Loco7 Dance Puppet Theater: Lunch with Sonia

How to Say Goodbye: Loco7’s Elegy to Tia Sonia in Lunch with Sonia

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Tia Sonia has decided it is her time to die. She schedules her death-by-euthanasia day and invites her entire family to come to Bogotá, Colombia, to be there with her. Twelve years later, Federico Restrepo, Sonia’s nephew and artistic director of Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre Company,  alongside executive director Denise Greber, completed their piece about Aunt Sonia’s final goodbye lunches leading up to her death and the process of remembering, grieving, and letting go. 

Lunch with Sonia opens with Restrepo dancing with a small rod puppet made of wire that is maneuvered by three puppeteers. The puppet sometimes climbs on Restrepo’s limbs and other times gracefully floats through the air, often mirroring his movements. In the background, a recording of Restrepo plays, as he describes his memory of the day Sonia told him that she had scheduled her death day: September 24. “I asked her if she could possibly change it to the twenty-sixth” her nephew Federico narrates—he was busy on the twenty-fourth. “Okay,” Sonia replies. Such lighthearted and playful moments are sprinkled throughout the piece, blending with the heaviness of grief, capturing the emotional vertigo that comes with losing a loved one. As Restrepo dances with his wire puppet—“my companion” he tells us in the post-show discussion—he also dances to his own recorded narration. Here we watch Restrepo negotiate his relationship, not so much to Sonia herself, but to his memory of her.    

The piece flips between re-creations of Sonia’s last days with her family and dance-puppetry interludes. While Restrepo dances with his wire puppet double, Sonia’s sister dances with a wooden puppet double as she narrates her own memories. Sonia herself is represented by a giant puppet who stands a head taller than her puppeteers. She is a plush foam puppet with short gray hair and glasses wearing a bright-pink nightgown and Crocs. Rods extend from behind her head, elbows, and shoes. These attach to the feet of a puppeteer who walks behind her, allowing her to move and dance around the stage with realism. The original puppet for Sonia was twelve feet tall; however, Restrepo and Greber decided that, while Sonia should feel “larger than life,” they also wanted to capture the intimacy of her final lunches. By making Sonia just slightly bigger than the cast of dancers and puppeteers, she evokes the sense of how her family remembers her: a big presence who was always at the center of the family gatherings but who was also imminently human. We are thus reminded that Sonia is the primary agent in her story. Even in death, she remained in control of her life. In the hands of Loco7, death is not a diminishment of a life lived but an augmentation of it. 

While Sonia is represented by a larger-than-life puppet, her family members are represented by the dancers in Loco7’s company. In contrast to Sonia’s bright-pink outfit, they are dressed entirely in black. In most scenes, Sonia is seated in a large armchair center stage. In a semicircle around her are several stools that different family members come and sit on as they spend Sonia’s last days together. While these family gatherings usually begin with a playback of a recording narrating the scene—each of which was made by Restrepo’s actual family members—they quickly morph into expressionistic dance pieces. In one scene, the dancers begin in unison while sitting on their stools. Their movements are restricted by what they can do while remaining sitting. However, as the dance progresses, they adopt their own individual choreography and begin to use the stools in increasingly dynamic ways. In this way, Loco7 helps us to imagine both the feeling of discomfort and helplessness that comes with the pressure to respond to Sonia’s death in the same way, as well as the need for each member of the family to come to terms with losing their matriarch individually and to carve out their own space to grieve.     

Throughout the performance, a video plays in the background showing a chef preparing a meal. Restrepo’s wire puppet features in the video as well, sometimes as an observer of the chef’s preparation and other times as a helper, stirring a pot on the stove. It’s a single uninterrupted cut—capturing the exact duration of the preparation for Sonia’s final lunch. By grounding the audience in the very real and actual time of the final lunch, while simultaneously showing snippets from multiple of Sonia’s goodbye lunches and memories from Sonia’s life, Loco7 delivers us to the strange temporality of the final goodbye. The film builds anticipation of the meal that will be served as we watch the chef carefully slice, dice, boil, and marinate. As Restrepo reminds us in the post-show discussion, most of Sonia’s final days entailed a lot of waiting around in uncomfortable silence. However, there was also a lot of activity in this period as family members came to terms with Sonia’s death at different speeds and in different ways. And not only is Restrepo himself presenting his personal memory of Sonia’s final lunch, but his memories swim alongside those of his family members and the stories Sonia would recount about her own past. By overlaying each of these temporalities, Loco7 captures the often fractured, warped, and dizzying sense of how it feels to say a final goodbye.