LA MAMA MOVES! Festival

Nine different performance events comprise the 2024 La Mama Moves! Festival this spring season. Chris Yon and Taryn Griggs in Yoggs Family Newsletter shared an evening with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks’ EXTREME CLASSICS.

Yoggs Family Newsletter 2014-present (NY edition), a delightful, witty, and often poignant family portrait of two parents (Chris Yon and Taryn Griggs) and their twelve year old daughter (Bea), share the stage, encapsulate time and fleeting experiences of family life; their journey as artists together and apart. It begins with Yon and Griggs, with deadpan faces, dancing a fast paced duet with strict, angular arm and foot work broken up with frenetic, chaotic, uncontrolled spasms as they work to keep it together as parents;  the young daughter lurking behind, slowly picking up some of their gestures and footwork. The piece is often narrated by the daughter as part of the sound score: “This last year has been rough, ya’ll,” explaining their time apart as the parents have been working as an adjunct and as a professor at two separate universities, piecing their family life together, often as a rehearsal.

The work sketches the intimacy found in everyday life: the mother and daughter lying on the floor with a phone, waiting for customer service to answer their inquiry; the father talking on a microphone about his disorientation of what to “call home;” the trio dancing to water and insect sounds as if on a vacation, the girl soaring like a bird in space…all depictions of time spent together and apart. At one point, Yon takes off numerous tee shirts, one after the other, perhaps symbolizing time travel together. 

A darker, less transparent piece by Chuma followed: EXTREME CLASSICS – extreme avant-gard toward extreme classic.  Her experiences in Palestine with dancer and activist Noora Baker (one of the leading dancers and directors of the El-Funoun Palestinian Popular dance company in Ramallah, Palestine) is sited as a substantial inspiration for this project. 

A lot goes on. There’s a video collage presentation on the back wall with slow and fast paced scenes. Two performers (Dennis O’ Connor and Santiago Molina) unpack numerous white wooden milk bottles from boxes, set them up on the floor with black small balls interspersed, then stack them neatly with great precision. While a pianist (Dane Terry) plays on stage, Yoshiko holds a toy dinosaur, and parades it in front of the audience. The soundscape of screeching sirens rises, then dramatic music accompanies a large video representation of the film version of Godzilla (the fictional monster in the 1954 film; a metaphor for nuclear weapons, and also, some say a metaphor for the United States) appears, as does the date July 25, 1946. That day, the US detonated Helen of Bikini  a nuclear bomb in the Marshall Islands, 90 feet underwater releasing radioactive sea spray causing extensive contamination. Supposedly, the purpose of the tests was to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships. To this day, Bikini Atoll islands are uninhabitable due to contamination.

Dennis O’Connor performs controlled lunges, gestures, tilts, in stark shapes (an adaptation of Merge Cunningham’s 50 Looks from 1979) to  grand exploding sounds and a scene of the actual bomb exploding on the screen. Yoshiko watches him from the side, warships now appearing on the screen as a newscaster of the time discusses the tests administered on ships after the explosion to measure the amount of contamination. Yoshiko now walks around the stage with a large spherical mirror, holding it up in front of the audience as if to say, “you/we did this.” 

O’Connor’s movements become more distraught as the once neatly stacked milk bottles are thrown to the side of the stage; Chuma standing on the piano bench hugging the pianist, finds a shard of a mirror and again, points it to the audience. 

The chaotic, inexplicable reality on stage seems to represent Chuma’s alarm and dismay over her own history as a Japanese immigrant after WW2, and her recent work in Palestine,. She shows the futility of war, and our own reluctance to see the consequences before we act, time and time again. 

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman