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.
Kari Hoaas Productions
Shadowland
April 6-8 @ Ellen Stewart Theatre
Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas’ latest project Shadowland responds to an increasingly unstable post-pandemic world through the beauty and athleticism of contemporary dance. It is a poetic investigation of a continuum, as well as the body moving through loss. Visually and conceptually inspired by the work of Norwegian visual artist Jan Groth, Shadowland centers around a series of solo dance practices as well as group constellations, aiming toward an expression that is both abstract and poetic and emphasizing the affective and energetic power of movement.
T.I.T.S.
Forced Beauty
April 7-9 @ The Downstairs Theatre
Forced Beauty by T.I.T.S. is an audiovisual physical performance about power structures, violent aesthetics, and the strangeness of empathy. The work takes a close look at the phenomenon of aestheticizing violence in media and the constant hate comments and threat toward women on the internet. Here, T.I.T.S. confronts their fascination with unrestrained expressions of violence with an exploration of mirror neurons and the audience's ability to experience physical empathy.
Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre Company
Lunch with Sonia
April 12-16 @ The Club
Lunch with Sonia is a dance puppet theatre piece inspired by Federico Restrepo’s true-life experience with his Aunt Sonia, a woman who decided to end her life with dignity after a long illness at the age of 72. The show uses puppets, live actors, music, video and physical theatre to deal with the themes of life, love and loss.
Shared Program
Nora Alami, Jadd Tank, Leyya Mona Tawil/Lime Rickey International
April 13-16 @ Ellen Stewart Theatre
Presented in partnership with the New York Arab Festival (Adham Hafez, Artistic Director)
3rd Body, created and performed by Nora Alami and Jadd Tank, is designed with simulations, each told through dance. Inspired by virtual reality technology, 3rd Body’s simulations are distinct worlds that replicate reality without the parameters of reality itself (think: mirage). Lime Rickey International is the superconciousness of hybrid artist Leyya Mona Tawil. Here, Lime is shipwrecked in time, performing future folk songs and dances from a homeland yet to exist. Tawil uses voice, microphones, interactive surfaces and elements of dabke to build hybrid performances and sound compositions.
Shared Program
Baye & Asa
Suck it Up
Wendy Perron and Morgan Griffin
The Daily Mirror 1976/2022
April 14–16 @ The Downstairs Theatre
Known for their propulsive and rhythmically dynamic physicality, Baye & Asa present their duet Suck it Up. The work looks at how commercial images promise status, offer solutions to inadequacy and breed entitlement and how internalized deficiency has created a culture of resentment. Suck it Up confronts the violent fallout of male insecurity and entitlement. In 1976, Wendy Perron made The Daily Mirror by creating a chunk of movement every day for 100 days. It was a movement diary, reflecting the interior and exterior landscape of the day. Forty-five years later, she unearthed five contact sheets of photos that photographer Babette Mangolte had taken of this solo, performed in Trisha Brown’s loft. Perron thought it might be interesting to see a younger dancer use the 138 photos as a score with which to make her own choreography. Around the same time, Morgan Griffin, Perron’s former grad student at NYU Tisch Dance, was interested in combining dances of the past with her current sensibility. She accepted Perron’s challenge and started making her own original choices based on the photos.
Bobbi Jene Smith
Broken Theater
An AMOC* Production
April 20–30 @ Ellen Stewart Theatre
Evocative choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith will present her latest work, Broken Theater. Created within the walls of La MaMa, Broken Theater melds live dance, theater, music and cinematic beauty. Eleven artists meet in a ghost theater where they grapple with love, humiliation and loss at the cost of each other. It asks: When the script has disappeared, when the audience is gone, where are the lines between the part you play and the person you are?
Kayla Farrish
Put Away the Fire, dear, pt.2
April 21–23 @ The Downstairs Theatre
Put Away the Fire, dear pt.2 is Kayla Farrish’s newest evening-length work in development originating with the question of how live performance can be transformed into film. The work is a lens into American cinema from the 1930s to 1960s, focusing on thriller, film noir, romance and musical. The range of epic to intimate and into meaning pulls through the characters, space and narratives alongside the exploration of music scores—jazz, symphony, voice, cinematic scores, contemporary sounds and their distortion.
