La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival 2017
La MaMa Moves is a Village Voice Choice!
Curated by Nicky Paraiso
Now in its 12th season, La MaMa Moves! dance festival is taking place in all La MaMa venues. This wide range of dance programming supports La MaMa’s commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge audience’s perception of dance and reflects La MaMa’s longstanding mission to present performance that transcends politics and unifies cultures. Read a letter addressed by Nicky Paraiso on the La MaMa Blog.
Photo Company SBB photo by Sally Cohn
Check out our dancers and choreographers behind the scenes in one easy place on STORIFY!
LA MAMA KIDS PATIENT(CE) DANCE WORKSHOP
Kids Workshop
May 6 | The Downstairs
This intergenerational workshop will focus on the work of PATIENT(CE). An interdisciplinary piece that examines physical harmony found between space and time. Interacting with an enormous cloud of fabric children and adults work together to support weight and find balance when working with an inanimate partner.
WHITE WAVE YOUNG SOON KIM DANCE COMPANY
iyouuswe
May 18 – May 21 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
With iyouuswe, (I-You-Us-We), Young Soon Kim and her multifaceted team create a visually provocative, intimate piece that challenges us to examine who we are and how we relate to ourselves and each other. It’s a story about developing meaningful relationships in which we struggle to seek a sense of ‘i’ as part of a ‘we’.
JEREMY NELSON & LUIS LARA MALVACÍAS / 3RD CLASS CITIZEN
A and D
May 19 – May 20 | The Club
A and D are part of a larger project – From A to Z – to create a series of highly structured improvisational duets, which use signposts and issues connected with life and aging as a framework for exploration. The practice of manipulating images and concepts onsite following a strict conceptual frame can produce instant movement and unravel choreography that is full of content and related to specific thoughts. The original project began with the idea of 6 duets – A B C D E F – and has expanded to include the entire alphabet.
DANCING IN THE STREET BLOCK PARTY
Free Event on E 4th Street
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May 20, 11am – 4pm | Free event on East 4th Street
Join La MaMa as we celebrate our 55th Anniversary with a Dancing in the Street Block Party with food, free performances, crafts, children’s activities and dancing in the street!
Scheduled to perform at the Block Party are: Dancers and choreographers from La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival; Rude Mechanical Orchestra; Yoshiko Chuma; Thurgood Marshall Middle School Step Team; Kinding Sindaw indigenous Filipino dance company; Stefanie Batten Bland; Pua Ali’I Ilima O Nuioka traditional hula dance troupe; among many others.
CO SBB STEFANIE BATTEN BLAND
Bienvenue 欢 迎WelcomeBienvenidoكب ال
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May 25 – May 28 | Ellen Stewart Theater
Welcome…, a collaboration between 2016 Jerome Robbins Award recipient, Stefanie Batten Bland, visual artist Benjamin Heller, and composer Paul Damian Hogan, examines our willingness to embrace and share space with others. Countering the present political climate, in which walls have become synonymous with barriers that separate people and places, Welcome considers the graffiti-decorated walls of cities as communal canvases that express the past and present of its neighborhood people. A mural of paintings created by children and their parents, becomes an integral part of the dance.
SHARED EVENING
Beth Graczyk | Mariana Valencia
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May 25 – May 26 | First Floor Theatre
Beth Graczyk’s One of You is Fake One of You Is Fake is the second solo piece in Graczyk’s performance series Desire Motor, following her inaugural solo Beast. Unfolding as an earnestly absurdist look at the future of mankind, Graczyk engages both mundane and exquisitely made objects to question our collective participation in the erosion of the physical, sensual and material world.
Mariana Valencia’s Album (excerpt) responds to archiving the self from a root query: “I don’t know who will write a herstory about me, so I’m starting now to help them write it better.” Through text, dance and song, Album navigates a cartographic herstory written from places out of focus, from where history neglects to look. This research particularly depicts relationships to urbanity, vampires, love, and marginality.
ASTAD DEBOO
Eternal Embrace
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May 25 – May 26 | The Downstairs
Eternal Embrace is inspired by the poem Maati, written by Sufi poet Hazrat Bulleh Shah. Embodying the poem’s central themes, the piece explores the tensions between annihilation and infinity, the ephemeral and the material worlds. Astad Deboo’s name is synonymous with contemporary Indian dance. He pioneered an innovative style of Indian dance in the late 70’s. Diverse influences have given Astad Deboo a rich vocabulary as a successful soloist. It has also given him the resources to engage in creative collaborations with musicians, puppeteers, theatre directors, visual artists and dancers.
SHARED EVENING
Brendan Drake | Jasmine Hearn
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May 27 – May 28 | First Floor Theatre
Brendan Drake’s The Big Finish uses camp, humor, and the American Musical Theater Songbook to examine the paradox of depression and isolation amidst boisterous self-expression. Sanity requires a certain level of impersonation. What we project out into the world is often nothing more than a glossy varnish, but what would happen if we truly “let our freak flag fly?
Jasmine Hearn’s blue, sable, and burning uses memories of home, travel, and the waters that we have visited and that have visited us, as the source for a collage of dance, song, and story-telling. Taking inspiration from Robin Coste Lewis’ poem The Voyage of the Sable Venus, the piece revisits imagery from an ongoing collaboration with visual artist and activist Jennifer Meridian, and is a map that follows where the Sable Venus has been in past, present, and future.
SHARED EVENING
Yoshiko Chuma | Rady Nget | Brother (Hood) Dance!
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May 25 – May 26 | The Club
Yoshiko Chuma‘s π=3.14…Dead End, Hey! All Women! is a flowing resistance activity with a delicate, powerful monologue through dance.
Rady Nget began his dance training in 1999, specializing in the monkey role of Lakhaon Kaol, the Cambodian classical male masked dance form. As a classical dancer, he has toured to Europe and throughout Asia, and as a contemporary dancer has performed in numerous works.
Brother(hood) Dance! is an interdisciplinary duo that seeks to inform its audiences on the socio-political and environmental injustices from a global perspective, bringing clarity to the same-gender-loving African-American experience in the 21st century
SLOW COOK THIS
Free Panel Discussion
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May 27 | The Downstairs
Moderated by Ali Rosa-Salas with Maura Nguyen Donohue, Alexis Convento and Nicky Paraiso
Slow Cook This will gather an intergenerational group of artists of color to share their struggles and their praises in a long form conversation about working in a system that has historically marginalized non-white voices.
SHARED EVENING
Curated by Maura Nguyen Donohue
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May 27 – May 28 | The Club
All of the choreographers on this program were once students at the Hunter College Dance Program in the City University of New York. By gathering them into shared space and time, Maura hopes to celebrate the rich plurality their artistic voices offer our community as makers and movers.
Dancers include Rina Espiritu, Alexandra Amirov, Kirsten Flores-Davis, Janice Rosario, Kareem Alexander, and Camilla Davis
MALINI SRINIVASAN
Remembering Pandit Ramesh Misra Tejas-Luminous
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May 27 – May 28 | The Downstairs
This evening’s performance is a tribute to the music of sarangi maestro late Pandit Ramesh Misra, whose inspirational music is featured in many of these dances. Malini Srinivasan presents excerpts from Tejas – Luminous, a dance production exploring the connections between the spiritual, the corporeal, light and sound. Including: the Evening’s solemn rituals, Dawn’s awakening body and spirit, and the Day’s ecstatic renewal. Guest choreographer Janaki Patrik presents Ghalib Sher & Ektaal Tarana in Raag Kalavati.
#HERETODANCE
The campaign for creative activism!
Artists! Dancers! Choreographers! Everyone! Unite! La MaMa is calling on our community to express their belief in creative freedom through movement. The campaign for creative activism is #HereToDance! Ignite this global call to action with your own #HereToDance video.
Watch on Facebook! | Watch on Twitter!
MAURA NGUYEN DONOHUE
Tides Project: Drowning Planet/Disposable Bodies
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May 25 – 26 & June 1 – 3 | Downstairs Lobby
An immersive, interactive installation focused on the destructive presence of plastic pollution in our oceans, developed, in part, in collaboration with CultureHub. Drowning Planet embeds video screens into an underwater garden of reclaimed plastics. The installation will include Disposable Bodies, live performance activations of the entire lobby, amidst collected single-use plastic bags woven, braided and tied into an evocation of kelp forests and submerged spaces.
PATRICIA NOWOROL
Tremendous
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June 1, 2017 – June 3, 2017 | The Downstairs
Emboldened by the polarized and threatening American political climate, choreographer Patricia Noworol turns to uniquely personal stories of the feminine experience. Noworol and her five diverse dancers uncover shared defenses and vulnerabilities while reckoning with divergent histories. Can we be distilled to only one of our defining characteristics? How do we choose which parts of us to defend when oppressed from several angles? Can we unify selectively?
PATRICIA HOFFBAUER
Getting Away With Murder
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June 2 – June 4 | Ellen Stewart Theatre
From Plato’s definition of the “wandering uterus” as an angry and desirous animal inside a woman’s body, to notorious legal defense of his actions, “Getting Away with Murder” is built from myriad sources. In this work, Hoffbauer explores ways women have featured prominently as object and subject in Western Art, focusing on iconic moments where the female body is at the receiving end of violent representation and actions. Incorporating a cast of 10 performers, a set designer, a musician, and an interaction with Yvonne Rainer, the piece juxtaposes dance, performance and iconic imagery to transverse a subject already know.
SHARED EVENING
Regina Nejman | Ephrat Asherie
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June 2 – June 4 | First Floor Theatre
Regina Nejman’s Beautiful Figure is a new multimedia dance where two dancers explore various ideas of “beauty”, ranging from the late Renaissance period to contemporary times, when beauty is merely defined by our culture as “hot” and often distorted, exploiting and objectifying women. It includes text derived from real online conversations, which are all true, word for word. Regina Nejman grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is based in New York City, where she has been creating her own choreography since 1993.
Ephrat Asherie’s Odeon (work in progress) is in an early phase of investigation, this original dance work is set to the music of Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth. Nazareth composed music from the 1870s to the 1930s and was known for mixing European harmonies with African rhythms, a sort of hybrid of European romanticism and samba. Similarly, this work takes a hybrid approach to movement as it explores various street and club styles. Odeon will premiere as an evening-length work in the summer of 2018 at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
SHARED EVENING
Curated by Alexis Convento
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June 3 – June 4 | The Club
Alexis Convento of the Current Sessions brings together emerging women performance artists and choreographers in two shared evenings, connecting each story to social identity, cultural memory, and embodied history.
Super-Ceremony introduces the work of Fana Fraser, Mersiha Mesihovic & Veraalba Santa developing their own diasporic reality as performative artifacts of survival and soft power. Artists are of Trinidadian, Bosnian and Puerto Rican descent.
Double Agency features work by Leslie Cuyjet, Maree Remalia & Jessica Pretty. It folds through itself into something new. A space inside a dance, outside the now we’re stuck with.
The 12th Season of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival has been made possible with public funds from National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, with special thanks to City Council Speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; Ford Foundation; Howard Gilman Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; The Harkness Foundation for Dance; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, and additional a special production support from FUSED: French-US Exchange in Dance.
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.