2022 Research + Development: For Parents/Guardians // Daria Kaufman

May 24-May 30, 2022 // Stomping Ground LA

ma ma

In her new performance piece titled ma ma, experimental dancer/choreographer Daria Kaufman uses movement, sound, and text to explore what it means to make and shape a person. For this period of Research + Development, she collaborated with performer-composer Cassia Streb, sourcing sounds from the dissonant chords of children’s choirs, pre-language utterances, and home audio recordings of Kaufman’s 4-year old son. Kaufman also explored early developmental stages of movement and the physical labor of care, such as rocking, wrangling, and states of anticipation. From the squirmy, jolting motions of infants, to the ceaseless bouncing and swaying that new life demands, ma ma aims to blur the lines between mother and child, care and abandon. 

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Day 1:
The nervous tingles quickly dissipate once I arrive. After a couple hours spent reveling and remembering
how to move, I play with a few prompts based on what my son did when he was first learning to walk.
One exercise – which I call ‘cantilever’ – involves swinging and tossing the upper body, in an effort to
move the lower extremities. I try to do it without becoming ‘dancey’ or illustrative (because he wasn’t).

It’s awkward and restraining and mental and slow, but there’s something there, so I keep at it.

Day 2:
Uvalde. Uvalde happened yesterday while I was in the studio. I listen to NPR reportage on the drive over.
All the correspondents notably have on their ‘empathy’ voices, including whilst delivering unrelated
financial news, so that even good market numbers sound droopy… up half a point… up 1%…

Contact lenses wonky from all the crying. Gotta wait and blink it out – that method where you look up
(blink), side (blink), down (blink), other side (blink), and repeat. I’m always surprised by how effective
just a single round of this is. Amazed at the lens’ ability to self-correct with the most incremental motions.

Let’s surrender today. Lie prone. Play more with that squirmy, I’m-a-baby-just-discovering-my-feet-and-hands-
for-the-first-time thing. Little wiggles. Effortless and unknowing. What does Carolyn always say in Feldenkrais class?
How much can this not matter. How much can you let go.

Day 3:
More reports. More ‘empathy’ voice. Do they receive training in it? Was it an explicit instruction? Did
their boss send a memo? What did the memo say? Mind your tone or Let’s all take a deep breath and
remember to be compassionate today. Or maybe, at this point, there’s a template that they just activate.
Might even be automated.

Meeting and working with Cassia for the first time in-person. I learn she has three young children and that
we share an attunement to the small things – subtle, delicate moments, and the emergent patterns sparked
by task. We talk, play, and talk some more.

Later I look up the definition of ‘attunement’ to find that, in psychology, it’s thought of as something that
occurs between parents and children, such as when a parent mirrors their child’s affect and emotions back
to them, smiling when their child smiles or saying “uh-oh!” when the child drops something.

Day 4:
Cassia tells me a story of one time when she spent hours playing a single chord, trying to find just the
right sound, until she said to herself, “Wait. Am I crazy?”, and then kept going.

I show her ‘cantilever’, along with my toddler walk and run. It’s not about illustrating, I say. I don’t
wanna make fun of him. And I don’t wanna pretend. It’s something else.

We haven’t talked about the shooting at all. I haven’t brought it up. I’m afraid it will swallow everything.
Afraid that it should.

Day 5
Work-in-progress showing (my choice entirely; the residency doesn’t require it at all). It feels
simultaneously extremely useful and futile, not for lack of thoughtful, caring attendees (indeed, all five
viewers are deeply attentive and offer great insights), but because what I end up showing isn’t what I
want, and I sense this as I’m doing it. I feel the all-too-preciousness of it; the restriction. I wonder if the
week’s events made me draw inward, to a place I could control.

Day 6
Donut and coffee and sore muscles. Sore mind. It’s a good day for dispersal.
I repeatedly toss, pour, partition and flick roughly 100 solid-colored wooden building blocks that I stole
from my son’s toy chest. The indeterminacy is exhilarating. Such a relief to watch the pieces scatter. To
see shapes emerge and dissolve, independent of me.

I imagine tossing a pitcher full of milk onto the wall and watching as the sperm-like drops scuttle
downward. I improvise a monologue and character that I later deem “Sperm Doula” – a Southern woman
who shouts lovingly at the milky tadpoles on their kill-or-be-killed chase to potential fertilization (or
OBLIVION!!!). I envision an entire play featuring SD – this microscopic fiery creature who straddles the
laws of quantum and Newtonian physics – with the tagline: She is on no one’s side and everyone’s side.
She is on the side of life. She is… SPERM DOULA.

Day 7:
Frolicking. Laughter. Relinquish.
I go home and hold my son.

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Side note:

For art culled from motherhood / stuff I keep returning to as I make this work / stuff that might interest you if you’re still here:

• Mary Kelly, “Post-Partum Document”
• Carrie Mae Weems, “Kitchen Table Series”
• “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” by Rachel Cusk
• “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid

More information about our R+D Program HERE

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About Daria Kaufman:

Daria Kaufman is an experimental dancer, choreographer, and performing artist whose work spans movement, theater, and writing to explore the multiplicity of female identity. Her practice is rooted in the body – its mutability and capacity for (un)making meaning.

After earning her MFA in Dance from Mills College, Kaufman lived and worked in the SF Bay Area and Lisbon, Portugal, where she gained influence from the cross-genre, contemporary performance movement Nova Danca Portuguesa. While in the Bay, she was nominated for the Isadora Duncan Dance Award (the “Izzie”) for Individual Performance in 2015.

An avid collaborator, Kaufman has frequently worked with Berlin-based intermedia performance collective StratoFyzika, including on their most recent piece, “Human/ID” – an immersive media installation that explores full-body deepfake mapping technology (presented by CounterPulse, 2021).

Kaufman’s performance works have been presented throughout Europe and the US, at venues including: Cutting Ball Theater (SF), ODC Theater (SF), NOHspace (SF), Mills College (Oakland), Pomona and Scripps Colleges (LA), Armazem 22 – in scope of Festival Dias de Danca (Porto), FAKI Festival (Zagreb), Zaratan Contemporary Art Gallery (Lisbon), Festival Cidade PreOcupada (Montemor-o-Novo), and Montras Festival (Sao Luis). Her projects have received funding from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), Gestao dos Direitas dos Artistas (GDA, Portugal), and the European Cultural Foundation.