Shared Program: Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro / Jordan Demetrius Lloyd / La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
Company:
Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd
Jesse Zaritt and Pam Pietro’s duet is an experiment in accumulation and dissolution. They trace, describe, inscribe, erase, observe, fantasize, and imprint. Through persistent dancing, they attempt to exhaustively examine, negotiate, dissect, inflate, and undermine the movement vocabularies and patterns of effort that produce what we think of as ourselves. Zaritt writes: “We think of this dance as a kind of prayer - if prayer can be understood as a petition to the unknown, an action that makes space for wonder, urgency, and bewilderment, radical presence and a joyful abandonment of self.”
In Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s most recent work the performer is both the magician and the veil, fostering spaces of encounter with his audiences. Lloyd works from formal foundations focusing on exactitude of shape, energetics, and tone, which becomes one layer of poetics that emerges from the work. The focus is then on how these formal elements make available the intimate act of seeing, and reveal the complexities of constructing meaning through movement, sound, and relationship. The carefully composed duet, with a score by composer Ryan Wolfe, empowers in-betweenness, expanding and collapsing scale on a whim, creating spaces of liminality and unsettled beauty.
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.
