Put Away the Fire, dear pt.2 (in draft form) at La MaMa Moves last month moves in and out of cinematic and live performance structures, often jump-cutting from internal narratives to vigorous dancing
There is an insidious thrum of accelerated timelines smashing together at the messy intersection of computational expansiveness, human fear, militaristic state intervention and governmental ignorance in “La Machine de Turing” currently running at La MaMa through March 5th
A dominating thread of grief and healing wound its way through La MaMa Moves! 2021 and most of the artists brought song and storytelling into a festival that, as curator Nicky Paraiso acknowledged was full of resilient artists “making work that is essential and true to this pivotal moment in time.”
With XIV, my favorite experimental constitutionalist bruthrr George Emilio Sanchez is crashing a brown, brooding and bold biography into the broader American histories of other fights for equal rights. XIV offers an incisive and often intimate look at the never ending challenge that is our country’s constant separations of equality in a show that continues this weekend and next at Dixon Place.
Dan Safer is the devil you’ve been dying to dance with and Ae Andrea’s enviable lines and swag make them an optimal fiend friend for that card.
Here, thoughts are freed from linearity or reasonable binds. There, processing systems allow the universe to expand and retract as an infinite sponge. Where bodies transmute from human familiars to alien exotica.
“Double consciousness is knowing the particularity of the white world in the face of its enforced claim to universality… Double consciousness, in other words, is knowing a lie while living its contradiction.” – Biko Maura ruminates on white privilege and the mythology of the neutral body.
Maura interviews Dorothée Munyaneza. Her “Unwanted” has its New York premiere at Baryshnikov Arts Center TONIGHT (September 21-22). Her “Samedi Détente” at Under the Radar Festival in early 2016 ripped open the wounds of the genocide in Rwanda. With “Unwanted,” she explores the physical and mental repercussions of rape used as an instrument of war.
Cumbe: Center for African and Diaspora Dance (Cumbe) returns to Brooklyn with a new home at RestorationART. Maura interviews Jimena Martinez, Cumbe’s Executive Director.
Maura talks to Maria about her upcoming premiere of “dying and dying and dying” at Gibney Dance Center this week.
An effective seduction, there is enough truth in the tall tales to keep us believing and bound to the ride.
In these perilous, challenging and unpredictable times in our country and in the world, we can look to the performing arts for some clues as to how we might respond and continue to live our lives with vigilance, and hopefully a modicum of wisdom, to