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La MaMa presents the 20th annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Curated by Nicky Paraiso with guest curators Martita Abril, Blaze Ferrer and Adham Hafez, the festival features works by 20 visionary artists with varied creative practices and approaches to performance.
Tides (working title) (World Premiere)
John Jasperse Projects
April 10-13
Ellen Stewart Theatre
John Jasperse Projects will premiere a new evening-length work, Tides (working title), that is built around a collection of real-life, intergenerational mentor-protegé relationships that exist within the team of collaborators. This celebration of the arc of life in dance and the generosity of the act of transmission are at the heart of the work. The work features a cast of collaborating performers ranging from veteran luminaries in the downtown scene, Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick and Cynthia Koppe, to younger, emerging dance artists Jace Weyant and Maria Fleischman. The commissioned score is created by Jasperse’s longtime collaborator Hahn Rowe, with lighting by Ben Demarest and visual and costume design by Jasperse.
Love Alone Anthology Project (World Premiere)
Keith A. Thompson & danceTactics performance group
April 10-13
The Downstairs Theatre
danceTactics performance group will present Love Alone Anthology Project, choreographed by Keith A. Thompson and inspired by the writings of AIDS activist Paul Monette (1945-1995). Galvanized by his powerful 1988 volume of poetry Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, written while his gay lover was dying from HIV, this multidisciplinary performance interprets and embodies these stream-of-consciousness monologues into a suite of powerful episodes performed by men of multiple generations, backgrounds and sexual identities. Love Alone Anthology Project features performances by Clarence Brooks, Shawn Brush, Aidan Feldman and Brendan McCall, visual art by Robert Flynt, lighting by Joe Levasseur, video art by David Fishel and original music by Albert Mathias, Maesa Pullman and Dalal Bruckmann.
Shared Program
e-Motion (NYC Premiere)
Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company
Tremor (New York Premiere) and Then (World Premiere)
Pat Catterson
April 18-20
The Downstairs Theatre
e-Motion, a dance-theater collaboration between choreographer Daniel Gwirtzman and playwright Saviana Stănescu, explores AI, neuroscience and what it means to be human in a digital age. Gwirtzman creates a physical interpretation of Stănescu’s provocative text that brings conceptual ideas deep into the human body. The score is text, augmented by music composed by the late Jeff Story, a longtime collaborator of DGDC. The narrative duet, performed by Gwirtzman and Sarah Hillmon, follows the presentation of the AI creature for public consumption. The big launch. What could go wrong?
Pat Catterson will present Tremor, a work for five dancers, and Then, a new solo. Created while Catterson was a La MaMa Resident Artist, Tremor is concerned with those moments of high alert when we realize something is not right, when what happens next is uncertain. The work is performed by New York dancers Brandon Collwes, Louisa Pancoast, Maia Ramnath and Timothy Ward, and Boston dancers Mitzi Eppley and Sarah Slifer Swift. The original score is by Quentin Chiappetta. Then is the opening solo of a new ensemble work in progress inspired in part by solo cello pieces by Philip Glass. The title, Then, implies both past and future, as does this dance in its structure, feel and movement.
Shared Program
Hunter College MFA and NYU Tisch MFA Choreographers
April 18-20
The Club
The Hunter College MFA in Dance is for returning professionals seeking to investigate the role of dance in contemporary culture. This community of inquiry meets in the intentional space that each cohort of artists forges together. Francesca Dominguez’s The Nearly, Barely, Just unravels the tension between compulsion and control, examining how our bodies become conditioned to constant stimulation and where the line blurs between impulse and agency. Maria Angela Talavera-Tejeda’s Por Debajo de la Rodilla (“Below the Knee”) is an immersive dance that examines the body's unspoken language, revealing ancestral memories and the human yearning for salvation, recognition, and forgiveness from a higher power.
The MFA in Dance: Interdisciplinary Research at New York University program provides a laboratory for established artists, makers, and practitioners to reimagine and enact dance through a range of collaborative and self-directed research, from the speculative to the practical. In her new solo, SYMPHONY, marion spencer investigates the archive from her lineage and daily life, asking what we hold onto and why in a world of imminent climate catastrophe. Xin Ying’s Paper Dragon: Five Elements Matrix is an interdisciplinary performance that incorporates movements and sounds into the five-elements-matrix, creating a new ritualistic form for all transplants who are uprooted from where their traditional rituals are rooted.
LUCY AI (US Premiere)
bluemouth inc.
April 24-25
Community Arts Space
LUCY AI is a collaboration between Lucy Simic and her Toronto-based interdisciplinary performance collective bluemouth inc. and Montreal artificial intelligence company Reimagine AI. Simic and David Usher of Reimagine AI have been close friends for three decades, since they first met as students while studying modern dance at university in Vancouver, BC. In 2018, at the age of 49, Simic was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Usher was deeply impacted by the news and began wondering how his company Reimagine AI, might be able to use its technology to create a poetic visual archive of his friend’s life and career as an artist. LUCY AI is an interactive video installation that tells the story of Lucy's life through a collage of film, music and movement powered by artificial intelligence.
Shared Program
Alexis Chartrand & Nic Gareiss
Alexis Chartrand and Nic Gareiss
Please Cry (US Premiere)
Megumi Eda
April 25-27
The Club
Percussive dancer Nic Gareiss and fiddler Alexis Chartrand meld unparalleled virtuosity with an introspective sensibility. The two artists trace, with disarming spontaneity, their path across French Canadian, Appalachian and Irish traditions. Propelled by traditional fiddle tunes and percussive steps, Gareiss and Chartrand explore, with palpable pleasure, the sharing of sounds and gestures, blurring the lines between music and dance, melody and movement. Their concerts are a privileged opportunity to witness the contemporaneity of fiddle and dance traditions through the singular creativity of Gareiss’s step dancing, and Chartrand’s anomalous fiddling on the baroque violin.
Please Cry is a deeply personal solo performance by Megumi Eda, blending dance, live video and music to explore intergenerational trauma, resilience and the lingering impact of war. Inspired by the silence surrounding Eda’s grandmother’s past, the piece reflects on how unspoken histories echo across generations. Through movement, Eda seeks to embody these inherited emotions, giving form to what words cannot express. War’s trauma is never just history—it lingers, passed down like an unbroken chain. Please Cry features an original score by Reiko Yamada.
Shared Program
dance for no ending (World Premiere)
Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro
Currently Untitled (World Premiere)
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd
April 25-27
The Downstairs Theatre
Jesse Zaritt and Pam Pietro’s duet is an experiment in accumulation and dissolution. They trace, describe, inscribe, erase, observe, fantasize and imprint. Through persistent dancing, they attempt to exhaustively examine, negotiate, dissect, inflate and undermine the movement vocabularies and patterns of effort that produce what we think of as ourselves.
In Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s most recent work the performer is both the magician and the veil, fostering spaces of encounter with his audiences. Lloyd works from formal foundations focusing on exactitude of shape, energetics and tone, which becomes one layer of poetics that emerges from the work. The focus is then on how these formal elements make available the intimate act of seeing, and reveal the complexities of constructing meaning through movement, sound and relationship. The carefully composed duet, with a score by composer Ryan Wolfe, empowers in-betweenness, expanding and collapsing scale on a whim, creating spaces of liminality and unsettled beauty.
Ta’na Nirau (World Premiere)
Amalia Suryani
April 26-27
Community Arts Space
Amalia Suryani’s Ta’na Nirau is rooted in the dance, music and storytelling traditions of the Dayak tribes of Borneo, Indonesia, who are grappling with multiple existential challenges. These tribes are struggling with environmental destruction, land theft, illegal logging and palm oil plantations. Forests are destroyed by unchecked greed, with no regard for the suffering of earth’s creatures. This performance gives voice to the Indigenous resistance striving to restore denuded forests against all odds.
Shared Program
Emerging Choreographers Program
Curated by Martita Abril and Blaze Ferrer
May 1-4
The Club
Shared Program
Presented in partnership with the New York Arab Festival
Curated by Adham Hafez
May 1-4
Community Arts Space
New York Arab Festival (NYAF) presents its “festival within festival” program at La MaMa for its 2025 edition, rooted in experimental Arab and Arab American choreography, theater and performance. Curated around surveying underground and experimental practices by Arab artists from the 1950s through today, this edition promises a diverse program that shuttles between performance, readings, choreography, and community engagement. Artists TBA.
Tides (working title) (World Premiere)
John Jasperse Projects
April 10-13
Ellen Stewart Theatre
John Jasperse Projects will premiere a new evening-length work, Tides (working title), that is built around a collection of real-life, intergenerational mentor-protegé relationships that exist within the team of collaborators. This celebration of the arc of life in dance and the generosity of the act of transmission are at the heart of the work. The work features a cast of collaborating performers ranging from veteran luminaries in the downtown scene, Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick and Cynthia Koppe, to younger, emerging dance artists Jace Weyant and Maria Fleischman. The commissioned score is created by Jasperse’s longtime collaborator Hahn Rowe, with lighting by Ben Demarest and visual and costume design by Jasperse.
Love Alone Anthology Project (World Premiere)
Keith A. Thompson & danceTactics performance group
April 10-13
The Downstairs Theatre
danceTactics performance group will present Love Alone Anthology Project, choreographed by Keith A. Thompson and inspired by the writings of AIDS activist Paul Monette (1945-1995). Galvanized by his powerful 1988 volume of poetry Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, written while his gay lover was dying from HIV, this multidisciplinary performance interprets and embodies these stream-of-consciousness monologues into a suite of powerful episodes performed by men of multiple generations, backgrounds and sexual identities. Love Alone Anthology Project features performances by Clarence Brooks, Shawn Brush, Aidan Feldman and Brendan McCall, visual art by Robert Flynt, lighting by Joe Levasseur, video art by David Fishel and original music by Albert Mathias, Maesa Pullman and Dalal Bruckmann.
Shared Program
e-Motion (NYC Premiere)
Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company
Tremor (New York Premiere) and Then (World Premiere)
Pat Catterson
April 18-20
The Downstairs Theatre
e-Motion, a dance-theater collaboration between choreographer Daniel Gwirtzman and playwright Saviana Stănescu, explores AI, neuroscience and what it means to be human in a digital age. Gwirtzman creates a physical interpretation of Stănescu’s provocative text that brings conceptual ideas deep into the human body. The score is text, augmented by music composed by the late Jeff Story, a longtime collaborator of DGDC. The narrative duet, performed by Gwirtzman and Sarah Hillmon, follows the presentation of the AI creature for public consumption. The big launch. What could go wrong?
Pat Catterson will present Tremor, a work for five dancers, and Then, a new solo. Created while Catterson was a La MaMa Resident Artist, Tremor is concerned with those moments of high alert when we realize something is not right, when what happens next is uncertain. The work is performed by New York dancers Brandon Collwes, Louisa Pancoast, Maia Ramnath and Timothy Ward, and Boston dancers Mitzi Eppley and Sarah Slifer Swift. The original score is by Quentin Chiappetta. Then is the opening solo of a new ensemble work in progress inspired in part by solo cello pieces by Philip Glass. The title, Then, implies both past and future, as does this dance in its structure, feel and movement.
Shared Program
Hunter College MFA and NYU Tisch MFA Choreographers
April 18-20
The Club
The Hunter College MFA in Dance is for returning professionals seeking to investigate the role of dance in contemporary culture. This community of inquiry meets in the intentional space that each cohort of artists forges together. Francesca Dominguez’s The Nearly, Barely, Just unravels the tension between compulsion and control, examining how our bodies become conditioned to constant stimulation and where the line blurs between impulse and agency. Maria Angela Talavera-Tejeda’s Por Debajo de la Rodilla (“Below the Knee”) is an immersive dance that examines the body's unspoken language, revealing ancestral memories and the human yearning for salvation, recognition, and forgiveness from a higher power.
The MFA in Dance: Interdisciplinary Research at New York University program provides a laboratory for established artists, makers, and practitioners to reimagine and enact dance through a range of collaborative and self-directed research, from the speculative to the practical. In her new solo, SYMPHONY, marion spencer investigates the archive from her lineage and daily life, asking what we hold onto and why in a world of imminent climate catastrophe. Xin Ying’s Paper Dragon: Five Elements Matrix is an interdisciplinary performance that incorporates movements and sounds into the five-elements-matrix, creating a new ritualistic form for all transplants who are uprooted from where their traditional rituals are rooted.
LUCY AI (US Premiere)
bluemouth inc.
April 24-25
Community Arts Space
LUCY AI is a collaboration between Lucy Simic and her Toronto-based interdisciplinary performance collective bluemouth inc. and Montreal artificial intelligence company Reimagine AI. Simic and David Usher of Reimagine AI have been close friends for three decades, since they first met as students while studying modern dance at university in Vancouver, BC. In 2018, at the age of 49, Simic was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Usher was deeply impacted by the news and began wondering how his company Reimagine AI, might be able to use its technology to create a poetic visual archive of his friend’s life and career as an artist. LUCY AI is an interactive video installation that tells the story of Lucy's life through a collage of film, music and movement powered by artificial intelligence.
Shared Program
Alexis Chartrand & Nic Gareiss
Alexis Chartrand and Nic Gareiss
Please Cry (US Premiere)
Megumi Eda
April 25-27
The Club
Percussive dancer Nic Gareiss and fiddler Alexis Chartrand meld unparalleled virtuosity with an introspective sensibility. The two artists trace, with disarming spontaneity, their path across French Canadian, Appalachian and Irish traditions. Propelled by traditional fiddle tunes and percussive steps, Gareiss and Chartrand explore, with palpable pleasure, the sharing of sounds and gestures, blurring the lines between music and dance, melody and movement. Their concerts are a privileged opportunity to witness the contemporaneity of fiddle and dance traditions through the singular creativity of Gareiss’s step dancing, and Chartrand’s anomalous fiddling on the baroque violin.
Please Cry is a deeply personal solo performance by Megumi Eda, blending dance, live video and music to explore intergenerational trauma, resilience and the lingering impact of war. Inspired by the silence surrounding Eda’s grandmother’s past, the piece reflects on how unspoken histories echo across generations. Through movement, Eda seeks to embody these inherited emotions, giving form to what words cannot express. War’s trauma is never just history—it lingers, passed down like an unbroken chain. Please Cry features an original score by Reiko Yamada.
Shared Program
dance for no ending (World Premiere)
Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro
Currently Untitled (World Premiere)
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd
April 25-27
The Downstairs Theatre
Jesse Zaritt and Pam Pietro’s duet is an experiment in accumulation and dissolution. They trace, describe, inscribe, erase, observe, fantasize and imprint. Through persistent dancing, they attempt to exhaustively examine, negotiate, dissect, inflate and undermine the movement vocabularies and patterns of effort that produce what we think of as ourselves.
In Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s most recent work the performer is both the magician and the veil, fostering spaces of encounter with his audiences. Lloyd works from formal foundations focusing on exactitude of shape, energetics and tone, which becomes one layer of poetics that emerges from the work. The focus is then on how these formal elements make available the intimate act of seeing, and reveal the complexities of constructing meaning through movement, sound and relationship. The carefully composed duet, with a score by composer Ryan Wolfe, empowers in-betweenness, expanding and collapsing scale on a whim, creating spaces of liminality and unsettled beauty.
Ta’na Nirau (World Premiere)
Amalia Suryani
April 26-27
Community Arts Space
Amalia Suryani’s Ta’na Nirau is rooted in the dance, music and storytelling traditions of the Dayak tribes of Borneo, Indonesia, who are grappling with multiple existential challenges. These tribes are struggling with environmental destruction, land theft, illegal logging and palm oil plantations. Forests are destroyed by unchecked greed, with no regard for the suffering of earth’s creatures. This performance gives voice to the Indigenous resistance striving to restore denuded forests against all odds.
Shared Program
Emerging Choreographers Program
Curated by Martita Abril and Blaze Ferrer
May 1-4
The Club
Shared Program
Presented in partnership with the New York Arab Festival
Curated by Adham Hafez
May 1-4
Community Arts Space
New York Arab Festival (NYAF) presents its “festival within festival” program at La MaMa for its 2025 edition, rooted in experimental Arab and Arab American choreography, theater and performance. Curated around surveying underground and experimental practices by Arab artists from the 1950s through today, this edition promises a diverse program that shuttles between performance, readings, choreography, and community engagement. Artists TBA.
Performance Schedule:
Visit lamama.org for full lineup and schedule.
