The other day, I watched a subway dancer fall. Backflipping between metal rails, his hand slipped and he crashed back-first to the floor. For a moment, the train was still. No one had a script to follow for what should happen next, and our responsibility as witnesses was immediately called into question. The veil between us, passive watchers, and this possibly-injured performer was punctured in an instant. After an extended pause, the dancer stood up and pulled his hat lower over his eyes. He limped stiff-backed out of the car at the next stop, suffering at the very least, it seemed, from a bruised ego.
As I continued riding, I reflected on this moment of the mundane-made-strange, in which every passenger was forced to confront our assumed relationships with each other in the presence of physical risk. Drawn out of our typical autopilot mode of commuting, this encounter, confronting the precarity of bodies, left me wondering: in what ways are we constantly performing? How does a state of active witness affect our understanding of ourselves in relation to others?
Watching Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s Mooncry and Jesse Zaritt & Pamela Pietro’s
Dance For No Ending at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (April 25-27, 2025) expanded this line of inquiry.
Described by the choreographer as a dance in which “the performer is both the magician and the veil, fostering spaces of encounter with its audiences,” Lloyd’s Mooncry explores the act of seeing as an evolving, relational practice of meaning-making.
Mooncry began on a spare stage, in Lloyd’s dreamscape of muted blues and grays. Circling around the audience, his own words, and himself, Lloyd’s repetitive movement phrases were grounded, sweeping, and intent. Mere inches away, as he stood among the audience, I watched Lloyd gently roll through his spine and reach a hand out—alternatingly a gesture of blocking, slowing, and inviting. Lloyd’s circular imagery appeared in refreshingly tactile ways, too: addressing audience members by name off a prepared list of ticket holders, Lloyd tossed round Lifesaver mints into our hands, implicating each of our distinct selves in his explorations of liminality and its poetic possibilities.
As he led us into his choreographic portal, Lloyd quickly made clear that we were operating on his timeline—a nonlinear, notably unhurried pace. At times, Lloyd’s gestures toward patience were subtle: the house lights progressively dimmed to narrow our field of vision and hone our focus. He slowly prepared his microphone height, donning reading glasses, putting up his hair, taking off his shoes and socks, and walking leisurely from one end of the stage to the other. At other points, Lloyd was more adamant in his directive to wait. His repeated gesture of an emphatic pointer finger aimed at the audience stands out—just hold on a moment. Wait. Look.
Lloyd’s encouragement to slow down and pay attention was welcome preparation for his deeper thematic inquiries, including the question of what constitutes worthwhile research. Standing on a pile of books, Lloyd proceeded to quote and misquote various academic affirmations, tossing the books across the stage. Far from telling us exactly what to believe, Lloyd’s layering of language and physical shapes offered striking examples of the subjectivity of meaning. How do we know what we know? And aren’t we changing our minds all the time?
In the striking final image of Mooncry, Lloyd placed a wig on a microphone stand, suspended in the breeze of a blowing fan. While he cleaned up the surrounding stage, now scattered with books and paper, we witnessed a brief and striking duet unfurl between a long-haired dream self and Lloyd’s actual, physical self. I recognized, with new appreciation, the evolving dance of self-performance.
Like Lloyd, Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro’s work expanded the boundaries of the proscenium stage. Their duet, Dance For No Ending, included in its frame the wings of the stage, back storage hallway, and folds of the curtains. Opening with Zaritt and Pietro entwined in a creature-like, shifting embrace that crept across the back wall, the two dancers slowly negotiated postures of intimacy—a leg draped over a shoulder, a hand supporting the lower back, arms tangled, and a torso precariously tipped off-center. Along the way, the audience could hear their barely audible discussions of their next move under their breaths. Immediately, we were confronted with the simultaneous awkwardness and beauty of bodies working to understand one another.
This entwined form soon burst open. Pietro abruptly threw rolls of paper, chairs, plastic wrap, and various furniture onto the stage, as Zaritt joined her in an increasingly passionate parade of physical feats. At turns comical, impressive, and stress-inducing, Zaritt bounced up and down in full splits as Pietro performed sets of pull-ups on a clothing rack. Deep squats were paired with megaphone-distorted yells: your head weighs eight to ten pounds! And it is entirely empty! They tell us. Far from the audience, Zaritt furiously drew marker shapes on paper, calling out their meanings as they arrived to him: Fish! Crying!
Some of these challenging exercises—Zaritt and Pietro’s virtuosic dancing was exhilarating to experience—appeared self-motivated, as though the dancers wanted to prove their own strength to themselves. Elsewhere, Zaritt and Pietro seemed to compete for the highest kick or who could hold a longer side plank. Regardless of intention, these exhausting movements inevitably resulted in the dancers returning to each other like magnets, finding, despite their independent work, an intrinsic reliance on each other’s bodies to give form and meaning to their efforts.
As the lights flickered off, Zaritt turned on a projector, illuminating the back wall of the theater with hand-drawn animations that morphed abstract shapes into recognizable faces—a fitting reminder of our own ability to decide and re-decide meaning for ourselves.
I was struck by the warmth and collaborative approaches of both Mooncry and Dance For No Ending. For dances exploring themes in dangerously heady territory, I found both pieces’ meditations on meaning-making refreshingly focused on real people in shared space, with an immediacy akin to my experience of the subway dancer. In Lloyd’s case, his fourth-wall-breaking approach to audience engagement quickly drew me into the work as a kind of acknowledged collaborator. Zaritt and Pietro’s performance held a similarly mutualistic spirit as the dancers pushed their bodies to physical limits in shared pursuit of a dynamic self. As I walked away from the show, my eyes drifted to sidewalk level, where countless feet performed a two-step to avoid a growing puddle. The dance continued.
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