Las Fridas Returns for a Days of the Dead Limited New York Engagement November 1-5, 2023

at  8:00 PM at the Lower East Side MDD Studio Theater 310 at The Clemente Center

 

Trigger Warning: This work contains scenes portraying death, violence, and episodic loud sounds

 

Las Fridas is a 60-minute duet developed over 13 years inspired by the life and work of Mexican painter and revolutionary, Frida Kahlo. This season the audience has the opportunity to experience the surreal full evening work in an intimate setting with limited seating: Mark DeGarmo Dance Studio Theater 310. This space is where Mark DeGarmo and MDD have been artist- and company-in-residence since 2001 on New York’s Lower East Side at the Clemente Center. It is also where DeGarmo created the work and intended for the public to experience it, in his words, “up close and intimate to feel part of the heartbeat of Las Fridas.” The timing coincides with DeGarmo’s November 2, All Souls Day of the Dead birthday.

 

Audience members of past seasons remarked the work is not only “genius” and “brilliant in composition and execution” but “in a way, frightening... the way great art always should be.” The piece is “not scared to push the audience right up to the edge that the performers are living on” and “wonderfully in your face, both literally and metaphorically.” “This is not your grandmother’s Modern Dance.”

 

Artistic associates for over 30 years, dancer/performer Marie Baker-Lee and director/choreographer Mark DeGarmo will perform the dual Dark Frida and Light Frida roles. DeGarmo recalls that "due to the sudden illness of one of the women over age 60 performing one week before the December 2015 New York City previews, I assumed the role, adding gender fluidity, and exploding my previous assumptions... In Fridas' work there are often two figures, sometimes two Fridas. What if all the different sides of herself, including the masculine and feminine, were made visible?"

 

The work explores a transcultural transdisciplinary art, theater and performance space, while the sum of its two parts suggests a strange new surrealistic view of Frida's life and traumas. It is inspired by the duality of sun and moon, mother and child, sacred and secular, ancient and current as they appear in Kahlo's artwork. Las Fridas challenges its audiences to examine their own history, heritage and assumptions about Kahlo, gender, power relations and aging. The implicit question the work proposes is: “What might Frida Kahlo's life have been like had she lived beyond the age of 47?”

 

In making an offering of this work on Mexico’s Days of the Dead to the world of the living and the dead, Mark DeGarmo pays homage to his mothers, grandmothers, mentors and friends, including renowned choreographers and dance educators Anna Sokolow and Hanya Holm, educational theorist Maxine Greene, and Living Theatre Co-Founder Judith Malina. Maxine Greene’s hands and Judith Malina’s feet are ex voto images embedded in the windows of the Blue House backstop for this miniature portrait played as an eternal struggle of the forces of duality, nature, violence, love, hatred, fear, and anguish.

 

 

About Mark DeGarmo Dance

Mark DeGarmo Dance, founded in 1987 and in 2023 celebrating its 36th anniversary, is a leading New York City nonprofit dance organization located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side at City-owned The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center (The Clemente). President Barack Obama commended DeGarmo and MDD for your service to your community and the nation. MDD’s NYC dance education program for under-resourced public elementary children of Color was called a national model by the National Endowment for the Arts. https://markdegarmodance.org

 

About Mark DeGarmo

Mark DeGarmo is an award-winning, internationally-recognized dancer, choreographer, writer, researcher, and Founder, Executive & Artistic Director of Mark DeGarmo Dance. New York press and audiences have characterized his dance performance work as mesmerizing and fearless; and DeGarmo as a gladiator in various arenas. https://markdegarmodance.org/performance/

 

Information

Mark DeGarmo, Choreographer, Director, and Dancer/Performer

with Marie Baker-Lee, Dancer/Performer.

 

Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 8pm (MDD Studio Theater 310) SOLD OUT

Thursday, November 2, 2023, 8pm (MDD Studio Theater 310)

Friday, November 3, 2023, 8pm (MDD Studio Theater 310)

Saturday, November 4, 2023, 8pm (MDD Studio Theater 310)

Sunday, November 5, 2023, 3pm (MDD Studio Theater 310)

 

Mark DeGarmo Dance Studio Theater 310, 3rd floor walk-up, no elevator

 

The Clemente Center, 107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002

 

Subway: F/M/J/Z to Delancey/Essex

 

Tickets: $35. Ticket fees apply. To Purchase Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/las-fridas-a-movement-installation-and-offering-tickets-690359442677?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl

 

Shortened link: https://bit.ly/3rn49Fb    

 

 

https://markdegarmodance.org

 

This program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.