Category: Responses
-
THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH IS THE: A Conversation with Hallie Chametzky on Gertrude Stein and Nuanced Reckonings
I was sixteen in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time. I went to the March for Our Lives in Boston. I fastened witty political buttons to my denim jacket. I put “activist” in my internet profiles, right next to “dancer” and “artist.” I’d been online for years, so I knew the importance…
-
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.
-
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…
-
In SOONEST MENDED, Matthew Gasda Shows Off the Fashionable Foibles of the Educated Elite
I could picture the eye rolls coming, the sheer exasperation. There could be no other reaction. “It’s a play about this Brooklyn couple– they’ve been married for years, now they’re opening things up”. “Of course it is.” Sitting down for a late-night coffee at a Qahwah House in Morningside Heights, I struggled to explain my…
-
Heloise Wilson’s ASTRONAUTS WANTED: An Approachable Story Written Deftly
Do I want to go to Mars? Not really, no. I was never one of those kids who looked up at the night sky and pointed to the stars and said “woah.” I haven’t even seen, for instance, Interstellar. Mars, space, the universe—these are infinitely far places that never quite landed deeply enough in…
-
A(U)NTS! Up Close
With her uncanny ability to capture highly-specific instances and deeply darkly kept-secret feelings, along with her bravery to really go there with descriptions of the body and all of its innate gore, Zoë Geltman imagines a world where women can be disgustingly free.
-
Eric Bogosian’s HUMPTY DUMPTY Shows Its Age.
Set in the year 2000, flip phones are everywhere in Humpty Dumpty. The two central couples, Hallmark characters with high-power city jobs, spend much of the play walking around desperately waving their phones in the air in search of a signal. It’s particularly egregious, then, that none of them can act their way through the…
-
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…
-
In NYTW’s BECOMING EVE Being Jewish is Living in Paradox
TRADITION: it’s what survives into the next generation, what parents and teachers pass along to their children, and what we find ourselves replicating for better or worse. If the present is obligated to honor the memory of what came before, what flexibility, in turn, do our traditions owe us? How can customs repeat if they’re…
-
Anne Imhof “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory
It’s very easy to feel small, to feel helpless. But even in the midst of this dark time, we have the capacity to be present with each other, and through caring for each other when we are in pain, suffering, and fearful, to redeem ourselves and our sinful world.
-
“The truth is the truth is truth is the…” A dance-theater retelling of the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
As it turns out, Stein and Toklas did many things, some of them frightening and problematic, some of them strenuous and beautiful—all of them a legacy worth digging into. Chametzky was wise to put this work onstage in 2025, as we face a resurgence of fascism and question our own moral codes in relation to…
-
The Devastation of A Frustrated Dream: Micaela Fariña and Gonzalo Quintana’s La consagración de nadie (Unsuccessful)
A few weeks ago I got a gig working the book table at BODY/SHADOW, a Douglas Dunn + Dancers performance at Judson Church. In preparation I perused the books– all penned by Dunn– for sale. One in particular caught my eye; a small black book titled Aidos. I flipped to a random page: “Shame at…