LAMAMA MOVES! FESTIVAL

La MaMa Moves! Festival, curated by Nicky Paraiso, is celebrating its 20th year, presenting emerging and established dancers and choreographers in the downtown dance scene. 

A shared program of two pieces, on April 25, although very different, showed choreographers grappling with their own creative process, their inner worlds, and the need to be seen and understood. 

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s world premiere Mooncry  attempted to break the fourth wall, creating humor and surprise and a sense of intimacy with the audience. He enters the stage, turning, turning, turning, on the diagonal from downstage to up, then returns, wearing simple tee shirts, sweatpants, and sneakers. He lunges side to side, then falls to the floor, dragging his body to the back. He walks behind the split black curtain. We wonder….”What is he up to?”

Intermittent dancing happens: releve’s, plei’s, side lunges. Lights go down; he walks off. Where did he go? Now he is at the top of the stairs of the audience seats, forcing us to turn and watch, intruding on our usual vantage point. Slowly, he evolves down the side stairs, in adagio movement. 

Entering the stage again, he picks up a microphone while standing on a pile of books. He calls out names of people listed in the attendance sheet, throwing them candy from a gift bag.  As he kicks the books away one by one, he asks: “Do you cry? Do you practice courage? Do you hear it? Shall we clap together?” He wants us to pay attention. To see. To hear. To feel.

Outer-space music plays as he lunges against the back wall, takes off his shoes and socks. He pulls out a red long-haired wig, hangs it from a microphone at the back of the stage where a fan blows wind on the hair. He ends by walking off the stage, sweeping the floor with a janitor’s push broom. Lloyd certainly captures our attention in this work; drawing us in in unusual ways. Still… it feels like a piece where the parts don’t add up to a whole that makes sense out of nonsense.  

Jesse Zaritt and Pam Pietro astound us with passionate physicality in Dance For No Ending. Indeed, radical presence starts the piece, as the two, entertwined as one body, trace the back of the stage, pressing against the wall and each other, struggling and pushing each other towards the end until reaching the edge of the stage. 

Pietro begins a mad, frantic episode, throwing “things” onto the stage: trash, rolls of tape, a chair, warm up props, a park bench, a coat rack, pens; a tantrum of exhausting activity, creating a mess on stage. She then pulls him into the fray, as he lies passively on the floor, also part of the mess. 

They then alternate between frantic exercise activities, as they attempt to stay in shape: push ups on a park bench, balancing on a chair, while also trying to clean up the space. She poses on the floor; he comes behind her; they entwine again, aggressively so that he almost strangles her. Besides the mess on the stage, their relationship is at odds, perhaps all part of the collaboration and meshing to two egos making one dance?

The piece then switches! A projection on the back of the stage, shows drawings of bodies, moving and colliding together; then Zaritt in a glowing, silvery, costume, dances as the projections appear on his body. He is the art.  He then draws on paper as Pietro balances on a chair ( his model, perhaps?).

She brings out a megaphone, screeching, reminding him of anatomical and professorial terms as he continues to draw on paper, childlike. She then dances a beautiful adagio, before donning a shirt, stuffing it with trash, before hobbling off, burdened, into the open corridor to the backstage as beautiful sacred music “Miserere mei, Deus” by Gregorio Allegri accompanies their exit. The prayer music blessing their labor?

What are we to make of this? The merging of two creative personalities and identities trying to work against the odds and chaos of their thoughts, daily obligations, and the messiness of life; an attempt to make sense of the world around them even as they struggle with frustration and fragmented experiences. 

But…they continue on….

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Mary Seidman