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.”
Elliot spent his career looking for the meaning of this elusive concept [of dramaturgy], and with the following we attempt to honor him and continue his quest by articulating what Elliot’s dramaturgy meant to us, his many collaborators and friends.
I hope the more arts workers and others share these stories, the more clear and obvious the focus on change becomes. —Emily Johnson
Black Dance Stories is exactly what it sounds like and precisely what we need right now. It’s a distillation of insightful moments in post-performance talkbacks spliced with casual conversations you once shared over drinks, plus powerful sentiments you’re overhearing now at BLM protests.
Black Dance Stories is exactly what it sounds like and precisely what we need right now. It’s a distillation of insightful moments in post-performance talkbacks spliced with casual conversations you once shared over drinks, plus powerful sentiments you’re overhearing now at BLM protests.
This body unfurls in slow motion, leaving ample space for labels, classifications, and archetypes to land upon her and vanish.
Want to take out your phone and text? Please, I dare you, and I hope I’m there to see what happens. Maybe Young will want to take a selfie, or share your photos, or throw your phone out the window. Anything could happen.
The work is the group; the group is the work. It is an antidote to work that devalues the human. The individual is decentralized, but not devalued.
There is no preaching to the choir when it comes to considering reparations, because there is no choir. It’s a lonely act.
The artistic spaces that once housed me hurt me, causing tremendous trauma. This project—the second installment of “soft bodies in hard places,” “very peak summer solstice”—was a haven.
Two pieces that delve into ideas surrounding worship and identity: Angie Pittman’s “Came Up in a Lonely Castle” and Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDProjectNYC’s “Process memoir 4: The word, the spirit, and Little Rock.”
And, yet, we are here, re-fashioning community and remaining soft in a building of stone. The monuments are crumbling. We can take an ax to their base or let them dissolve to the dust of their origin story.