlers, and throughout all of this, the thing that keeps on coming back to me is the way that we're sold yoga and other wellness practices as part and parcel of being the trope of the stressed out mother. Nobody's selling dads yoga to flatten their pooches or like to get rid of their fupas. I was going through my social media feed and I was actually taking screenshots of all of the ads for wellness-related products for women. House cleaning products for women. Youth products for women. Things like shaving your legs and making your legs less hairy for women and all these things that you're told to do. And of course, they all feature white women except for this one where there was a mystical, magical, black mammy figure who produces a pair of period undies for a girl on her first period and I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” Gosh, these tropes, they come back again and again, and this aligns with this research project that I've been doing about black dance and sitcoms, which is just a trip. Anyway, it keeps coming up again and again. This thing about motherhood and the things that we’re fed, the messaging that we're fed all the time. All the time and what it actually feels like, which is really, really different. What we're fed does not allow for nuance and humanness. In the experience of motherhood, we are effectively rendered non-human, “Oh you robot, be beautiful. Be sexual, but don't forget to wash the rug.”
Anabella: Our kids are our teachers. Do you notice the difference between your colleagues who have kids and the other ones who don't have kids?
Cara: Yeah, I think that the ones who don't have kids, and I think this is something that was happening before the pandemic but now even more so, are throwing themselves into work in a way that it's like, “I can't pay attention. The world is on fire, so I'm just gonna make work about it.” And not necessarily make work about the world. Being in that tunnel, I don't have the luxury to do that. And I say that it's a luxury, but it's also maybe not a luxury. I don't know.
While I wish to be deep in a process, I don't necessarily want to put my blinders on, and because I have a child, I can't put my blinders on. There are too many things that I have to do that require engaging with the world and other people to get done. I can't get lost in my brain. I can't get lost in a hole.
Anabella: Anything else you want to share? It's so much information and it's a pleasure to talk to you, Cara!
Cara: Thank you!
Cara Hagan is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics, a necessary occurrence in pursuit of liberation. In her work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page, and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts. In recent years, Hagan and her work have traveled to such gatherings as the Performática Festival in Cholula, Mexico, the Conference on Geopoetics in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Loikka Dance Film Festival in Helsinki, Finland, the Taos Poetry Festival in Taos, New Mexico, and to the Dance on Camera Festival in New York City. Extended residencies have taken place at Thirak India in Jaipur, India, Playa Summer Lake in the dynamic outback of Oregon, Roehampton University in London, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of North Carolina, School of the Arts. Hagan is editor and contributor to the anthology Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom, published in 2021 by Routledge. Hagan is author of the book Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial practice, published in 2022 by McFarland. Cara Joined the faculty of The New School in 2022 and works as Associate Professor and Program Director for the MFA in Contemporary Theatre Performance.
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.