Pleasure and the Pandemic: Is it Over?

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, 19 E. 3rd St. 

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 3^rd 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 blue sky on a sultry Sunday.     

Jasmine Hearn:  Photo by Steven Pisano 

The stage covered half the lot, but it didn’t seem big enough for Hearn (pronoun “they”) who danced and sang along with three songs from their new album Pleasure Memories. A child of south Texas, Hearn whirled, dove, and slid across the floor, spilling over the edge, slamming up against the wall of the adjacent building.  They 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 post-war 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, with 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 another, 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. 

At the end of her set she was joined by five Asian women, planted in the audience, who came to the stage bearing wildflower bouquets and bubble tea in plastic cups.  Vendil helped herself to a bubble tea and was surrounded by sweetness, 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 
Performance photos by Steven Pisano