Author: Meg Doyle
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Performing the Palimpsest: Electric Blue and Naked Vanguard at La MaMa Moves!
Some performances can bring back the dead. Through references and recordings, through revivals and reenactments, they channel the spirit of the artists and choreography they cite and call upon the stage. Though the ontological nature of performance is rooted in its disappearance – once the dance is over, we no longer have access to…
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Attention, Salvation, and Celebration: Three Emerging Choreographers of La MaMa Moves!
There is a moment in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that I return to whenever I think about the relationship between dance and language. It’s an often misquoted scene, but it happens when the traveling Estragon and Vladimir ask Lucky to dance: ESTRAGON: Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn’t too…
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“Surrounded by the Same Water, Divided by the Same Fields”: Owen McCafferty’s Agreement
The first songs I learned as a child were rebel songs. They recounted uprisings, hunger strikes, and rebellions; they rhymed and were easy to remember. Lyrics like “Some say the devil is dead and buried in Killarney / More say he rose again and joined the British Army” played in our kitchen and on our…
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ON HOLDING AND (UN)LOCKING: CHOREOGRAPHING THE IRISH DANCE ARCHIVE IN Jean Butler’s What We Hold
There is a photograph of my grandad and three of his brothers taken in Dublin in the early 1930s; the brothers stand in a row and pose with their arms firmly placed by their sides or their hands on their hips. They wear what are known as “hard shoes” in Irish dance, made of black…