La MaMa announces the lineup for the 17th edition of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Curated by Nicky Paraiso, the three-week festival will feature new works by nine dance artists/companies with bold and diverse approaches to performance. The 2022 festival will take place Thursdays through Sundays, April 14–May 1, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre and The Downstairs Theatre, 66 East 4th Street (between Bowery and Second Avenue). Performance times vary. The performances will be streamed following the live presentations. 

“This season’s choreographers are working with a myriad of issues: reexamining the meaning of home, researching postmodern dance as a racial construct, and recognizing the essential need for trust in our everyday lives. These concerns have arisen in a time of crisis, uncertainty, and also reflection, questioning the ways we respond with our bodies, our minds, our hearts. The artists in this season’s La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival have taken on these issues in creative, thoughtful, deeply felt ways,” said Nicky Paraiso.

The festival opens with Tiffany Mills Company’s Homing, a dance-theater work inspired by the wealth of experiences that shape and bind us in our homes. Bay Area-based choreographer Gerald Casel will present his company’s newest work, Not About Race Dance, a performance response to the racial dynamics of postmodern dance. From Colombia, Compañía Cuerpo de Indias will present its acclaimed work Flowers for Kazuo Ohno (and Leonard Cohen). Valetango Company will present Confianza (Trust), a work that highlights the choreographic potential of radical interdependency through tango’s legacy of improvisation. And John Scott returns to La MaMa with his latest work, Cloud Study, which uses the idea of clouds as a traveling dreamy mass and carrier of storms to explore the dynamic between two dancers.

There will also be two shared evenings. The first features Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Jesse Zaritt. Mercer’s to land somewhere unfelt is about being free, moving through time, and what Mercer describes as a marathon of forever becoming. Zaritt’s No End of Detail (III) is organized as a series of bodybuilding and body-dissolving rituals that attempt to both make and unmake a self. The second shared program features Pele Bauch and Marina Celander. In A.K.A. Ka Inoa, Bauch explores the gray areas in ethnic identity through visual metaphor. Celander’s Stone She: Space Edition explores our inside/outside worlds and humanity’s disconnect from nature.

As part of the festival, La MaMa and Movement Research will co-present Secret Journey: Stop Calling Them Dangerous #3, a panel symposium and long-table discussion examining stories about oppression, marginalization, prejudice, and profiling. With Yoshiko Chuma and other artists TBA.

Tickets for La MaMa Moves! are $25 in advance/$30 day of show. Students/Seniors: $20 in advance/$25 day of show. Two and three-show packages are available. Tickets are available at www.lamama.org. For La MaMa’s health and safety protocols, visit: www.lamama.org.