Lists of Promise

Lists of Promise,” a new work currently in a two-week run from March 13- 30 at the East Village cultural landmark, Theater for the New City, promised more than it delivered, at least for now. The physical theater creation by experimental theater director Ildiko Nemeth and veteran choreographer and performing artist Lisa Giobbi treats the troubling issue of patriarchal dominance—from its emergence in history and some of its perverse suppression of women through to the current time. Inspired by the 1976 feminist classic When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone, the production rolls (literally—as the narrator performs on roller skates) through a series of vignettes tracing a disparate group of women from different historical periods and circumstances in a consciousness-raising check-in.

Performance

“Lists of Promise” by Ildiko Nemeth and Lisa Giobbi

Place

Theater for New York City, New York, NY, March 13, 2025

Words

Karen Greenspan

“Lists of Promise” by Ildiko Nemeth and Lisa Giobbi. Photograph by Judit Sipos

The work is laudable for its imaginative structure and for its total integration of movement into the theatrical experience. From the moment you enter the theater, interest is provoked by five women posing like statues amid the folds of classical drapery suspended against the upstage wall. Costumed in cream colored Greco-Roman style garb, designed by Tamar Mogendorff in collaboration with Jessica Mitrani, the five are not frozen in time. They are breathing humans, who continuously shift their poses in subtle ways as the narrator skates about the stage. The formal exposition begins as the five step out of the “curtains of history” like lost goddesses to reclaim their silenced narratives. They deliver solo lines and perform group movement sequences as a female chorus illustrating and responding to the narrator and the aerially danced action.

The narrator, played by Sarah Lemp, comes forward reading a heartfelt letter to Virginia Woolf—speaking to the issues Woolf disclosed in A Room of One’s Own. Dressed as a contemporary woman in gym shorts on roller skates, she updates Woolf on the current state of women’s affairs, reporting that even with the advantages of money, space, and the accumulation of women’s knowledge, we have still not overcome the marginalization of women. An ongoing communication to Woolf loosely ties the scenes together in a credible and inventive framework.

With original writing by Marie Glancy O’Shea and a creative stream of movement tableaux on the ground and in the air by Giobbi, a renowned aerialist, the scenes explore origin stories, past eras, and present crises in a quest to find a path forward. The narrator opens an overstuffed tome for story time as the chorus, like a huddle of eager children, gather at her feet in rapt attention. She begins with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as she attempts to restore the unchronicled female perspective, or what Woolf called the “accumulation of unrecorded life.” From the patriarchal angle, the biblical couple’s fall from paradise was the fault of Eve and all her sex. Her action of tasting the forbidden fruit and tempting Adam with it was the “original sin,” which caused the ancient and ongoing mistrust, derision, and suppression of women.

“Lists of Promise” by Ildiko Nemeth and Lisa Giobbi. Photograph by Judit Sipos

The storytelling prompts the aerial choreography, a simultaneous display of the narrative, performed by Giobbi and three more aerialists. The weightless nature of the airborne movement—with its uncoiled spinning, flipping, bounding, floating, and falling—gives a beautiful, whimsical, and humorous gloss to the absurd and painful anecdotes and index of historical censures imposed upon women. Federico Restrepo’s lighting design made bold use of color and light projections heightening the drama and absurdity enacted in the scenes. In a memorable tableau, a Victorian hoop skirt petticoat (called a cage petticoat) drops down from above and bewilders an unsuspecting woman as to its purpose. She steps into it and is instantly flipped upside down as it swoops her into the upper reaches. There, two other petticoat-clad women complete with Elizabethan collars and fans join her. As the harnessed women in the air read off lists of dos and don’ts of appropriate women’s behavior, the cast on the ground embodies the absurd physicality of the strictures. Unfortunately, the speakers’ vocal projection was not strong enough to deliver the full impact of the captivating scene.

In another vignette—a trial enacted on the ground, in which the chorus of five (now with spectacles) sits as a jury while the narrator plays the defendant’s counsel. The jurors debate the motives and justification for a woman’s crime of rage—a murder. The defendant floats in a harness above the courtroom already condemned before the verdict is rendered. The trial scene might have engendered more sympathy for the female defendant if the charges had been for witchcraft instead of murder. Killing rarely garners a groundswell of female support.

“Lists of Promise” offers a potent structure for questioning the expectations and judgments placed on women through the ages as it highlights the absurd, ironic, and tragic consequences. It falls short, however, with the general lack of vocal projection, unequal skills of some performers, and the pat ending, in which the women of today (the chorus) promise to do better.

Karen Greenspan

Karen Greenspan is a New York City-based dance journalist and frequent contributor to Natural History Magazine, Dance Tabs, Ballet Review, and Tricycle among other publications. She is also the author of Footfalls from the Land of Happiness: A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan, published in 2019.

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