Pleasure and the Pandemic: LaMama Moves! Outdoors
Shared Program: LaMama Moves! Dance Festival 2021
Jasmine Hearn/ Songs from Pleasure Memory
Sugar Vendil/ Test Sites
Outdoors at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, New York City
May 23, 2021
Sixty years after the Sixties, The East Village can still feel like the most sensuous part of New York. Like their spiritual forebears, people in this low-rise, low-rent district live for pleasure – erotic, psychedelic and aesthetic. So it felt right that a graffiti-scarred vacant lot on East 3rd Street was the scene for a revival of live experimental theater in the dying days of the pandemic.
Interdisciplinary artists Jasmine Hearn and Sugar Vendil concluded the 2021 LaMama Moves Dance Festival with emotionally charged solos, under a patch of blue sky on a sultry Sunday.
The stage covered half the lot, but it didn’t seem big enough for Hearn (pronoun “they”) who danced to three songs from their upcoming album Pleasure Memories. Hearn sang along with the soundtrack as they whirled, dove, and slid across the floor, spilling over the edge, slamming up against the wall of the adjacent building. A child of south Texas, Hearn undressed and dressed on stage, pulled pants on inside-out, then ducked into what looked like a slave’s gunny sack. All this was mockumented by a buddy called Missy, who scrawled squiggles upside-down on a poster board held like an apron. Inside-out, upside-down and all over the place, they smiled recalling pleasures of the past and cried out with desire for pleasures to come. Their bottom line was survival, and they made it through.
Sugar Vendil, a second-generation Filipinx-American, took a grimmer view of a year that saw racial and political turmoil erupt into anti-Asian violence. She performed several of her Test Sites, brief experiments in process and form—whose title is also a reminder of US nuclear tests that devastated Pacific islands, leaving them radioactive to this day. (Anyone remember Eniwetok?)
Like Hearn, Vendil’s ambience was a mix of live song and processed soundtrack, plus various forms of the piano: In one piece, she plunked the keys of a toy baby grand. In another she ran her hands wildly across a miniature keyboard.
In “This Too Shall Pass,” Vendil used repetitive movement clashing with inchoate sound to evoke the madness of pandemic life—one day just like the next, amid a storm of conflicting emotions. At the end of this exercise she invited the audience to join in a primal scream, which felt good – conclusive, hopeful, fun.
For a finale she was joined by five Asian women, planted in the audience, who came to the stage bearing wildflower bouquets and bubble tea. Vendil helped herself to a bubble tea and was surrounded by community and love. Thus passes the pandemic, we pray.
The bulk of the festival took place online. The earlier shows--- wildly varied, a la LaMama --- are available on demand through June 30 at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lamamamoves21
copyright 2021 © by Tom Phillips
