La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival: Shared Program: Baye & Asa + Wendy Perron and Morgan Griffin
Company:
La MaMa Etc
Shared Program
Baye & Asa
Suck it Up (2022)
Wendy Perron and Morgan Griffin
The Daily Mirror (1976/2022)
April 14–16 (Friday–Saturday at 8:30pm, Sunday at 4pm)
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.
Suck it Up was commissioned by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for The BlackLight Summit at the University of Maryland. Movement was generated during a residency at the 92nd Street Y.
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. Intrigued by Griffin's new choreography, Perron entered this sequence as the older dancer she is, and the two made Part I. This is a duet between an older dancing body and a young dancing body, with touches of tenderness and humor. Part II is Griffin’s complete solo, which is her own dynamic path based on the 1976 photos of Perron.
Photo of Baye & Asa by Richard Termine
Photo of Wendy Perron and Morgan Griffin by Julie Lemberger
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