Jane Comfort and Company returns to La MaMa with a Premiere and two Landmark Works
Company:
Jane Comfort and Company
La MaMa presents Jane Comfort and Company for the first time in more than eight years with a program of three dance-theater works that confront America’s cultural and political landscape through Comfort’s incisive choreographic lens. The program includes a world premiere, The Gulf of America, with new music by MacArthur Award–winning composer Heather Christian alongside an excerpt from Comfort’s Afro-Brazilian-infused Artificial Horizon (1983) and her piercing 1996 work Bites.
The Gulf of America addresses the nation’s current immigration crisis. Christian’s vocal composition, built on layered polyrhythms and polyphony, amplifies the choreography’s complex movement structure, plunging the audience into the chaos brought on by the government’s actions.
In Bites, Comfort employs a game of musical chairs to examine a community grappling with dwindling resources. Performed to a percussive soundscape by Klimchak and underscored by an excerpt of Newt Gingrich describing his “Contract with America,” the work fuses movement, music, and text into a powerful theatrical statement.
Artificial Horizon weaves spoken word, written by Comfort, into a rigorously-structured polyrhythmic work of text and Afro-Brazilian movement. One of Comfort’s earliest experiments integrating language and movement, the piece is set to live drumming by Auchee Lee and Pamela Patrick.
