La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival ’13
Curated by Nicky Paraiso
La MaMa Moves! 2013 celebrates the dance artists who have performed at the famed experimental theater over the years. While retaining the festival’s vibrant and expansive vision, its diverse range of form, content, style and its international reach, the 2013 schedule features more full-length works, giving artists more of a chance to take root. Ten premieres are scheduled.
Companies & Choreographers:
Pavel Zustiak | Jen Abrams | Chris Yon | Afshin Varjavandi | The Loch Leven Dancers | Shot Scotch | Luke Murphy & Carlye Eckert | Jennifer Monson | Renee Archibald | Renee Wadleigh | Hari Krishnan | Paul Matteson | John J. Zullo | Oren Barnoy | East Village Dance Project
Performances
Pavel Zustiak
The Painted Bird Trilogy
June 21-30 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
Among this year’s highlights is Pavel Zustiak’s widely heralded, three-part production “The Painted Bird Trilogy,” whose first sectioned premiered at La MaMa in November 2010. These performances mark the first time the entire trilogy is presented in New York. Inspired by the classic Jerzy Kosinski novel, The Painted Bird explores displacement, otherness and transformation through an emotionally searing, magical and mysterious melding of dance, theater and music.
Jen Abrams
Any Resistance
June 7-29 | First Floor Theatre
Any Resemblance is a series of 14 performances, which chronicle a gay female couple’s emotional, psychic and spiritual lives as one of the parents attempts to get pregnant. Applying the principle of TV On Demand to the live performances, which take place in Abrams’ own Brooklyn apartment, the four episodes will also appear online for those unable to see it live. The drama of “Any Resemblance” is intensified by the racial differences between the black and white potential parents. While there is spoken dialogue, the movement takes over when words fail to express the characters’ joy and pain as they experience the present and imagine their future.
Chris Yon
The Very Unlikeliness
June 14-16 | The Club
Chris Yon returns with the world premiere of “The Very Unlikeliness (I’m going to Kill You!) [again&again version]”. Yon works as a collagist. The witty and unpredictable dance is a layered assemblage of movement that references history, popular culture imagery, and it is performed by Yon and his wife Taryn Griggs, with the fast-paced urgency of James Brown in Deadpan.
Afshin Varjavandi
Oceania
June 12-13 | The Club
Developed at La MaMa’s artist residency center, La MaMa Umbria International, Afshin Varjavandi’s “Oceania,” which employs a cast of seven Italian dancers from Centro Danza Perugia, will be performed at The Club.
Scottish Dance Night
The Loch Leven Dancers and Shot Scotch
July 1 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
La MaMa Moves! Will celebrate the Scots with “A Scottish Dance and Music Night” that includes the live music of the Wild Thistle, a lively band whose vibrant sounds combine with the vitality of The Loch Leven Dancers and Shot Scotch dancing the highland fling, the sword dance, reels, jigs, and strathspeys. The audience, which is invited to participate, is encouraged to drag out their kilts from the closet. The Scots will perform in the Ellen Stewart Theatre.
Luke Murphy & Carlye Eckert
Drenched
July 5-7 | First Floor Theatre
The Irish perform July 5-7, with the American premiere of “Drenched,” a duet between Luke Murphy and Carlye Eckert that features a multi-channel video design and installation by David Fishel. The work, which points out the contractions and uncertainties of romance, has been described as having “a sharp edge, and even sharper sense of humor,” and takes place in the First Floor Theatre.
Jennifer Monson
Jennifer Monson & Friends
June 21-23 | The Club
Two evenings that feature a trio of works by three spectacular ex-New York choreographers now working at the University of Illinois: Jennifer Monson (with Niall Jones), Renee Archibald, and Renee Wadleigh, who was an original member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
Shared Evening
Hari Krishnan, Paul Matteson, and John J. Zullo
June 22-23 | The Club
Hari Krishnan, Paul Matteson and John J. Zullo will present an evening of four new dances. Krishnan’s “Frog Princess” is a Bharata Natyam inspired dance, while his “I, Cyclops,” is a nod to Marcel’s X-Men. Paul Matteson’s “Take It OVER” is set to music by Sam Crawford. John J. Zullo’s “this Exquisite diversion/mysterious Skin” uses text from Scott Heim’s novel Mysterious Skin.
Oren Barnoy & Wendell Cooper
Angels at the Club & [BODIED]
June 28-30 | The Club
Oren Barnoy’s “Angels at the Club” shares shows with Wendell Cooper’s “[BODIED]’” a multimedia work featuring rapping, dancing, spoken word, and multiple costume changes that express an effort to simultaneously accommodate and subvert the changing identities enforced outside by society, and inside oneself.
East Village Dance Project
June 24-25 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
Once again, young artists from the East Village Dance Project will perform this year in works by Victoria Roberts-Wierzbowski and Martha Tornay, 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.