Remember Who You Are

“ It’s like he’s saying to you: “Remember who you are.” You know? You’re a replica of your mother, and your grandmother before that, and her grandmother before that.”



I was having a conversation with our Dramaturge, Carmen, last month when she said this to me. We were talking about my solo in Portrait, about the character I had developed. How to put on a necklace? How to transition from an improvisation back into set, technical movement? How do I react when Cesar stops me from moving?

The how of dancing is the mysterious part. Not the what, the steps. Those come with time, repetition, perseverance. Those come early in the development of a new piece. How comes later. But so much hinges on how… and, in the case of Portrait, by whom.

As I thought it over, I kept hearing Carmen's words. This isn’t just about me, I realized. This solo about being a woman, with all its responsibilities, obligations, manners, loyalties, betrayls, desires, compulsions, this is an old story, a family story. A self-portrait is also a portrait of the past. Of me, of my mother, of my grandmothers.

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My mother’s mother was Camilla Mary Russell Bernauer.


Camilla came from an Irish family, and was tiny. She went to college and studied English. She married and had 8 children before getting a Master’s degree and becoming a Psychologist. I remember her as being somehow formal and casual at the same time: sipping a cocktail in a lowball glass before dinner, perched on the arm of my grandfather's big chair. And her house of beautiful things, like the tiny tree with leaves made of jade. My grandmother had an intimidating authority despite her size. It took me many years to understand why she made my mom so nervous. She was smart, she was on to you, and she could get you to talk. Even when she was old, she was sharp. I talked to her on the phone a few days before she died and when I mentioned a line from a poem, she recited the whole thing to me, from memory.

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My father's mother is Adele Francis Koepsell Stillwell, here on her wedding day.


Adele’s family was German. She studied Visual Art in college, married my grandfather and had 5 children. I love her stories about her mother, my great-grandmother, who would take the kids on long drives through the snow drifts after a storm, or over to Iowa to visit relatives….on a whim. This, at a time when few women were independent, let alone driving cars. Adele is just as brave, strong and stubborn as her mother. She is a do-it-yourself, figure-it-out, don’t-buy-it-if-you-can-make-it kind of woman. And she can make almost anything: paintings, pickles, soup, babies stop crying, boxes of dress-up clothes, quilts, dinners for 30.... just don’t get underfoot. In my memories, she is wearing shorts. Her legs are tan and muscular. She's 55, 60, and she's in the thick of the action, chasing the toddlers, weeding the garden, waterskiing at the lake.

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My mother is Virginia Mary Bernauer Stillwell.

She is half Irish, from her mother, and half German, from her father. She studied theater in college, and she worked professionally as an actress and director until her late 20s. She married her high school sweetheart, had 4 children, and moved our entire family across the country 7 times before she was 40. During that time she also got two Master’s degrees in Theology and wrote a book.

Virginia is shy and demostrative, creative and critical, affectionate and detached in alternating and unpredictable doses. She is physically very beautiful but doesn't know it. She has never used her looks to get or achieve anything. But they've always been there, the big eyes, the cheekbones, the great figure. She’s like the person who can’t find her glasses because they’re on top of her head. Except in her case, she isn’t even looking for the glasses. She’s too busy thinking. So much that she often seems to be chasing her mind around, trying to catch up with herself. Meanwhile she is beautiful, and we are all trying to get her attention.

At least, this is how I remember it from childhood. Her eyes are huge and she’s looking right at me, she’s saying “look out the window’ as we drive across Utah because she wants me not to miss the painted canyons. She’s waking me up in the middle of the night because the Northern Lights are shining. She’s showing me the hoar frost on the trees and explaining what makes it so special. That's the essence for her: the moments of absorbtion, of witnessing. It’s as if she has one foot in another world. The other one is here with us.