Review: LANOTTE+VERSO Vitalizes at LA MAMA

The East Fourth Street cultural district is a wildly fascinating and most humbly inspired reintegration of the old and new that makes New York, New York. For the patient flaneurs and public amateurs, it's a vibrant dreamscape for the 21st century.

Amateur, by its root definition, simply means a lover who pursues passion, beauty, art and life in all of its wonderfully diverse expressions despite professional or financial gain. While amateurs certainly rub shoulders with career artists and profiteering entrepreneurs steeped in the incomparable Manhattan culture market, the beauty of East Fourth Street culture is its continuity with over a hundred years of artistic appreciation.

Outside the 4th Street Photo Gallery, seasoned photographer Alex Harsley stands like a staunch pillar of African-American history told through his impeccably original lens. Inimitable portraits of Mohammed Ali and Miles Davis intermingle with chromatic streetscapes from "All over," as Harsley says, a kind man of few words.

Next door, Pageant Print Shops offer passersby a glimpse into bygone cartographic depictions of every neighborhood in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and truly throughout the globe. A storefront away, at Rivington Guitars, one 1960 Silvertone Model 1448 is displayed with a $600 price tag that will make any music buff drool.

Across from the New York Theatre Workshop, where thespians and dramatists gather under a drizzling, overcast Sunday breeze. is LA MAMA, a precious experimental theater venue in the heart of the East Fourth Cultural District.

In the first floor theater, Carol Mendes & Artists are presenting LANOTTE + VERSO, beginning with an eerie opening. A dancer writhes deliberately in the dim, searching shadows between brick walls. The scene is reminiscent of early 20th century performance art, a constant fixture of the underground arts milieu.

VERSO originates from the Portuguese, meaning, among other definitions, poetry without regular rhythm or rhyme. And truly, the soft touch of Brazilian choreographer Carol Mendes breathes like a stroke of impressionist paint over the now highly modern, Pollock-like texture of the lower Manhattan mindscape.

The company is about female empowerment. They deliver this at the community level, inspiring young women with artistic discipline. In continuity with the early New York veil of female oppression that plagued the obscene, exploitative arts world at the height of the immigrant age--1890s-1920s--Mendes now posits the reclamation of women as strong and creative.

She pulls no punches, though, in her reanimation of the past, as her dancers performed LANOTTE+VERSO with soot-smeared chests, hands and backs, as in the resurrection of the women workers of early LES Manhattan, before the neighborhood gentrified into its more palatably saleable, present nomination East Village.

While the choreographer and dancers are not born and raised New Yorkers, they authentically grasped the spirit and ambiance of East Fourth neighborhood history with a lively, upfront stage presence.

When Carol Mendes appeared onstage for intermission, inviting a volunteer to join her, she emphasized the physical difficulties of her artistic discipline. Crowd participation, female nudity, and the dimly lit brick walls of the theater all screamed with the passage of voices gone to time, though not to art.

Photo Courtsey of La MaMa

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