SHADOWLAND Opens La MaMa Moves! Dance Fest in April

Choreographer Kari Hoaas from Oslo, Norway will open the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival April 6-8, 2023 with the world premiere of "Shadowland," a work of musicality and grace that contemplates the world's pandemic-imposed state of liminality. The performance will employ Norwegian dancers Ida Haugen, Matias Rønningen and Christine Kjellberg and a short appearance by Kari Hoaas herself.

Hoaas' award-winning work has been co-produced and presented in over 20 countries on four continents. Postmodern, abstract and contemporary, her artistry invites comparison with Germany's Sasha Waltz, Belgium's Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Britain's Russell Maliphant. During the period 1993-2006 she lived and worked in New York City and regards her return with this presentation of "Shadowland" as a sort of joyous homecoming.

A choreographic response to our increasingly unstable post-pandemic world, "Shadowland" is visually and conceptually inspired by the work of Norwegian visual artist Jan Groth. It is built on physical solo dance practice, aiming at an expression which is both abstract and poetic.

In explaining the piece, Hoaas refers to the concept of liminal space. The term, she notes, originated in architecture for spaces you move through, like in an airport. "They are places of transition--unsettling because we know something has passed and we don't know what's next." Psychologically, it's applied to the feeling of being overwhelmed and confused when going through a major life change--raw, vulnerable and uncertain. Puberty has been called the liminal space of adolescents. "The pandemic has put us in this kind of space," she says.

In "Shadowland," distinct solos created with each dancer are scored together in different constellations, forming choreographic bricolages and larger performance events. The resulting performance becomes a web of various assemblages and shifting formats, constructing a multiple of group dances, quartets, trios, duets, and solos, each engaging with the presence (or absence) of live music and film projections. A trailer for the evening, featuring two of its solos, is available at: https://vimeo.com/778826507.

Two versions of these solos have also been produced in 2022 as dance films. The first, "Shadowland I", features dancer Ida Haugen and is set to "Amanecer Loretano" composed by Italo Arbulu. It has won seven awards:

* Best Dance Film Short at Mannheim Arts and Film Festival, Germany, Sep. 2022.
* Best Dance Film Short at Cine Paris Dance Festival, France, Sep. 2022
* Semi Finalist at FIVC International Screendance Festival of Chile, Sep. 2022
* Finalist at Immagina Film Festival, Italy, Oct. 2022
* Official Selection Athens International Digital Film Festival, Dec. 2022
* Official Selection of Dance Camera West Festival, Los Angeles, January 2023.
* Official Selection Festival Video (An)Danza Internacional, Puerto Rico, March 2023

On March 8, this film will be screened in Oslo at Kristiania University College's Seminar with Women in Academia marking the International Women's Day and Hoaas will be featured speaker. The film will be screened at the Martha´s Vineyard Film Festival March 22-26. On March 24, it will be screened in the Dance on Film program of Austin Film Festival.

The second short film, "Shadowland II," is performed by Matias Rønningen and is set to "Vocalise" by Sergei Rachmaninoff. It is not released yet.

The "Shadowland" project is conceived, directed and choreographed by Kari Hoaas. Cellist and composer is Fil Uno. Stage and light design are by Gard Gitlestad. Costume design is by Zofia Jakubiec. Film and editing are by Kari Hoaas and Alexander Kayiambakis.

La MaMa figured prominently in Hoaas' artistic evolution in the 1990's and early 2000's before she relocated back to Norway. As a dancer, she appeared at La MaMa with Maureen Fleming in "After Eros" and was painted in gold for her appearance with Poppo and the Go Go Boys in "Universe." In that period, she lived in the East Village and worked with various independent choreographers including Sarah Skaggs, Susan Rethorst, Seán Curran Company, and the Merce Cunningham Understudy Repertory Group under the direction of Chris Komar, among others. She curated PS 122's "New Stuff" series from 1998 to 2003. Hoaas moved back to Oslo in 2005 but continued traveling back and forth to New York and working in two continents until 2007. "Since then," she writes, "I have dreamed of returning to the US to present my own choreographic work on one of New York's downtown stages, the community where I feel I grew up in as an artist." Her stage work "Be Like Water" was scheduled to make its US premiere at the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. She recontextualized this live performance material in 2021 into a series of filmed "dance haikus" for Café La MaMa Live, a series that provided performing artists an opportunity to re-imagine their stage work for an online platform.

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