La MaMa Dances On

La MaMa Moves!
Through July 9, 2006
Various times and spaces, La MaMa ETC, 74A East Fourth Street, East Village, $10
Tickets, schedules, and information: (212) 475-7710
Reviewed by Jack Anderson June 25, 2006

Dance events have long come to La MaMa. But now dance abounds in the theater center's three spaces in "La MaMa Moves!", a series featuring 50 attractions curated by Nicky Paraiso and Mia Yoo.

Programs are grouped around six basic themes: "Duets," "Dancing Divas," "Children of UR," "Burlesque," "Mavericks in Motion," and "Border Jumping," and the celebration's announcements explain them. My own schedule led me to "Duets," June 24, in the space called the Club. I was rewarded with five neatly-made well-danced depictions of couples getting along, staying together, or breaking off.

Sunhwa Chung's "Petals in the Wind" was a study in attraction and rejection, resistance and yielding, and uniting and separating for Yoshinori Ito and Claire Malaquias to melancholy recorded music by Hans Zimmer. It was the one serious offering in a program featuring comic looks at couples' gatherings.

Russell M. Kaplan provided plaintive live songs and accordion music for "Seatbelt," choreographed by Tom Pearson and its dancers, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus and Zach Morris, who moved in and out of lovers' quarrels with surprising alternations of sharp intensity and seemingly blasé indifference.

Jason Dietz Marchant and Lindsey Dietz Marchant were another pair of squabbling lovers in jointly choreographed excerpts from their "Any Given Day." They kept taking off and putting on clothes and arguing over what time an event was supposed to start. Their altercations finally led to rituals of falling to their knees and saying, "I'm sorry," but these endless apologies became as emotionally extravagant, and as theatrically witty, as their bickerings.

Patricia Hoffbauer was a busybody who tried to tame a wild George Emilio Sanchez in scenes from their own collaborative production, "The Architecture of Seeing." Walking down the theater's aisle, Hoffbauer also flirted with members of the audience, including me. She and Sanchez eventually capered with erotic abandon while Sanchez did some remarkably convincing lip-synching.

Peter Sciscioli and Robbie Cook billed their "In Progress" as a work-in-progress, so who knows what its eventual shape may be. At present, it's a very funny portrait of two guys both trying to express intimate feelings and warily avoiding doing so.