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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on April 28, 2025
Photo: Steven Pisano
“Mooncry”
Choreographer and Performer: Jordan Demetrius Lloyd
Composer: Ryan Wolfe
Lighting Design: Cameron Barnett
“Dance For No Ending”
Created and Performed by Pamela Pietro and Jesse Zaritt
Dramaturgy, Sound, and Lighting Design by Niall Jones
Sound sources include “Nadia’s Theme” by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr., “Two-Spirit” by Lamin Fofana, “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat, and “Miserere mei, Deus” by Gregorio Allegri
Before sitting down to write this piece, I moved my body. It’s something I’ve come to realize nearly four decades into my dancing life: I have to move my body first, every day, before getting down to “intellectual” (read: sedentary) work — given that, of course, the body is intellectual. My intellect awakens first in my body: through movement before words, through sensation before ideas, and I’m more receptive to abstract thought when I’ve moved through embodied thought.
A couple years ago I shifted away from the gym to a routine that fits on my 6’x8’ living room rug: an hour-long mashup of Pilates, yoga, body weight, resistance, and strength training, and physical therapy exercises gleaned from four surgical recoveries and countless acute and chronic injuries (a version of this also happens in empty studios before getting into equally familiar sequences of dance exercises). Breathing deeply as I bridge and plank and squat and lunge and push-up and curl and press and stretch my way through familiar patterns, I check in with my body: how’s that hip today? how’s that foot after rehearsal yesterday? how crunchy is the arthritis in my knees today? This routine is an accumulation: of training, of learning, of aging, of care and attention. I do it so I can dance more freely, so I can trust my body, so I can use my brian, so I can feel clear and settled and agile on all fronts — so I can feel more like myself.
I know I’m not alone in this, and I see evidence around me nearly every day. I’m grateful for a life that allows me to be around fellow dancers all the time: in the studio, on stage, or in the audience. We all carry our histories in our bodies — some more transparently than others — and we all guard secrets and surprises. And our dancing reveals us. This intimate, sacred act of revelation is something I hold when I dance and honor deeply whenever I watch others dance, particularly when I experience a dancer’s dancing for the first time. That first-time revelation came threefold for me in Jesse Zaritt & Pamela Pietro and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s shared program at the LaMaMa Moves! Dance Festival in a generous introduction that left me wanting to know each of these artists better.
Lloyd’s solo “Mooncry” reveals an artist in relationship to himself and his audience. He reveals himself as he reveals us in turn: casting us in bright light, addressing us by name, tossing us gifts in the form of individually-wrapped mints. His dance is for us, not as ticket-buying consumers or even as space-sharing witnesses, but as symbiotic co-creators: his dance doesn’t exist without us, and we, as an audience, don’t exist without him. Lloyd is a dancer of astonishing purity and power, suffused with an inner gravity that allows him to float on quiet feet and grounded center. His prodigious reach and articulation extend through circling gestures, gentle isolations, and daring athletics that probe the edges of understanding to find meaning in studied sensation.
Bathed in stark light and smoky jazz, Lloyd swirls onto the stage in a flurry of skittering hops and alternating lunges that etch his profile into our eyes; his ribcage pulses and stretches to bare architectures of interiority. Ease and purpose converge in his succession of energetically precise shapes and gestures that shift with the elegant turn of a wrist or the delicious touch of a hand. A distant beat throbs through Ryan Wolfe’s sound score, rising in deep rumbles and claps, ringing echoes, helicopter thrums and radar blips. This sonic accumulation thickens stretches of silence and interludes of spoken address, which Lloyd performs atop an unstable pile of paperback books, a shifting intellectual history he launches one by one across the stage. He speaks as he moves: directly, with casual unpredictability and unassuming grace. He poses questions that prompt a recognition of our mutual humanity. “Do you cry?” Of course I do — as does the person to my right, the person to my left, the person behind me, and the person facing me from the spare, open stage.
Lloyd’s questions of connectedness move through his body: limbs circulate in smooth sockets, spine rumbles viscera shaken from within, shoulder blades crawl figure eights along the floor as clasped hands trace corresponding curves in the air above. He is made of movement as movement is made of him as movement is made between us: shapes and textures of an unknowable self generously shared. I am deeply grateful, just as I long for more.
Pamela Pietro and Jesse Zaritt. Photo: Steven Pisano
Zaritt and Pietro’s duet “Dance For No Ending” addresses the inscription of the dancing self through “an experiment in accumulation and dissolution.” The two use dance to enter a stream of constant, rigorous negotiations with themselves, each other, and a slew of objects, materials, and situations that call upon their embodied histories. They begin and return to physical entanglement as a touchstone in weight-sharing improvisations that traverse the theater’s walls and architecture and spill across the stage. The tension of outstretched legs, searching arms, hooked joints, and splayed hands reveal modes of support that harness strength and weight to resist and surrender to the inevitabilities of gravity and their environment. They whisper to each other as they move, voicing their intentions in real time as the convergence of their bodies shifts in tone and speed. Together they create a bond that runs through all that is to come.
Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro. Photo: Steven Pisano
An onslaught of props thrown unceremoniously onto the stage creates a field of action that unfolds through outrageous aerobics and ecstatic dancing. Zaritt does split-kick pull-ups on a rolling rack; Pietro performs push-ups on a folding chair and frantic Pilates atop a stool; they crack their backs in tandem high kicks and absurd virtuosities. This is the physical material their dancing is made of: the patterns and vocabularies that shape their bodies, their instincts, and the insights we receive from their offerings. Pietro, suddenly serene, breaks into a sinuous adagio that slowly sharpens its edges into geometric gestures and jagged abandon. Projections of Zaritt’s nervy line drawings pan across the darkened stage in stuttering animation, zooming in and out on bodies and faces and forms, unsettled and uncapturable as they play over Zaritt’s body springing through the dark.
Accumulation continues as Pietro gathers the dance’s detritus about her body: she stuffs heaps of crumpled paper in her clothes, hangs a folding chair over an arm, drapes a mat across her laden shoulders like a cape. Zaritt bounds around the space with the parallel effort of his loose-jointed athleticism: folding, dropping, swiping, reaching, sweating. Unwieldy and exhausted, they return to their entanglements on the wall, sharing weight informed by their enactments of personal history. Together they shed the weight of their accumulation, wading through the debris of their excavations to emerge that much more themselves.
In this intimate program, these three artists take an unsparing look at their self-making: Pietro and Zaritt through each other and Lloyd through us. Together they explore the dialogic worlds of dancing bodies: individuals revealed and shared through physical histories embedded in every step they take. As their offerings resonated in my mind, my morning calisthenics felt a little more absurd and a lot more holy: this is what I’m made of, this is who I am, and this is how I dance.
