‘Mother.Father.’ conveys joys, heartaches of LGBTQ parents through dance

Suarez Dance Theater is presenting an intriguing portrait of LGBTQ parenthood filtered through dance and movement on Valentine’s Day in Hollywood.

‘Mother.Father.‘ is Suarez Dance Theater’s fifth project exploring family. Suarez conducted interviews with lesbian moms and gay dads. These parents’ stories create the framework of Mother.Father. Excerpts of the audio from the interviews form the sound score. The stories are intimate and engage both the profound and the mundane. They unfold with compassion, humor, grit and honesty. Themes of transformation and devotion intersect with ideas of identity and the socio-political conflicts of creating a family outside of hetero-normativity.

Dance artists Eva Angeloff, Bernard Brown, Ilaan Egeland-Mazzini, Kai Hazelwood and Nguyen Nguyen join Suarez to collaboratively create a physical landscape to support these stories. They are investigating how to embody the essence of each story, to find the metaphor in their bodies. New York-based composer Skye Steele is editing the interviews and building the musical score.

They have performed this work in churches, synagogues and theaters through the Los Angeles area.

​Mother.Father. was made possible through support from the Community Access & Participation Grant from Santa Monica Cultural Affairs and individual donors.

Their 2023 performance was made possible in part to an Arts Grant from the city of West Hollywood.