The La MaMa Moves Festival, now in its 13th season, opens Thursday May 10. Curator Nicky Paraiso and artists Ellen Fisher, Jonathan Gonzalez, Adham Hafez and Ni’Ja Whitson recently shared some thoughts about their relationship to the festival.
mayfield brooks, jumatatu m. poe, and the I Moving Lab are part of aa three-week series conceived and curated by Marýa Wethers at Gibney Dance highlighted “intersections and crossroads among Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity.”
When I hear that two pieces have been “smashed together,” I make certain assumptions. If I read “conceived by” or “created by the ensemble,” I expect a piece so thoroughly picked apart and put back together, it barely recognizes the original source material. At the
Her quizzers and yelps, the need of her sound, the holes in her anger revealed through the unsteady rocking of her delivery, created the tapestry that was her performance.
The objects could be anything generative, and Heather’s choices are varied, sophisticated, heartfelt, and a fascinating insight into what interests this artist.
Suggestions of timeless spaces, Miss-Julie-ish rage, and as I knew from the program, taking up issues of sexual violence.
There is a dizzying effect to the realization / acknowledgement of one’s cringe-worthy actions as white person to date, and Aloha Aloha gives that kaleidoscopic wheel quite the healthy spin.
“Nothing happening,” I wrote in a heavy slant down the page, “but I can’t look away.”
The act of appropriation at the core of the theatrical encounter becomes, in Sy’s hands, a metaphor for and means of exploring other appropriative encounters and the difficult entanglement, in each, of empathy and violence.
The anxiety vortex of What Makes Us Feel Good shoots one into the black hole of anxiousness.
Wilson says to the container, “Well fuck you,” then to us, “Get ready to run if this explodes, I guess.”
there’s never enough time and we’re always reaching back, trying to remember what it felt like to crack wide open for the first time.