La MaMa Announces Full Schedule of Performances and Events for La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, May 12–23
Company:
La MaMa ETC
La MaMa Announces Full Schedule of Performances and Events for La MaMa Moves!
Dance Festival, May 12–23, 2021
New York, NY, April 29, 2021 – La MaMa announces a new opening date for the 2021 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival and the full schedule of performances and events. The lineup for the digital international showcase on May 18 will feature works by Morgan Bullock (US), Gerald Casel (US), Daudi Fayar (Kenya), BamBam Frost (Sweden), and John Scott (Ireland). The two-week festival will also feature works by New York-based artists Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum, J. Bouey, Jasmine Hearn, Tiffany Mills, Ricarrdo Valentine, and Sugar Vendil. Performances will be streamed live from La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre and Downstairs Theatre, with additional performances outdoors at Downtown Art for limited, in-person audiences.
In addition to the performances, and in recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, La MaMa Moves! will host a LiveTalks event with women choreographers and performers from across the diaspora. This intergenerational dialogue centers on how artists have been maintaining personal and artistic practices of resiliency and resistance prior to and during the pandemic, as well as during the current rise in anti-Asian violence. The event will be moderated by Maura Nguyen Donohue, choreographer, writer, and Director of the MFA Program in Dance, Hunter College.
Choreographer Tiffany Mills and dancer/rehearsal assistant Emily Pope will teach a movement workshop as part of La MaMa Kids.
This season’s programming continues La MaMa’s commitment to presenting diverse performance styles that challenge conventions and audiences’ perceptions of dance. Utilizing movement, storytelling, song, and sound, the works in this year’s festival address the artists’ engagement with the current social and political moment, as well as honor diasporic histories and legacies, ancestral inspirations, and intergenerational dialogue.
La MaMa Moves! curator Nicky Paraiso said: “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.”
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival 2021 will take place Wednesday through Sunday, May 12–16, and Tuesday through Sunday, May 18–23. Performance times vary. The full schedule of performances and events is below.
Tickets for La Mama Moves! are pay-what-you-can starting at $5 and are available at www.lamama.org.
Schedule of Performances and Events
All events listed in ET
La MaMa LiveTalks
Wednesday, May 12, at 6:30pm
Free Online Event / RSVP lamama.org
In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, artists from across the diaspora will hold an intergenerational dialogue about maintaining personal and artistic practices of resiliency and resistance prior to and during the pandemic. Set against the backdrop of the rise in anti-Asian violence, in particular, the murder of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta, GA, the group will touch on hidden American histories, the “model minority” myth, and how dance and performance serve as a vessel for challenging and changing stereotypes of Asian and Asian American women. The event is curated and moderated by Maura Nguyen Donohue. Artists include Yoshiko Chuma, Sophia Gutchinov, Potri Ranka Manis, Paz Tanjuaquio, and Sugar Vendil. The evening will include links to resources and ways to support the local AAPI community.
La MaMa LiveTalks are conversations with artists, activists, and thought leaders from around the country and around the world who join in discussions about art and life in time of crisis.
La MaMa Kids Workshop via Zoom
Tiffany Mills Company
Thursday, May 13, at 4pm
Free / Registration required
Tiffany Mills Company offers a fun, creative movement class for kids (age 5 and up), drawing inspiration from the company’s Home Project. Choreographer Tiffany Mills and dancer/rehearsal assistant Emily Pope will lead kids through a movement adventure, using rooms and household objects as inspiration. A favorite purple stuffy in the bedroom, a soft rug in the living room, a potted plant in the sunlit kitchen will help spark movement exploration. Class will culminate with kids magically transporting themselves to a dreamed of place—moving though sparkling sand at the beach or on a snow peaked mountain. Imaginations will soar!
Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum
Prayer of the Morning
Thursday, May 13 and Saturday, May 15, at 7pm
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 while interrogating collusion with colonial regimes, they weave and re-cast their cultural pageantries, composing new prosody for this moment.
J. Bouey
untitled: an exploration of grief
Friday, May 14, at 7pm and Sunday, May 16, at 5pm
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
Tuesday, May 18, at 7pm
Featuring Morgan Bullock, Gerald Casel, Daudi Fayar, BamBam Frost, and John Scott
Online-only Event
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 About Race Dance critiques the unmarked predominance of whiteness in US postmodernism. It cites Neil Greenberg’s Not About AIDS Dance to connect the silence around the AIDS epidemic and the unacknowledged racial politics of postmodern dance. Occupying a space defined by white artists, it contests the structural endurance of white postmodernity by disidentifying with the white cube activated by Trisha Brown’s Locus and asks how difference can be made visible through choreographic structures that do not make space for Brown and Black bodies.
Kenyan choreographer/dancer Daudi Fayar blends movement styles in a personal work, originally presented at the third edition of BoldMemoirOnline.
Sweden-based choreographer BamBam Frost has created a seven-minute digital work for the festival using her recent stage piece YES as a starting point. YES is a cascade of pleasure, sadness, and dreams of possibilities. In her work Frost is dealing with questions of how to create more sustainable ways of existing individually and 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 worlds of 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 a compass for healing and dreaming of alternatives.
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)
Thursday, May 20 and Saturday, May 22 at 7pm
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 stable and constant, some mobile and unpredictable. They source material from their present homes impacted by the isolation of COVID-19 and inspired by the current fight 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.
Ricarrdo Valentine/Brother(hood) Dance!
All About Love
Friday, May 21, at 7pm and Sunday, May 23 at 5pm
Streamed live from the Downstairs Theatre
This new work by Bessie Award honoree Ricarrdo Valentine is a personal dance-theater exploration on Black love and healing. The work is created in collaboration with Orlando Zane Hunter Jr.
Shared Program
Jasmine Hearn / Songs from Pleasure Memory
Sugar Vendil / Test Sites
Saturday, May 22 and Sunday, May 23 at 4pm
Outdoors at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega (19 East 3rd Street, NYC 10003)
Jasmine Hearn shares a short set of three new songs from their soon-to-be-released album, Pleasure Memory. Through movement, sound, and storytelling they wonder/wander how to offer space and time so their body can roam, still, and fly.
Sugar Vendil’s Test Sites is an ongoing series of performance pieces that are experiments in process. Each Test Site involves a short-term process and is an exercise in limits and creativity. Blending voice and movement, her new Test Site 7 will be a release of rage and a ritual for joy. Vendil will also perform Test Site 5: Seedlings for voice, movement, and electronics, and other solo music compositions. An AAPI New Yorker, Vendil says she is making the work as “an inelegant, angry, and urgent response to the current moment.”
Schedule by Date
Wednesday, May 12
6:30pm: La MaMa LiveTalks, moderated by Maura Nguyen Donohue, with artists Yoshiko Chuma, Sophia Gutchinov, Potri Ranka Manis, Paz Tanjuaquio, and Sugar Vendil
Thursday, May 13
4pm: La MaMa Kids Workshop with Tiffany Mills and Emily Pope
7pm: Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum / Prayer of the Morning
Friday, May 14
7pm: J. Bouey / untitled: an exploration of grief
Saturday, May 15
7pm: Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum / Prayer of the Morning
Sunday, May 16
5pm: J. Bouey / untitled: an exploration of grief
Tuesday, May 18
7pm: Virtual International Showcase featuring Morgan Bullock, Gerald Casel, Daudi Fayar, BamBam Frost, and John Scott
Thursday, May 20
7pm: Tiffany Mills Company / Home Project
Friday, May 21
7pm: Ricarrdo Valentine/Brother(hood) Dance! / All About Love
Saturday, May 22
4pm: Shared Program: Jasmine Hearn / Songs from Pleasure Memory and Sugar Vendil / Test Sites
7pm: Tiffany Mills Company / Home Project
Sunday, May 23
4pm: Shared Program: Jasmine Hearn / Songs from Pleasure Memory and Sugar Vendil / Test Sites
5pm: Ricarrdo Valentine/Brother(hood) Dance! / All About Love
Ricarrdo Valentine. Photo: Ryan Muir
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