Category: Dance
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At La MaMa Moves, a Joint Program Produces States of Grief and Sounds of Pleasure
Shared programs can be tricky. As a dance festival curator, part of the battle is attempting to describe a work of art effectively to the public while predicting their reaction. Putting two different artists together on the same bill may double the work, but if handled deftly, it can forge synchronicity. Even in situations where…
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Piercing the Veil: Jesse Zaritt & Pamela Pietro and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd at La MaMa Moves!
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…
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El Club MEG: La MaMa Goes Post-Postmodern
The vibe was very: here we are in the midst of a fascist coup, what is left to fear? Lots, obviously. But the old obsessions with boundaries and criticism are too much to carry now.
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La Mama Moves: How Do You Feel? While Nature Duels with Technology, Dance Contends with Its History and Future
As artificial intelligence takes over the world, many artists seem primed to abandon their inhibitions and experiment with the latest innovations. Concordance between art and technology is harder to imagine in the field of dance. ChatGPT may now draw Studio Ghibli-style cartoons and draft opinion essays, but just like any hollow robotic entity, it would…
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On This Turnless Page: LOVE ALONE ANTHOLOGY PROJECT at La Mama
Before seeing this performance, I had never heard of gay writer and AIDS activist Paul Monette. Despite living through the AIDS crisis, choreographer Keith A. Thompson hadn’t heard of him either, until 2014, when he learned of Paul’s work. Artistic Director of the danceTactics performance company, Thompson wanted to create a dance that engaged with…
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Dear Kayla Farrish, Burn it Down! At Least the Ashes Will Enrich the Earth
Imagine being told that what you have just experienced did not actually happen the way you experienced it, that it was actually just a collection of dissonant apparitions created by your own strained need to link unrelated events together.
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Miya Shaffer on “I Feel Like You Don’t Trust Me” by TAQ Dance
These haptic qualities enable the audience an imagined point of entry into the onstage sensations, inviting vicarious feeling of the braided hair, the waxiness of plant fronds, the lightness of linen clothing against bare skin.
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In ANGEL VISITS Worship and Communion Traverse The Divine
If we are to honestly appraise the people’s history (those we refer to when we shout “power to the people!”), we must acknowledge the unceasing, if ever-evolving, presence of violence. A sense of scale inspired by looking up into the cavernous arches of St. John the Divine showed me the grandiosity of the human capacity…
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Thank You, Steve.
“There he is.” Nicky Paraiso is sitting next to me and wants me to look at something on his phone. Ostensibly, we´re here at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery to see a show, the first of Danspace Project´s 50th season, but tonight feels more like a reunion, a gathering of old friends. It’s 7:15, the event was…
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Ghost Porn by Brendan Drake
Like fear, desire can be excessive, often humorous, and represents a valuable state in itself — a totality of the sensation in which personal and social histories persist, and new insight can emerge.
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“hope organ” takes on politicizing shame and dance synesthesia
Which I think says something meaningful about fantasy; materials become less messy and people become more one-dimensional and places become infinitely reachable and the perfect temperature in our minds.
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Trying Too Hard
There are few things as infuriating as watching a choreographer attempt and fail at being original. I have often had this feeling while watching the work of Pam Tanowitz for New York City Ballet. In Bartok Ballet, her second commission for the company, Tanowitz breaks convention by sending a dancer– in this performance ballerina Miriam…