Highlights: La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (NYC)

La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, which takes place in all three of our venues and features over 50 emerging and seasoned choreographers, reflects La MaMa’s longstanding mission to performance that transcends politics and unifies cultures.

2012 Festival Line-Up:

May 9: Love Story, Palestine
May11: Chamber Works I
May 17: Beauty
May 17: The Mermaid Show
May 18: Chamber Works II
May 19: Digital Duets
May 20: East Village Dance Project

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Love Story, Palestine
May 9 – May 12, 2012
Wednesday – Friday at 7:30pm
Saturday at 2:30pm & 7:30pm
Free Admission – Reservation Required.

https://vimeo.com/33564674

Concept, Design and Choreography by Yoshiko Chuma and School of Hard Knocks

This is a fiction based on the true story Occupation Layer: PALESTINE by Yoshiko Chuma
featuring members of Palestinian Dance Troupe El-Funoun from Ramallah

Conceptual Artist/Choreographer/Artistic Director of The School of Hard Knocks Yoshiko Chuma continues a lifetime obsession with danger in her new work, Love Story, Palestine. Intentionally confusing documentation with history, Chuma tasks El-Funoun members Sari Husseini and Anas Abu Oun and NYC-based talents Miriam Parker, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Saori Tsukada-—three performers who have never been to Palestine—with re-creating segments from her own documented works and experiences in Ramallah, Palestine. Chuma assembles a mosaic of images and interviews which pertain to pain and longing, as if framing theater with barbed wire. Traditional dance is juxtaposed with contemporary movement, video projection and spoken text in a borderless environment constantly reshaped by sculptural objects. Yoshiko Chuma herself performs on the backdrop of Robert Flynt’s photography.

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The Mermaid Show
May 17 – May 20, 2012
by Ann Liv Young

Ann Liv Young, who has routinely provoked, tormented, and enraptured audiences, will do it all once again in the U.S. premiere of “Mermaid Show.” Young
is, of course, the Mermaid, but one who challenges her audience’s passivity in her turn from the sweet Disney creation into a raw fish eating, spitting creature as she emerges from her blow-up pool.

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Beauty
May 17 – May 20, 2012 at 7:30pm
by Jane Comfort and Company

Hailed by The Washington Post as “fascinating and fantastic,” Beauty takes a gimlet-eyed look at the extremes women go to achieve impossible beauty. Jane Comfort’s wildly versatile company members don false eyelashes, sequins, and Spanx to compete in a nightly Barbie Beauty Contest judged by random audience members. Ditching Barbie drag, they examine the many beauty procedures available to us lesser creatures: liposuction, botox, plastic surgeries, etc., and those that aren’t: Photoshop, the digital magic that retouches every model we see in magazines. Beauty invites men and women of all ages to consider how they perceive and project notions of female beauty in both benign and malevolent ways, consciously and subconsciously. Comfort was awarded a Guggenheim to create this wickedly funny and poignant work, which is performed in repertory with her Bessie Award-winning Underground River.