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Coffeehouse Chronicles #178: DANCENOISE Comes To La MaMa This Weekend

Event will feature Cynthia Hedstrom, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Mike Iveson, Hapi Phace, and Carmelita Tropicana.

By: Feb. 05, 2025
Coffeehouse Chronicles #178: DANCENOISE Comes To La MaMa This Weekend  Image
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La MaMa will present Coffeehouse Chronicles #178: Dancenoise taking place on Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 3PM at Ellen Stewart Theatre @ La MaMa (66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003).

The event curated by Michal Gamily with Anne Iobst, Lucy Sexton will be moderated by Cynthia Carr and will feature Cynthia Hedstrom, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Mike Iveson, Hapi Phace, and Carmelita Tropicana 

Dancenoise is an American performance art duo created by Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. Dancenoise entered the New York and Washington, D.C., art and club scene in 1983, performing at venues such as WOW Café, the Pyramid, 8BC, Performance Space 122, Franklin Furnace,  The Kitchen, La Mama, Danspace Project, and King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. Their work has also been presented around Europe as well as at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Dancenoise has also collaborated with other artists including Charles Atlas, Mike Taylor, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Yvonne Meier. In addition to their work under the title Dancenoise, Iobst and Sexton, along with Jo Andres and Mimi Goese, were frequent collaborators with Tom Murrin, an East Village performance artist known for his monthly celebrations in honor of the full moon. Dancenoise is a recipient of National Endowment of the Arts Choreographic Fellowships and a Bessie Award for New York Dance and Theatre.   

DANCENOISE is Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton. The duo began making dance- based performances in 1983, initially emerging at the crossroads of no- wave, punk, radical feminism, performance art, modern dance, and Manhattan's East Village nightclub scene. They performed at such NYC clubs and theaters as WOW Cafe, the Pyramid, 8BC, Performance Space 122, Franklin Furnace, the Kitchen, and Lincoln Center, and went on to tour nationally and internationally. Highlights include the Phenomenon Festival in Jerusalem, Israel; Queer Up North at the Green Room in Manchester, UK; Vienna Fest Wochen in Vienna; Mayfest in Glasgow, Scotland; New York Live in Osaka, Japan; and numerous performances in squatted houses across Europe in the early 80s. In 1989 they received a NY Dance and Performance Award, Bessie, for their show “All the Rage.” In July 2015 DANCENOISE was invited to create and perform a week-long retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. More recently they have performed at Danspace Project's Platform 2016, Charles Atlas's Follies at The Kitchen, at Franklin Furnace: Performance & Politics at Pratt, at Danspace's 2016 Lost and Found Platform, as part of Charles Atlas's Follies at the Kitchen (2018), and premiered a new full length show, Lock 'em Up at New York Live Arts in 2018. 

Cynthia Carr (aka C.Carr) was a columnist and arts writer for The Village Voice from 1984 until 2003, specializing in experimental and cutting edge art, especially performance. She is the author, most recently, of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar. Her previous books are Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She is co-editor (with Elin Diamond and Alisa Solomon) of a book on the work of Robbie McCauley, The Struggle Continues – to be published in 2025 by Theater Communications Group. 

Cynthia Hedstrom was born and raised in Indiana; attended Sarah Lawrence College; studied with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Early 1970s danced with Natural History of the American Dancer and in works by Barbara Dilley, Judy Padow and Mary Overlie. Member of Lucinda Childs Dance Company (1976-1980). Director of the Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church (1980-83). Worked for Mabou Mines (1983-86). Dance Curator at the Kitchen (1986-90).Became part of The Wooster Group (1984-1994). Helped establish International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven as producer, then program director (1994-2002). Re-joined The Wooster Group in 2004 as producer and sometime performer.  

Ishmael Houston-Jones' improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. In 2020 he received a fourth “Bessie” for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in-progress at Danspace Project in New York. Also, at Danspace, he curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now. He has received awards from The Herb Alpert Foundation, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and United States Artists. In 2022 he received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. 

Mike Iveson recently performed in Elevator Repair Service's revival of Gatz at The Public Theater. Broadway: What the Constitution Means to Me.Other recent NYC: Plenty and The Sound and the Fury (Public); Fondly, Collette Richland (NYTW); Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf (Abrons); The World My Mama Raised (Clubbed Thumb); May 2018 / (Performance Space). Regional: Elian(Miami New Drama); Molly Sweeney (Saco River Theatre); tours to the Guthrie (Minneapolis), the Kennedy Center (D.C.), and more with Constitution. He teaches theater to public-high-school teens at the Wooster Group and to adults at the Celebration Barn Theater. Film: Glad Hand in West Side Story; Alone Together; Hi, Friends! TV: “Tulsa King,” “Orange Is the New Black.”  

Alina Troyano, aka Carmelita Tropicana is a Cuban born, New York based writer, performer and educator who became a thespian at the WOW Cafe. Tropicana uses irreverent humor to challenge cultural stereotypes, performing feminine and masculine personas, animals, insects, cyborgs, and hybrid fantasy creatures. Her first plays were collaborations with writer and director Uzi Parnes and she's currently working on Live Memoir, (2025) with long time collaborator writer and director Ela Troyano. In 2024 the critically acclaimed Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!, a collaboration with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, premiered at Soho Rep and was the farewell show for the theater's home in Tribeca. She's received a Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022); United States Artists Fellowship (2021); John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017); and awards from Creative Capital (2016); Anonymous Was a Woman (2005); New York Foundation for the Arts (1987, 1991, 2006) and an Obie (1999). Her writing appears in her book I, Carmelita Tropicana, Performing Between Cultures (2000), a collection of scripts, short stories, essays and she is an editor with Holly Hughes and Jill Dolan on Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the Wow Café Theater (2015). She serves on the New York Foundation for the Arts Board of Directors, Soho Rep Board of Directors, and is a member of the Dramatist Guild. 

Hapi Phace is best remembered from the 80s as the host of ‘Whispers,' the weekly Sunday night‘disco-cabaret' at The Pyramid Club on Avenue A. On the nightclub circuit Hapi collaborated to create shows at The Pyramid , BoyBar, The Palladium, Jackie 60, and more. In the ‘90s, Hapi's  productions of ‘Sara Lee Entenmann Undercover Dietician,'  ‘Lincoln!,' and ‘The John Wayne Gacey Story' were presented at The Club at La MaMa.

Coffeehouse Chronicles is an educational performance series exploring the history of Off-Off-Broadway. Part artist-portrait, part history lesson, and part community forum, Coffeehouse Chronicles take an intimate look at the development of downtown theatre, from the 1960s' “Coffeehouse Theatres” through today. 





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