La MaMa’s Radical Dance Festival Turns Twenty

New York City’s East 4th Street between the Bowery and 2nd Avenue has been taken over by dance. The 2025 La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, which runs through May 4 in the venue’s four performance spaces, presents eleven shows featuring twenty emerging and veteran, local and international artists ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s. There will be dance-theater works and a mobile dance opera, post-modern, percussive, ballet, Indonesian and contemporary dance styles. There will be poetry and A.I. and karaoke and a car. There will be beer.

The La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is best known for its history of avant-garde theater and performance art, but over the past two decades, it has become a haven for experimental contemporary dance as well. For the festival’s 20th anniversary season, aptly titled Resistance & Transformation, the curators wanted to lean into what has made the festival so “La MaMa” for so long: its communal atmosphere, diverse and inclusive programming and works that break open perceptions of what dance and performance can be.

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La MaMa’s founder, Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), supported playwrights and experimental theater throughout her career. But as Mia Yoo, the artistic director since 2011, told Observer, Stewart became increasingly interested in communicating across cultures and languages. “As she continued her journey at La MaMa, she realized that sometimes words got in the way of communication.” So she started bringing in more movement-based works and invited Yoo and multidisciplinary artist Nicky Paraiso to curate the first La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in 2005.

Since taking over the role of artistic director after Stewart’s passing, Yoo has stepped aside from the curation, but Paraiso has happily remained the curator since the beginning. “Every year, I feel really lucky to obtain the availability of the choreographers who are doing the most interesting work,” he said.

For the festival’s 20th anniversary, Yoo and Paraiso decided to bring on guest curators—Martita Abril, Blaze Ferrer and Adham Hafez—to deepen their dedication to a diverse, intergenerational dialogue. The collaboration was seamless.

Hafez, artistic director and curator of the New York Arab Festival, took charge of its ‘festival within a festival’ program (May 1-4), which focuses on experimental Arab and Arab American choreography, theater and performance.

Paraiso curated several shows, while artist and producer Abril and interdisciplinary performer and choreographer Ferrer—who already knew each other because New York City’s experimental contemporary dance scene is tight-knit—chose to work together to curate the others. “Martita and I share an interest and a desire for counterculture,” Ferrer told Observer, “for works that are weird, that have a rhizomatic logic, that are sort of maintaining the radicality of contemporary dance in a way that transcends form. And I think that echoes the history of this institution and this festival.”

Abril, who is from Tijuana, Mexico, added that she wanted to focus on marginalized communities that don’t have a platform. “Coming from a border and seeing the way that folks are treated here, how I’ve been treated, it’s super important now more than ever to bring those voices to La MaMa.”

When asked what themes have emerged in the festival’s line-up, the curators agreed the shows are all pushing some kind of boundary. “I think a lot of the works are unapologetically queer,” Ferrer said. “I think they’re interdisciplinary and in sort of a border space between dance and theater and performance art that I find really interesting… I think they’re the coolest thing in the room whenever they perform.” Paraiso added that this kind of “intuitive curation” has led them to many overlapping themes and “places that you wouldn’t expect, but it’s serendipity.”

What to see at this year’s La MaMa Moves!

Resistance & Transformation is expansive, spanning weeks and styles and moods. Sadly, some works have already come and gone.

John Jasperse—perhaps the most well-known choreographer in the festival—presented the world premiere of his 20th evening-length work, Tides. The piece centers on three real-life, intergenerational mentor-protegé relationships, featuring a cast of legends from the downtown dance scene (Vicky Shick, Jodi Melnick and Cynthia Koppe) with younger, emerging dance artists.

Keith A. Thompson, a former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and frequent collaborator with Liz Lerman, presented the world premiere of Love Alone Anthology Project. The work for four men is inspired by the writings of AIDS activist Paul Monette (1945-1995), specifically the 1988 volume of poetry Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog. “I’m happy that Keith is bringing this material to us,” Paraiso said, “because it’s very important that we remember. Period.”

Looking forward to what’s coming, here are our recommendations of what not to miss:

As part of the Hunter College MFA in Dance and MFA in Dance: Interdisciplinary Research at New York University shared program (April 18-20), the incredible Martha Graham Dance Company principal dancer Xin Ying will perform in her ritualistic, interdisciplinary group work Paper Dragon: Five Elements Matrix.

In another shared program (April 25-27), up-and-comer and Bessie Award-nominated dance artist Jordan Demetrius Lloyd will present a new solo work alongside a duet by more veteran contemporary choreographers Pamela Pietro and Jesse Zaritt.

Maybe the most family-friendly show is a shared program (April 25-27) featuring percussive dancer Nic Gareiss and fiddler Alexis Chartrand’s joyful collaboration alongside the U.S. premiere of Berlin-based ballerina and filmmaker Megumi Eda’s moving solo Please Cry. About the performers, Paraiso said they are all “virtuosos in their own right.”

One of the most boundary-breaking works in the festival is Psychic Wormhole / Alex Romania and Stacy Lynn Smith’s fame hOle, a mobile dance opera and “existential roadshow” that is set inside their 2014 Toyota Prius v, performed in a shared program (May 1-3) alongside Jesi Cook’s experimental solo Wedge.

Closing out Resistance & Transformation is El Club MEG (May 4), the show that most fully captures the festival’s spirit and history. In a setting meant to evoke the casual, BYOB Brooklyn house performances in the 2010s, five emerging performance artists will show works-in-progress, followed by a karaoke session led by Le Papi Shiitake. “There will be beer and buckets,” Ferrer announced excitedly. Abril nearly shouted, “And mezcal! Mezcal from Mexico.”

“It’s going to be really fun,” Yoo added. “I feel like this is that moment of us thinking about how art can function beyond just the presentation of artists.”

For those who aren’t in NYC, La MaMa–always community-oriented and forward-thinking–will be streaming three of the performances live: the Hunter/NYU MFA showcase on April 19 at 7:30 p.m. and the shared program of Nic Gareiss & Alexis Chartrand with Megumi Eda on April 27 at 3:00 p.m.

The La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival 2025 runs through May 4 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, The Downstairs Theatre, The Club and Community Arts Space.