In Her New Piece, This Visionary Dancer And Performance Artist Explores How We Manage Grief And Rage

“Get in the light.” When she was a child Vanessa Anspaugh’s father, would direct his daughter with his video camera and advise her to get into the light. A passionate performer, she especially loved to dance.

“We have these old home movies of my father telling me to stand under a lamp and do my dances,” shares Anspaugh of her father, David, a prolific director whose credits includes the beloved films Hoosiers and Rudy.

That passion for ballet, tap and jazz continued to blossom within Anspaugh, whose mother is actress Tamara Kramer. “I absorbed both the director and performer parts and enjoyed being really expressive. And I became very serious about ballet,” says Anspaugh who was invited to apprentice with a ballet company in Southern California.

When her parents divorced the dance company offered her a sense of community and refuge. “I suddenly had this big extended family, a sense of accountability and a space where I would work very hard to get in my body,” she says.

For years Anspaugh continued on the ballet track. But at 17, she developed an eating disorder. “I was very skinny, but it also took over my mind as I became so obsessed with not eating,” shares Anspaugh. “And as I got older, I felt there was no escape. It was horrible” For her the best way to heal was to get as far away from ballet as possible. “It help detoxify my mind and body,” adds Anspaugh. “So I just quit.”

Years later when she was at Antioch College, she studied visual art and Buddhist philosophy. “I got interested in visual art, like painting, photography and sculpture, but of course my heart ached for dance and movement for many years,” Then one summer she found herself at The Kitchen, an avant-garde performance and experimental art performance venue in Chelsea watching a piece by Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder and was riveted and transformed.

“I felt a kinship with this artist. She was a choreographer performer and was amazingly fierce and wild and grotesque and so unafraid,” recalls Anspaugh. “She was also trained and I saw her working in such a rigorous way. I had never seen anything so unusual and multifaceted. It wasn't telling me a story like sleeping beauty. It wasn’t telling me how or what to feel. But I was feeling and thinking all kinds of things.”

That moment melded everything that Anspaugh cared about and she understood her path. “I knew I needed to make performance or dances,” she shares. As Anspaugh explains, her work exists in a contemporary dance context where performance, art, dance and theater collide.

Since 2006, Anspaugh’s work has been been commissioned and presented by many venues throughout the world including The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Danspace Project, DTW, The Sculpture Center, The Kitchen, The Rubin Museum, The River to River Festival and The Hessel Museum. When reviewing her work, Armed Guard Garden, New York Times dance critic Brian Seibert wrote that Anspaugh “draws the viewer in immediately and never lets go.”

Next month from November 10-12 Anspaugh is debuting her newest work, Mourning After Mornings at New York Live Arts. The piece delves into how to process loss at so many levels.

“Even before the pandemic, we were facing an unprecedented level of violence in this country—violence to marginalized bodies and the body of the earth. The ongoing atrocities are relentless,” observes Anspaugh. “And I didn’t know how to process their endlessness.” She returned to Susan Sontag’s seminal book, Regarding the Pain of Others. “She asks ‘how do we keep paying attention and stay sensitized to the enormity of bodies in pain when the images or atrocities, are non-stop?,” observes Anspaugh.

Then her own question took her further as she asked, “where are our spaces for grieving all of these losses?” She kept looking around for examples of grieving rituals. She saw none. “Sure, we have American funerals, an occasional vigil,” says Anspaugh. “But these gestures felt limited and short and contained in some unnameable way.”

As Anspaugh explains in Mourning After Mornings she intentionally chose to start the piece working with three female dancers in their 40s and 50s who had rich and celebrated careers dancing when they were in their 20s and 30s. “Once they each had children, they were no longer regularly seen on the New York stages as they had been,” observes Anspaugh of the women who all experienced losses.

“As their personal priorities may have shifted, this narrative is the status quo. Even Rebecca Serrell who had won a Bessie Award, the dance world version of the Oscars, for most outstanding performer in 2014, hadn’t performed in almost a decade.”

This lack of opportunities for older dancers has been troubling to Anspaugh. “In my opinion these three women have more to offer audiences now than they ever have,” she says. “Maybe their legs don’t go as high as they did when they were younger, but the depth and texture of their performances are so much more lived and nuanced, that simply watching them walk on to stage and just stand there for five minutes is captivating.”

Anspaugh hopes that Mourning After Mornings offers a cathartic experience for the audience. “Where at the end they walk out of the theater feeling their hearts beating in their chest and their feet moving their flesh down the sidewalk, in some quiet subterranean rhythm,” she says. “Where they feel a little less alone in the world.”