2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
"Performing artists have always proven to be resilient and resourceful even during the most challenging times. Since the pandemic began last March, dance practitioners have been both taking time to reflect and going ahead in doing the creative work they are always doing. This past year has certainly been painful and frustrating, both mentally exhausting and physically debilitating. Dance artists have, however, continued to make work, and I believe that the artists participating in this season's La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival are making work that is essential and true to this pivotal moment in time." - Nicky Paraiso, La MaMa Moves! Curator
2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa LiveTalks: Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 6:30 PM (EDT)
In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, artists from across the diaspora will hold an inter-generational dialogue about maintaining personal and artistic practices of resiliency and resistance prior to and during the pandemic. Set against the backdrop of the rise in anti-Asian violence, in particular, the murder of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta, GA, the group will touch on hidden American histories, the “model minority” myth, and how dance and performance serve as a vessel for challenging and changing stereotypes of Asian and Asian American women. The event is curated and moderated by Maura Nguyen Donohue. Artists include Yoshiko Chuma, Sophia Gutchinov, Potri Ranka Manis, Paz Tanjuaquio and Sugar Vendil. The evening will include links to resources and ways to support the local AAPI community.
La MaMa Kids: Dance Festival Zoom Kids Class
with Tiffany Mills and Emily Pope
Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 4PM (EDT)
Tiffany Mills Company offers a fun, creative movement class to kids (age 5 and up), drawing inspiration from their “Home Project,” which is being presented as part of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Choreographer Tiffany Mills and dancer/rehearsal assistant Emily Pope will lead kids through a movement adventure, using rooms and household objects asinspiration. A favorite purple stuffy in the bedroom, a soft rug in the living room, a potted plant in the sunlit kitchen will help spark movement exploration. Class will culminate with kids magically transporting them selves to a dreamed of place — moving though sparkling sand at the beach or on a snowpeaked mountain. Join us. Imaginations will soar!
Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum |Prayer of the Morning
Thursday, May 13 and Saturday, May 15 at 7pm
Streamed live from the Ellen Stewart Theatre
Prayer of the Morning is a collaborative performance by Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum grounded in multidisciplinary modes of their Ashkenazi Jewish lineages. Drawing strength from liberation struggles whileinterrogating collusion with colonial regimes, they weave and re-cast theircultural pageantries, composing new prosody for this moment.
J. Bouey | untitled: an exploration of grief
Friday, May 14 at 7pm and Sunday, May 16 at 5pm
Streamed from the Downstairs Theatre
J.Bouey explores grief through movement and improvisation. Calling on the grief that exists at the intersections of being Black and queer with mental illnesses, Bouey says they hope to learn the lessons that grief during multiple global pandemics (namely COVID-19 and anti-Blackness) has to offer.
Virtual International Showcase
Tuesday, May 18 at 7pm
An Online-only Event
Featuring Morgan Bullock, Gerald Casel, Daudi Fayar, BamBam Frost, and John Scott
Sweden-basedchoreographer BamBam Frost has created an eleven-minute digital work for the festival using her recent stage piece YES as a starting point. YES is a cascadeof pleasure, sadness, and dreams of possibilities. In her work Frost is dealing with questions of how to create more sustainable ways of existing individuallyand together, and for YES she turned to the “erotic” as reimagined by Audre Lorde, the “pleasure activism” of adrienne maree brown, and to the many worldsof Octavia Butler for guidance. It is a work that processes big emotions around current events and the colonial history that lead us here, with pleasure as acompass for healing and dreaming of alternatives.
Morgan Bullock, a world-ranked Irish dancer from Virginia and TikTok star, brings a short, dynamic work set to the song “All Up To You” by Shay Lia.
An excerpt from Gerald Casel’s Not About Race Dance will be presented. Not AboutRace Dance critiques the unmarked predominance of whiteness in US post modernism. It cites Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance to connect thesilence around the AIDS epidemic and the unacknowledged racial politics ofpost modern dance. Occupying a space defined by white artists, it contests thestructural endurance of white post modernity by dis identifying with the whitecube activated by Trisha Brown’s Locus and asks how difference can be madevisible through choreographic structures that do not make space for Brown andBlack bodies.
Kenyan choreographer/dancer Daudi Fayar blends movement styles in this personal work originally presented at the third edition of Bold Memoir Online. John Scott’s Inside Dance is part of a cycle of works created during the pandemic called Dances for Inside and Outside. It has elements of step dancing and is a dance of celebration, defiance, hope, and anxiety. Inside Dance is performed by Conor Thomas Doherty, Mintesinot Wolde, and Sibéal Davitt. John Scott/Irish Modern Dance Theatre is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland.
Tiffany Mills Company | Home Project(excerpts-in-process)
Thursday, May 20 and Saturday, May 22 at 7pm
Streamed live from the Ellen Stewart Theatre
Tiffany Mills Company's Home Project weaves movement, text, and electronic music together to create an environment inspired by one word: home. Mills and her collaborators take a close look at their relationships with the places in which they live. They draw upon memories of their diverse childhood homes-some stableand constant, some mobile and unpredictable. They source material from their present homes impacted by the isolation of COVID-19 and inspired by the currentfight for equality. And they search for the true essence of home as they try to accept who they are and imagine who they might collectively become. Conceived and choreographed by Tiffany Mills. The creative team includes Max Giteck Duykers (composer), Kay Cummings (dramaturge), and Chris Hudacs (lighting design). Home Project will be performed by Mills, Jordan Morley, Nikolas Owens, Emily Pope, and Mei Yamanaka. The evening-length work will premiere in 2022.
Ricarrdo Valentine / Brother(hood)Dance! | All About Love
Friday, May 21 at 7pm and Sunday, May 23 at 5pm
Streamed live from the Downstairs Theatre
Ricarrdo Valentine's new solo is a personal dance-theater exploration on Black love and healing.
Shared Program:
Jasmine Hearn / Songs from Pleasure Memory | Sugar Vendil / Test Sites
Saturday, May 22 and Sunday, May 23 at 4pm
Outdoors at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega
Jasmine Hearn shares a short set of three new songs from their soon-to-be-released album, Pleasure Memory. Through movement, sound, and storytelling they wonder/wander how to offer space and time so their body can roam, still, and fly.
Sugar Vendil's Test Sites is an ongoing series of performance pieces that areexperiments in process. Each Test Site involves a short-term process and is anexercise in limits and creativity. Blending voice and movement, her new TestSite 7 will be a release of rage and a ritual for joy. Vendil will also performTest Site 5: Seedlings for voice, movement, and electronics, and other solo music compositions. An AAPI New Yorker, Vendil says she is making the work as "aninelegant, angry, and urgent response to the current moment." Vendil will be joined by Jasmine Chong, Yoshiko Chuma, Sophia Gutchinov, Bliss Lau, Laura Snell, Alicia Tan, and Jing Yu
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature with additional support from the Harkness Foundation for Dance, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, The Sequoia Foundation, and The Shubert Foundation.
Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum (NYC/Lenapehoking) areinterdisciplinary performance makers who have been supporting each other's worksince 2014. Their individual works have taken different pathways towardexamining Jewish histories-for Ahuvia deconstructing Zionist folk song anddance and grounding in Ashkenazi liturgical modes; for Tenenbaum the resonantmythology of musical theater. They are recipients of the 2021 New JewishCulture Fellowship and have received support for their collaboration fromRoulette Intermedium, Mount Tremper Arts, and the Center at West Park. Theyhave facilitated collaborative workshops through Earthdance's Moving Arts Lab,and Brooklyn Jews. Individually, Ahuvia, raised in Israel/Palestine and theUS/Turtle Island, has had her work supported by Movement Research, BaryshnikovArts Center, New Music USA, and the Brooklyn Arts Council, and has beenpresented by NYLA/DTW, the 14th Street Y, Art Stations Foundations, DanspaceProject, and Gibney Dance. Tenenbaum's work was most recently presented byDanspace Project as part of collective terrain/s, co-organized with artistJasmine Hearn and curator Lydia Bell. Her past work has been commissioned andpresented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Temple University, Snug Harbor, andBrooklyn Studios for Dance, among others.
J. Bouey is out here doing their best. Currently moving onpandemic timing and prioritizing rest, Bouey is finding their way back to joy.Bouey is the founder of The Dance Union Podcast, a recent 2021-2022 JeromeFellow, and is a current Gibney Spotlight artist, Artist-In-Residence at CPR-Center for Performance Research, and 2021 Bogliasco Fellow. Bouey was also a2018 Movement Research Van Lier Fellow and a former dancer with Bill T.Jones/Arnie Zane Company. Determined to manifest the dreams dreamt in theiryouth, Bouey is assuming this responsibility because these dreams sustainedthem when the sun didn't shine or shined too bright to see.
Tiffany Mills is choreographer and artistic director of theNYC-based Tiffany Mills Company, which she founded in 2000. Recent New YorkCity seasons include The Flea Theater, La MaMa Moves!, and BAM Fisher. Otherhighlights include Guggenheim's Works & Process, Baryshnikov Arts Center,and Lincoln Center Out of Doors. The company's work has also been presentednationally at PICA's TBA Festival (OR), Wexner Center (OH), Contemporary DanceTheater (OH), Dance Place (Washington, DC), and internationally in Russia,Italy, Mexico, and Canada. Mills holds an annual Summer Intensive in New YorkCity (2006-present). Most recent awards and residencies include NYU's TischSummer Dance Festival, NCC Akron, CUNY Dance Initiative, The Joyce Theater'sMellon Anchor Tenant Program, and Baryshnikov Arts Center. Mills received a BAin dance from the University of Oregon and an MFA in choreography from OhioState University.
Ricarrdo Valentine is a 2nd generation Black, Jamaican American/estadounidense, co-founder of Brother(hood) Dance!, a Brooklyn based dance collective and 2020 Bessies Honoree for Afro/Solo/Man (Outstanding Production and Outstanding Visual Design). performed our works at Five Myles, Center for Performance Research, B.A.A.D! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), VCU-The Grace Street Theater, DraftWork at St. Mark's Church, JACK, Movement Research at Judson Church, Colby College, Denmark Arts Center, Universidad de las Américas Puebla/Performática(MX), Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán/Viso Festival (MX), Jean-Rene Delsolins Institute (HT) and other venues. Ricarrdo is currently working on a ethno-visual project, Where My People At?, as a 2020-2021 NorthStar Art Incubator Fellow.
Jasmine Hearn is from the ancestral lands of the Karankawaand Atapake people, now known as Houston, Texas. An interdisciplinary artist,director, choreographer, organizer, teaching artist, and a 2017 BessieAward-winning performer with Skeleton Architecture, they have crafted andshared collaborative dance-theater performances rooted in identity, memory, andthe facilitation of creative space for feelings and fantasy. They are currentlya company member with Urban Bush Women and a 2019 Jerome Foundation Jerome HillFellow. Hearn has creatively collaborated with multidisciplinary artistsSolange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Staycee Pearl, Holly Bass, slowdanger,BANDPortier, and Jennifer Nagle Myers, who have produced performances at theGuggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, Venice Biennale 2019, New York Live Arts,and the Houston Arts Alliance. Hearn's commitment to dance is an expansivepractice that includes performance, collaboration, sound, and garmentry.
Sugar Vendil is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinaryartist based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Her artistic practice is stronglyrooted in a rigorous discipline as a musician and has gradually expanded intoperformance that integrates music, movement, and unconventional approaches tothe piano. She is a proud second-generation Filipinx American. Vendil was recentlyawarded an ACF | Create commission to write a work for Boston-based duo Box NotFound (May 2020) and was awarded a 2020 Fellowship at the National Arts Club.Vendil was a 2019 Artist in Residence at High Concept Labs in Chicago and wasawarded a 2019 Chamber Music America commission to write a new work for herensemble, The Nouveau Classical Project, which she founded in 2008. She was a2019 resident artist at Mabou Mines and an artist in residence at Target MarginTheater. Vendil has performed at a variety of venues including BAM Fisher,Dixon Place, Knockdown Center's Ready Room, MoMA PS1, and National Sawdust,among others.
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival continues to support La MaMa’s commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge audience’s perception of dance by featuring performance/installations, experimental film screenings & public symposiums which address dance artists’ engagement with the current political climate, as well as honoring diasporic histories and legacy, ancestral inspirations and inter-generational dialogue.