La MaMa Presents CAFE LA MAMA LIVE: LA MAMA MOVES! ONLINE

La MaMa is presenting Café La MaMa Live: La MaMa Moves! Online, curated and hosted by Nicky Paraiso. This edition of Cafe La MaMa Live will be the first in an ongoing process of choreographers exploring the creation/recreation of work for an online platform. This live presentation of works-in-process by Kevin Augustine (USA), Kari Hoaas (Norway), Anabella Lenzu (Argentina/Italy/USA), Tamar Rogoff (USA) will be streamed on La MaMa's website and La MaMa's Facebook page at 7PM (EDT) on July 7, 2020, and will include a discussion with the artists involved. These new works will be further developed and presented again as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival Online later this summer.

The program for this July 7th presentation will include:

BODY CONCERT by Kevin Augustine

Performed by Kevin Augustine (creator/puppet maker), BODY CONCERT is kinetically supported by Bruckner's electroacoustic score composed with melodic fragments of oboe, cello and piano. Designers include Ayumu Poe Saegusa (lights), Gloria Sun (masks & molds), Ilya Vett (technical advisor & set designer). Le Nouvelliste says, "Augustine takes you to previously unsuspected areas, redrawing the limits of puppetry while proposing a reflection on the discipline as well as the theme of his conscious dream."

Be Like Water - the distant episodes by Kari Hoaas

Be Like Water - the distant episodes is a series of digital dance haikus created in response to the isolation and uncertainty we are all facing as humans in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. As dance artists we can no longer share our work through live performance and touring. At this moment we have embarked on creating this series of digital mini-dance poems, premiering a new poem each Sunday. We offer these works as short contemplations on time and place; on listening and seeing, noticing the interplay of light, shadow, movement and sound, and what is.

The night that you stopped acting/ La noche que dejaste de actuar by Anabella Lenzu

The night that you stopped acting/ La noche que dejaste de actuar is a one-woman show which confronts the absurdity and irony of life, while being an artist and a spectator in today's world. "My work reflects my experience as a Latina/European artist living in New York and comes from a deep examination of my motivations as a woman, mother, and immigrant. I have been working on a new dance-theater piece The night that you stopped acting/ La noche que dejaste de actuar since July 2019, and it was scheduled to have its world premiere on June 6 & 7 at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in NYC, but due to the circumstances of the pandemic, we adapted the stage piece to create a new dance film!"

A Plague on All Our Houses by Tamar Rogoff

The means available to us to theatricalize this highly dramatic situation we are now in are startlingly mundane. In the blunt instruments of the dancers alone at home, doing their own camera work, and the unreliable electronics that two dimensionalize the depths of the body and give us all eye strain, we must search for and find a silver lining. For LaMama Moves "I am presenting A Plague on All Our Houses, 12-minute excerpts from a work in progress. It is my choreographic medicine to treat the loneliness, absence of touch and isolation of Covid-19. In the shock of a known world suddenly gone missing, A Plague on All Our Houses looks through dance and documentary to bring 4 performers in relation to their homes and the larger world, into focus."

"We've asked four of our La MaMa Moves! choreographers to reimagine and rethink their works-in-process for the video camera format, perhaps creating a new form/at entirely" says Paraiso. "All four choreographers are resourceful, unique individual artists with their own idiosyncratic movement vocabularies and vividly visual instincts."

Dates for La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival Online, with further presentations of these four works will be announced soon.

Now in its 15th year, La MaMa Moves! continues to support La MaMa's commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge audience's perception of dance, and will feature performance that address dance artists' engagement with the current political climate, as well as honoring diasporic histories and legacy, ancestral inspirations and inter-generational dialogue.

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