La Mama Moves! Dance Festival Announces 2018 Lineup
By: Stephi Wild Apr. 23, 2018
Now about to turn thirteen, La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, the ever-evolving spring fling of dance that exuberantly commandeers the various theaters of La MaMa each year, takes on yet another challenge in 2018. This year's festival showcases nine artists who take the road less travelled, daring to speak out in new and forceful ways about issues that trouble and inspire them: race, gender, religion, exclusion, each using the body to voice concerns in ways words cannot. Eleven companies, nine performances, including five premieres are on the boards. New this year will be two offsite events: panel discussions about artists and cultural identity, and screenings of rarely-seen films. The 2018 festival runs May 10-June 3.
"The choreographers participating in La MaMa Moves! 2018 are all strong, powerful individuals beholden to no one, answering to no one but themselves, adhering to no style or genre, holding on to not one physical practice, dance technique or philosophy," said the festival's creatively intrepid and irrepressibly curious curator Nicky Paraiso, himself a practicing artist for over thirty years.
"Ever since its founding by Ellen Stewart over fifty-six years ago, La MaMa has been an artist-driven theater, committed to the idea that artists have their finger on the pulse of what is happening in the arts and respond with great imagination and empathy," said Mia Yoo, who has been the artistic director of La MaMa since 2011. "I think this season's La MaMa Moves! lineup expresses that commitment with grace and passion."
LUCIE GREGOIRE, May 10 and 11, 7PM; Ellen Stewart Theatre
Les choses dernières
Inspired by Paul Auster's bleakly beautiful "In the Country of Last Things," Canadian choreographer Lucie Gregoire's Les choses dernières brims with raw imagery and visceral physicality as it creates a portrait of a woman attempting to survive in a world gone askew. Cinematic in its visual power, the 53 minute dance has an original score by Robert Lepage; its intensely dramatic lighting is by Alin Lortie. Accompanied by a recorded reading of the novel by Auster, Gregoire herself performs the three-minute prelude to the work, followed by Kim Henry's performance of Les choses dernières. There will be a talk between Auster and Gregoire following the May 10 performance.
ADHAM HAFEZ COMPANY, May 12, 7PM and May 13, 4PM; Ellen Stewart Theatre
To Catch a Terrorist
Maintaining a stable sense of self after growing up in Egypt, a country divided by its Arab-African-Muslim identities is one aspect of To Catch a Terrorist. The other, inspired by the sting of current events, in which all Arabs are lumped together and perceived as potential terrorists, raises the questions that riddle through Hafez's work: "How much of our work can be seen/ understood by gazes that predetermine their politics towards my body?" he asks. "And how do our bodies that are heavily politicized and policed end up adding more obscurity to the works danced/ performed, to the point of the dance being invisible because of the political weight our bodies are made to carry?" Based on ten years of research and weaving real life interviews, the dance attempts to transcend such pre-determined vision and escape the accepted idea that a Muslim (religion) and Arab (race) equates to terrorist (a political stance)
TONY WHITFIELD AND WHITFIELD COLABS, May 11 and 12, 8PM; May 13, 2PM, Downstairs Theatre
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter and Paris, 1938
New Love: 1910: World Out of Kilter, a collaboration between choreographer Alexandre Bado, director Oisin Stack, composer/musicians Andrew Alden, William Basinski, Mathieu Goudot, Kurt Hoffman, Meg Reichardt and Faith Whitfield, along with the performers and videographers, is a live stage response to Adrien Barrere's 1910 film, "Tom Pouce suit une femme." The work, along with the video installation Paris, 1938, which will be shown outside the Downstairs Theatre at 7pm, are the first two segments of This Dancerie, a ten-part, multi-site, multi-media exploration of the ongoing dangers and subversively won joys of queer life in Paris over the last century.
PARIJAT DESAI, PAZ TANJUAQUIO, ANGIE PITTMAN, May 17 and 18 at 7PM, Downstairs Theatre
To Catch a Terrorist O.O.F. (studies in the opposite of fear), a solo performed by the Indian-born choreographer Parijat Desai combines contemporary and Indian classical dance to explore the relationship between motion and emotion in this newest iteration of Desai's ongoing studies of the subject. Angie Pittman's leaning in originally used the rousing hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" as a point of departure to celebrate her experiences of praise dancing in her church as a child and for her riveting explorations of the liminal space between rest and activity, abandonment and rootedness and sermon and prayer. The music for the work is Maggot Brain by Funkadelic and excerpts of Rivers of Babylon by Boney M. Station II Station, a solo created and performed by Paz Tanjuaquio and set to text and spoken word by George Emilio Sanchez, uses sound and film by Todd B. Richmond and imagery --ranging from abandoned gas stations to an imagined city--as vehicles to travel through Tanjuaquio's "stations of the mind."
JONATHAN GONZALEZ, May 19, 7PM and May 20 at 2PM; Downstairs Theatre
Obeah
At its simplest, Obeah refers to a sorceress who practices a form of West Indian black magic. In Gonzalez's dance, a duet between dancer Katrina Reid, who embodies the complex spirit of the Obeah and the dance's sound designer Rena Anakwe. Obeah is believed to inhabit the bottom of the sea, whose waters symbolize multiple meanings and expressions of grief including the spiritual freedom and joy that arises from collective memory, mourning and meditation.
ELLEN FISHER, May 25 and 26 at 7PM, and May 27 at 2PM, Downstairs Theatre
Time Don't Stop for Nobody
Using a cast of four, who range in age between 12 years to 95 years, Ellen Fisher's Time Don't Stop for No Body is an inquiry into notions of aging and its differing effects at the various stages of our life. The responses to a questionnaire that Fisher devised about growing older form the heart and soul of the piece. Its music, text and choreography were collaboratively conceived with Fisher serving as director. Guest jazz and world music vocalist Nilusha will sing live.
ANABELLA LENZU/DANCE DRAMA, May 30 and 31 at 7PM, Downstairs Theatre
No More Beautiful Dances
A solo performed by its Argentinian-born choreographer Anabella Lénzu, who tapped Todd Carroll for video projection, Jennifer Johanos for costumes, and Daniel Pettrow for direction, No More Beautiful Dances presents a personal look at twenty-first century femininity and what it means to Lénzu to be a woman--and now mother--living today's world.
NI'JA WHITSON, June 1 and 2 at 7PM, Downstairs Theatre
The Unarrival Experiments #4 (work-in-progress)
Unarrival Experiments #4 is a ritual digging into the "vaporous body" through relationships between astronomy, cosmology, time, Blackness," according to its award-winning choreographer and performer Ni'Ja Whitson. As a solo iteration of the evening-length installation performance in process, the Bessie Award-winning artist engages the work of Heidegger's "On Time and Being" with their forthcoming manuscript Walking Glories.
AUNTS@ LA MAMA, June 3 at 5PM, Downstairs Theatre
An Evening of Dance and Performance Organized by Aunts
An underground platform for dance, AUNTS creates events in unconventional spaces with multiple performers, overlapping performances, open dance parties, multi- disciplinary, body/non-body based, time oriented /experimental/unfinished/ process art. In the typical Aunts style event, artists negotiate simultaneous presentations of their work in relationship to one another. Audiences are free to move about the space, engage with as many or as few of the performances as they like, and create their own experiences. And at La MaMa? Expect the joy of the unexpected.
This year La MaMa Moves! offers two off-stage, off-site events: Secret journey: Don't Call Them Dangerous, a symposium and Shine New York Traces, a screening of rarely seen films.
SECRET JOURNEY: DON'T CALL THEM DANGEROUS, May 19 and 20 at 3pm, Movement Research GO5 at Abrons Arts Center
Secret Journey: Don't Call Them Dangerous is a gathering of non-native, U.S-based and international choreographers, curators and presenters, performance scholars who faced firsthand issues of immigration, migration, physical and psychic displacement. Among the discussants are long-time La MaMa Moves! artist Yoshiko Chuma, NYU doctoral candidate and choreographer Adham Hafez, as well as representatives from Syria, Turkey, Romania, China. The symposium is presented in partnership with Movement Research.
SHINE: NEW YORK TRACES, May 26 and 27 at 1pm, Douglas Dunn's Studio, 541 Broadway, 3rd floor.
Co-presented with the Berlin-based performance production group Dock 11 and hosted by Douglas Dunn, Shine: New York Traces features the screening of a series of rarely seen films by filmmakers living in the New York in the 1970's and 1980's including Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Elaine Summers and Yoshiko Chuma. Their avant-garde films feature performances by dance critic Edwin Denby, poet Anne Waldman, filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt, choreographer and dancer Stephen Petronio, among other stars of the downtown art scene. The movies were originally shown as part of Dock 11's 2016 and 2017 film series titled "Shine: New York Traces."
Tickets for La MaMa Moves onstage performances are $25 for adults; $20 for students and seniors (except for Aunts @ La MaMa which is priced at $15 for adults; $10 for students/seniors. The first ten tickets for every performance are available for $10 each (advance sale only) as part of La MaMa's 10@$10 ticketing initiative. Tickets may be purchased online at www.lamama.org or by calling OvationTix at 212-352-3101. The special offsite events are free to the public. The La MaMa box office is open one hour prior to every performance.
The Downstairs Theatre and the Ellen Stewart Theatre are located at 66 East 4th Street.
The Abrons Art Center is located at 466 Grand Street.
The Douglas Dunn Dance Studio is located at 541 Broadway.
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