Review: It's Flaneurs to the Front in "Footnotes"

Footnotes

Created, designed, and directed by Theodora Skipitares

Music and lyrics by Sxip Shirey

Presented by La MaMa and Skysaver Productions at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club

66 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC

February 27-March 15, 2026

A trio of philosophers. Photo by Victoria Forbes.

Anyone who goes to see veteran artist and theatermaker Theodora Skipitares's world-premiere play Footnotes at La MaMa will have had to walk (which, as the play reminds us, might be defined in different ways) at least a little bit to reach a seat inside the theater. What emerges from the punningly titled Footnotes is a sort of wide-ranging collage that highlights the foot and walking as fundamentally binding humans–and non-human animals–together across time, place, and experience. This sweeping scope of this visually remarkable production stretches as far back as 3.6-3.7 million year-old footprints, through Classical Era myths, and all the way to contemporary academic disability studies and the current-day labor activism of Los Deliveristas Unidos, all of which are embodied in various styles of puppet performance. Along with a mix of narration and dialogue, the arresting visuals are complemented by live music and songs (also in a range of styles) in a fascinating consideration of a simple but richly significant part of moving through the world.

Orpheus shadow puppet. Photo by Theodora Skipitares 

The play begins with a prologue in which an impressively tall, wood and metal ape-like puppet struggles to eventually stand erect. This vignette unfolds behind the seated audience, who is asked to stand and turn around for this segment; most of the main action plays out on one of two stages (the exception being portions staged on the balconies to the sides of the audience), and, appropriately, spectators must at one point get up and walk, albeit over a short distance, to a new seat at the second stage and then again to return to the first. These brief bits of using one's own feet dovetail with the thoughts of some of the play's narrators and characters as well as with the broader reminder of the embodiedness of artistic endeavor that inheres not only in parts of the play's text such as the proposed connection made by some anthropologists between walking upright and the origin of rhythmic sound creation but also in the physicality of puppeteering itself. In addition to the "Apeman" of the prologue, the puppets take on a panoply of forms, including giant heads of Greek gods, an equally giant disembodied skeletal foot, sets of disembodied legs, delivery workers racing around on small sets of wheels, faces on screens mounted on tripods, individual puppets of figures such as Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and Aristotle, and, in one especially aesthetically lovely sequence, colored shadow puppets that enact the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Three pilgrims walking. Photo by Jan Leslie Harding.

Several of the abovementioned characters underscore the link between walking and thinking, while an appearance by medieval English mystic Margery Kempe draws attention to the concept of pilgrimage, and nineteenth-century poet (and, again, mystic) Arthur Rimbaud asserts that death is preferable to amputation. At another point, we hear from a selection of contestants–an ostrich, a kangaroo, and an octopus–at the "Grand Championship of Bipedal Beasts." And in yet another section, academics Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor discuss how people without the use of feet or legs can still "go for a walk" and how ableism falsely views acts such as walking through a lens of radical self-sufficiency (the same sort of thinking that detaches humans from the environments and ecologies within which they exist). The musicians (Anthime Miller, Sxip Shirey, and Saudia Young, who also voice dialogue and narration), narrator (Tommie J. Moore), and puppeteers (Jane Catherine Shaw, Rosa Enginoli, Victoria Forbes, Kevin P. Hale, Eva Marie Lansberry, Natthew Marvan, Sasa Yung, and Zlata Godnova) together weave a wonderfully expressive tapestry with all of these individuals and ideas. In a director's note, Skipitares quotes from Rebecca Solnit's history of walking, Wanderlust, that walking is often a form of "looking for something," whether that something is tangible or intangible (incidentally, those interested in books about walking might also check out the work of UK academic, writer, and theater artist Phil Smith). On the more intangible side of things is justice: the juxtaposition of the acclaim accorded Ancient Greek Phillipedes, who died after running 150 miles to deliver his message, with the devaluation of the frequently dangerous, movement-based labor of the deliveristas is particularly striking; and the show's final song reminds us, in connection to a march led by Mahatma Gandhi, that changing the world can happen one literal step at a time. And in case you forget this, you will leave Footnotes with a tangible piece of art–a miniature booklet designed by Juniper Jeong–that will remind you.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards