2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival On Demand
"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
Watch selected events from the 2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival on-demand on Vimeo.
Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum |Prayer of the Morning
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
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
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)
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.
"The word “brilliant” has two definitions. The first is “radiant,” and the second is “intelligent.” Happily, “Home Project (excerpts-in-process)” is both." - Paulanne Simmons, TheaterLife
Ricarrdo Valentine / Brother(hood)Dance! | All About Love
Streamed live from the Downstairs Theatre
Ricarrdo Valentine's new solo is a personal dance-theater exploration on Black love and healing.
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.
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.