ZOE AJA MOORE

In My Arms (like a raft, like rope)

LACMA

Commissioned by LACMA, In My Arms (like a raft, like rope) is a new performance that responds to work by select artists represented in LACMA’s Modern Art collection: Ruth Asawa, Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Maren Hassinger, Dorothea Tanning, Lenore Tawney, and Anne Truitt. 

By tracing a line between these artists' physical lives — their bodies, their labor — and their artworks, the performance animates the Modern galleries and illuminates the lived experience that wove itself into the work on view. 

In My Arms is directed by artist Zoe Aja Moore and developed with an ensemble of seven female-identified and non-binary performers. A work of movement and spoken text, In My Arms presents a constellation of voices that celebrate the lives of the artists and evoke a multiplicity of experiences relating to the body — not just the physicality of artmaking, but also how sexuality, illness, motherhood, aging, and labor enter their work.

Textual Score developed in collaboration with dramaturg Amanda Shank

Created with performers: Sivan Ambrose, Brigette Dunn-Korpela, Fiona Dyer, Sarahjeen Francois, Laurel Irene, Tane Kawasaki, and Andrea LeBlanc.

Photos by Amanda Shank