La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club Presents Works from Jade Charon & Tiffany Merritt-Brown
Company:
Jade Charon & Tiffany Merritt-Brown
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club will present intimate works by Hunter College MFA Dance faculty members Tiffany Merritt-Brown and Jade Charon, exploring the enduring power of Black technology, ufemininity, kinship, spirituality, and ancestry as part of the 21st annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Performances are Friday, April 17 at 7pm, Saturday April 18 at 6pm, and Sunday April 19 at 4pm at 74A East 4th St., The Club. Tickets are $30 (general), $25 (students/seniors), with a $50 Support the Artists ticket option. Tickets are available here. Festival packages start at $45 and are available at https://ci.ovationtix.com/42/store/packages. Additionally, the first 10 tickets of each performance are $10 (limit 2 per person).
Merritt-Brown’s Tender is the Night considers what emerges in collective care. Charon’s Gold Pylon seeks the gateway of the higher self.
Tender Is the Night is an immersive choreographic work that brings to the forefront the rich interior worlds of Black women, illuminating how care, tension, and becoming shape sistahood and kinship. Centered on the question, What if tenderness were our inheritance? the work unfolds through a distinctive and intimate movement language, delving into the complexities of Black femininity—its strength, vulnerability, and compassion. It explores tenderness as something to be nurtured, negotiated, and protected, while questioning how openness and boundaries foster self-preservation. Moving between closeness and distance, stillness and release, it invites audiences to witness vulnerability unfolding over time. Tender Is the Night offers dance as a communal act of restoration, a love letter to Black women’s enduring care and legacy. Excerpts of Tender Is the Night have been presented at BAAD! and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Dance Department’s Moonshine Series, curated by Chris Walker.
Tiffany Merritt-Brown is a choreographer, performer, and educator whose work centers the interior lives of Black women and their embodied knowledge. She holds a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an M.F.A. in Dance & Social Justice from the University of Texas at Austin. She creates immersive choreographies that function as prayer, testimony, and visionary invitation, exploring tenderness, kinship, and care as sites of survival and connection. Grounded in Black feminist thought and radical imagination, her work positions dance as a space for inquiry, ritual, and collective life. She is an alumna of the Dancing While Black Choreographic Fellowship with Angela’s Pulse and the Jacob’s Pillow Ann & Weston Hicks Choreographers Fellowship. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Arts On Site (NYC), BAAD!, CADD (Collegium for African Diaspora Dance), Detroit Dance City Festival, The Kaye Playhouse, Miami Dade College, and WDA-A in Puebla, Mexico. tiffanymerrittbrown.com
Creative Team Credits
Dancers
Evan Beek
Zion Elle Lawrence
Samara Walker
Jalisa Wallerson
Heaven Wilburn
Choreographer and Director
Tiffany Merritt-Brown
Music Composed by
Musical Mix featuring Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Jazmine Sullivan, Sarah Vaughan, Sneha, and the Haxan Cloak.
Gold Pylon is an inquiry into how testimonies from the Black church tradition function as intercessory technology — a gateway to the higher self. Using audio recordings of Jade Charon’s grandmother, this multimedia work moves across past, present, and future, honoring memory, lineage, and transformation. While the first iteration centered on Charon's own testimonies, this version invites testimonies from other Black girls, expanding the work toward collective voice and shared spiritual connection. The piece is part of her ongoing multimedia research project Gold, created to emPOWER Black communities by connecting them to gold’s spiritual, metaphysical, and ancestral resonance through dance, film, sound, and writing.
Jade Charon is an award-winning choreographer, filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and mother. She is the creator of the multimedia project and children’s book Gold: Made Just for You, exploring empowerment, healing, and spirituality in Black communities. Her acclaimed films Reverse (2016), featured by The New York Times, and Recharge (2020) have screened internationally. She has received fellowships and residencies, including the Angela’s Pulse Dancing While Black Fellowship, the Bill T. Jones/New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist Residency, the GALLIM Moving Women Residency, and the Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow. She earned degrees from UCLA and Columbia College Chicago and is pursuing an Ed.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University. jadecharon.com
Creative Team Credits
Dancers
Gabrielle Loren
A’shey Clemont
Shania Jones
Janae Moses
Ayana Williams
Choreographer and Director
Jade Charon
Visual Designer and Technologist
Ker Chen
Music Composed by
Farai Malianga
La MaMa Moves! 2026, the 21st season of La MaMa’s annual dance festival, brings together dance artists at all stages of their careers to experiment, collaborate, and share new work. Curated by Nicky Paraiso, the festival will take place over five weeks in April and May of 2026 and will include twelve productions across La MaMa’s four venues, and up to four in-person community workshops and public discussions. This year’s festival line-up features dancemakers Donald Byrd, Beth Corning with guest puppeteer Tom Lee, Vangeline, Patricia Hoffbauer, Dancers Unlimited, Sun Kim Dance Theatre, Green Cow, Iver Findlay, BamBam Frost & Ori Flomin, Pioneers Go East Collective, and ms. z tye & Mina Nishimura in a shared weekend curated by La MaMa Curatorial Residents Martita Abril & Blaze Ferrer.
Building on the festival’s growing national impact, La MaMa Moves! will again offer hybrid programming that extends beyond New York City, including livestreams of several productions and open rehearsals or interactive discussions designed for online audiences, partners, and students across the U.S. These online/hybrid events are part of La MaMa’s ongoing work with Bloomberg Philanthropies Digital Accelerator program. These types of programs are essential not only to La MaMa’s mission and strategic plan, but to the sustainability of the dance community, because they empower and connect generations of dance artists.
In 2026, La MaMa Moves! continues its Curatorial Residency for the second year. Over six months, Curatorial Residents Martita Abril and Blaze Ferrer work with Nicky Paraiso as they plan and execute a shared program to be presented in the festival. Curatorial Residents have research time in the La MaMa Archive (which documents 60+ years of dance history) and attend productions across NYC with Paraiso. The residency aims to provide curatorial mentorship and professional development to young dance artists, empowering them to build sustainable careers while bringing new voices into La MaMa.
La MaMa Moves! highlights the extraordinary diversity and range of artists across cultural backgrounds, ages, and dance styles. By amplifying underrepresented voices and fostering intergenerational exchange, the festival continues to reimagine what contemporary dance can be. One of New York’s signature dance festivals, La MaMa Moves! has showcased small and large-scale works of more than 400 emerging and seasoned choreographers since its beginning in 2005. With sustained support, La MaMa can deepen this impact and ensure that visionary artists and their communities have continued access to this vital platform for years to come.
About La MaMa
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is dedicated to the artist and all aspects of the theatre. La MaMa's 64th Season, LA MAMA NOW, focuses on creating solidarity and building community, exploring ways to build connections for cross-sector coalition and invite artists, activists, organizers and community members into the creative process.
La MaMa has been honored with 30+ Obie Awards, dozens of Drama Desk, Bessie Awards, Villager Awards, the 2018 Regional Theatre Tony Award, and most recently a 2023 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Special Citation. We are a creative home to artists and resident companies from around the world, many of whom have made lasting contributions to the arts, including Blue Man Group, Bette Midler, Ping Chong, Jackie Curtis, Robert De Niro, André De Shields, Adrienne Kennedy, Cole Escola, Bridget Everett, Harvey Fierstein, Diane Lane, Charles Ludlam, Tom Eyen, Spiderwoman Theater, Tadeusz Kantor, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Meredith Monk, David and Amy Sedaris, Stephanie Hsu, Julie Taymor, Kazuo Ohno, Tom O'Horgan, Andrei Serban, Liz Swados, and Andy Warhol. La MaMa's vision of nurturing new artists and new work from all nations, cultures, races and identities remains as strong today as it was when Ellen Stewart first opened the doors in 1961.
