Café La MaMa Live: Christmas in Virtual NickyLand 2020

Cutting-edge choreographer/director/instigator/movement-explorer/performer, Yoshiko Chuma continues a lifetime obsession with the mythology of danger. Landing in New York in 1976, Chuma settled in lower downtown Manhattan, labelled as a dangerous place to be at the time. Devoid of the culture and inflation you see before you now, Yoshiko managed to begin her career in lower Manhattan, spanning an impressive 40 year career to date. Creating over 100 productions, including company works, commissions and site-specific events, Chuma is constantly challenging the notion of performance for both audience and participants. Crossing physical and metaphorical borders along the way, quite literally, Chuma has placed herself in danger's way for the sake of art.

Kyle Dacuyan writes poems and makes performance. Recent poems appear in The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Social Text, and elsewhere. He has presented performance work with movement and poetry at Ars Nova, FringeArts, Haus für Poesie, and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, among other places. He is the Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in NYC.

Ginger Dolden is a multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn New York. Recently, she been seen live on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Call with Carson Daly and has performed at Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Ace Hotel, La MaMa, Joe's Pub, Jalopy, Barbés, and The American Folk Art Museum. She has worked and recorded with artists including: Anthony Braxton, John Cale, Anthony Coleman, Yoshiko Chuma, Tony Conrad, Holly Miranda, Durand Jones and the Indications, The Hot Sardines and performs with The String Orchestra of Brooklyn and The Chelsea Symphony.

Pete Lanctot is a songwriter, composer, arranger, multi-instrumentalist and teacher living in Brooklyn, NY. He has toured and or recorded with Durand Jones and the Indications, Iris Dement, John Cale, The Hot Sardines, Holly Miranda, Tony Conrad and Anthony Coleman, has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Last Call with Carson Daly, and has performed at The Whitney Musuem of American Art, Music Hall of Williamsburg, MoMA, the American Folk Art Museum, Littlefield, Joe’s Pub, The Ace Hotel, and Issue Project Room. Pete is the on call strings player and arranger for the television and film scoring house, Hyperballad Music and composed and recorded the score for the 2018 Derek Shane Garcia film, The Experience which won the award for best director at the Chelsea Film Festival.

Nicky Paraiso is an actor, singer, musician, writer, curator, solo performance artist. He has been a fixture of the NY downtown performance scene for the last four decades. He is Director of Programming for The Club at La MaMa, and Curator for the annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, celebrating its fifteenth year in May 2020. He has worked as a performer with vanguard artists Jeff Weiss & Richard C. Martinez, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks, among many others. Nicky is the recipient of a 1987 Bessie Award for Performance, a 2012 BAX Arts & Artists in Progress Arts Management Award, a 2018 TCG Fox Fellowship for Resident Actors/Round 12, and the 2019 (NY Innovative Theatre) Ellen Stewart Award for Stewardship. Nicky's most recent full-length performance, now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories, directed by John Jesurun, was presented at La MaMa in March 2019. Photo: Jackie Rudin.

Stacey Karen Robinson is a multidisciplinary theater artist. She performed her solo work, You Never Can Always Sometimes Tell, at JACK (NYC) & Salvage Vanguard Theater (TX). The show was developed with support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. She’s a recipient of an Art Matters Grant (2019) and a BRIO Award for Playwriting (2009). Her previous monodrama, Quiet Frenzy, is published in solo / black / woman: scripts, interviews, and essays, Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Justin Sayre, praised for his “deeply passionate soul and acerbic wit” by The New York Times, is a writer and performer who Michael Musto called, “Oscar Wilde meets Whoopi Goldberg.” He was hailed as one the “Funniest People in Brooklyn” by Brooklyn Magazine and among “LA’s 16 Most Talented LGBT Comics” by Frontiers Magazine. Mean, the third in his trilogy of young adult novels from Penguin Books, was released in 2019. Sayre’s works for the theatre has been seen at LaMaMa, The Wild Project, Ars Nova, and more. Sayre’s Ravenswood Manor was recently produced at LA’s Celebration Theater and hailed as “a sharply written and well-acted exemplar of the horror-comedy genre” by The Los Angeles Times. Sayre also writes for television, working with Michael Patrick King on his hit CBS comedy “2 Broke Girls” and for Fox’s “The Cool Kids.” Sayre also appeared on HBO’s “The Comeback” with Lisa Kudrow.

John Scott, Dublin born Choreographer, dancer, singer. His company, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, has performed his work throughout Ireland and internationally at New York Live Arts, La MaMa, Theatre de la Ville, Paris, Kennedy Center, Washington DC, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. John is also one of the subjects of Sadlers Wells’ 52 Portraits with Jonathan Burrows. He founded Dancer from the Dance Festival of Irish Choreography in New York and Dublin in 2019. He performs in Oona Doherty’s ‘Hard To Be Soft’ and has also performed in Meredith Monk’s Quarry and for Yoshiko Chuma, Sarah Rudner, Thomas Lehmen, Adrienne Truscott and Anna Sokolow. He is a member of Aosdána. www.irishmoderndancetheatre.com

Paz Tanjuaquio is a choreographer, performer, and visual artist, based in NYC since 1990. Her work has been presented by LaMaMa Moves!, Wassaic Projects, Harkness Dance Festival at 92Y, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Danspace Project, among others; nationally, San Diego Trolley Dances, ADF Int’l Screen Dance; internationally, at Le Commun, Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland and at residencies in Cambodia, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, her birthplace. Awards for her choreography include NEA, Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, made possible by the Ford Foundation, NYFA Build and QCA. As a dancer, she has performed with Molissa Fenley, Nicky Paraiso, Dean Moss, George Emilio Sanchez, Carl Hancock Rux, Marlies Yearby, among others. She is a member of the NYS DanceForce and serves on the Steering Committee of The Bessies/NY Dance & Performance Awards. She received her MFA in Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts; BA in Visual Arts at UC San Diego. In 2000, she co-founded TOPAZ ARTS, Inc. with Todd B. Richmond – a creative development space for contemporary performance & visual arts. www.topazarts.org

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Cover Photo by Theo Cote

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