Groovin'

 LaMama Moves/Online

Tamar Rogoff with Merri Milwe
"Wonder About Merri"
Kevin Augustine/Lone Wolf Tribe 
"Body Concert"
Tamar Rogoff with Mei Yamanaka
"The Yamanakas at Home"

-- By Tom Phillips

The Yamanakas at Home 

 It's not that often that three disparate dance pieces fit together so well that they seem to be subtly referring and commenting on each other -- but last night's trio of experiments from LaMama seemed to have been made with each other in mind.  The bookends were two short pieces by Tamar Rogoff --  one set in downtown Manhattan, the other in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo -- with entirely different characters and themes, but a single groove -- a Motown beat that gets you on your feet, and won't let you do anything but dance. 

Bloomsday in America

This article was originally published online, in slightly different form, in  ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews  12/28/2020. 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Geography is destiny in two modern masterpieces – James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961) – but these destinies point in opposite directions. Joyce’s Dublin faces East across the Irish Sea to England; Malamud’s fictional Marathon, Cascadia west over the mountains to the Pacific.  Cascadia is green and fresh, the air clear, nature an “esthetic satisfaction” so overwhelming that art is superfluous.  Dublin is “snotgreen”, reeking of dead men, dead dogs, poor old women, “general paralysis of the insane” all seen through Irish art, the “cracked lookingglass of a servant.”                                                                           

"Poldy"  -- from Joyce's notes 

Enter into these opposite landscapes a single archetype, the wandering Jew -- outsider, observer, “chief critic of everything”. The aim of this essay will be to point out the direct relation between characters and episodes in these two novels – notably Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Malamud’s Seymour Levin. This link is repeatedly suggested by Malamud, beginning with the epigraph of A New Life, a quote from Ulysses: “Lo, Levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s western welkin."  A New Life can be read as another variation on Homer’s Odyssey, a bid by Malamud to extend the epic of human civilization to America’s farthest shore.  Spiced with biblical references, it is also the story of American Jews’ liberation from cyclical tragedy in the Old World, and the hazards of their new life in the New.    

Two Mamas at LaMama

 LaMama Moves/Online 
Annabella Lenzu & Kari Hoaas 

-- By Tom Phillips 

Ida Haugen in "Rise" 

Inauguration Day and the Pandemic both played into the hands of artists at LaMama's annual festival of dance, this year on video instead of downtown in New York.  Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas and Argentine-American Annabella Lenzu had to adapt work originally meant for LaMama's theater space.  And while their creative solutions narrowed the scope of their pieces, they may also have sharpened their focus. 

Le Coup pour Rien

 -- By Tom Phillips                   

The first rule of a revolution is that you need to win it; because you'll be harshly punished if you fail.  

Mao Zedong, who won the biggest revolution of the 20th Century, wrote:  “A revolution is not a tea party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery...  A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

President Trump has been impeached for "incitement of insurrection," but it wasn't a real insurrection, and had no chance of winning.  It was just the the final episode of play-acting in a show that's been running for four years, a fantastical grand finale in which five people actually died.  Mr. Trump lives by appearances, and can't cope with realities -- e.g. the Coronavirus, or the election results.  He keeps thinking he can fix things without doing anything about them. 

This week, as he summoned a mob and sent it against Congress, he failed to understand that a show of force is not the same as actual force.  Actual force performs work, as in one class overthrowing another.  A show of force is just a photo-op.