Shared Program: Alexis Chartrand and Nic Gareiss / Megumi Eda / La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
Company:
Alexis Chartrand and Nic Gareiss and Megumi Eda
Percussive dancer Nic Gareiss and fiddler Alexis Chartrand meld unparalleled virtuosity with an introspective sensibility. The two artists trace, with disarming spontaneity, their path across French Canadian, Appalachian, and Irish traditions. Propelled by traditional fiddle tunes and percussive steps, Gareiss and Chartrand explore, with palpable pleasure, the sharing of sounds and gestures, blurring the lines between music and dance, melody, and movement. Their concerts are a privileged opportunity to witness the contemporaneity of fiddle and dance traditions through the singular creativity of Gareiss’s step dancing, and Chartrand’s anomalous fiddling on the baroque violin.
Please Cry is a deeply personal solo performance by Megumi Eda, blending dance, live video, and music to explore intergenerational trauma, resilience, and the lingering impact of war. Inspired by the silence surrounding Eda’s grandmother’s past, the piece reflects on how unspoken histories echo across generations. Through movement, Eda seeks to embody these inherited emotions, giving form to what words cannot express. War’s trauma is never just history—it lingers, passed down like an unbroken chain. Please Cry features an original score by Reiko Yamada.
The 20th Annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, curated by Nicky Paraiso with guest curators Martita Abril, Blaze Ferrer, and Adham Hafez, features works by 20 visionary artists with varied creative practices and approaches to performance. La MaMa Moves! runs April 10 to May 4, 2025, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, The Downstairs Theatre, The Club, and Community Arts Space. Performance times vary.
