New York City Previews of “Las Fridas” - A love letter to Mexico
Company:
Mark DeGarmo Dance
New York City Previews of “Las Fridas”
A Movement Installation by Mark DeGarmo, Choreographer and Director
Marie Baker-Lee and Susan Thomasson, Performers
Wednesday - Sunday, December 16 - 20, 2015, 7pm
Studio 517, The Clemente, 107 Suffolk Street, Lower East Side, NYC 10002
Tickets: $25 - $100
Reservations: LasFridas.eventbrite.com
This 60-minute site-specific movement installation is a love letter to Mexico, an offering to Frida Kahlo, and homage to women exploring life after 60.
The two women move amidst a set, the Blue House, which is commissioned at each performance site in collaboration with local artists and community members. The work calls on each community who engages with it to examine their own history, heritage and assumptions about Kahlo, women, and aging. The implicit question the movement installation proposes is, “What if Frida Kahlo had lived beyond her forties?”
In offering this work for public viewing, choreographer Mark DeGarmo pays homage to his mothers, grandmothers, mentors and friends, including renowned choreographers and dance educators Anna Sokolow and Hanya Holm, educational theorist Maxine Greene, and Living Theatre Co-Founder Judith Malina. Video projections of Maxine Greene’s hands at 93 and Judith Malina’s feet at 88 are incorporated into the multimedia presentation.
Mark DeGarmo has had a distinguished international career as choreographer and performer and his creative work reflects his passion for intercultural exchange. He describes his creative process as a synthesis of multicultural influences:
“I am interested in exploring the roles of dance and the dancer in different cultures and to travel and interact with people from all over the world. My work has enabled me to dance and teach in a variety of cultural settings, including El Salvador; Guatemala, Cuba, Mexico, Eastern Europe, Peru, France, England and more ...
These journeys fill me up with sounds, images, experiences and motion, and inspire me with new dreams for new ways to move and to speak through the dancing and moving body. I come home filled with new perspectives on what it is to be alive and full of dreams about the future. I return feeling connected with a transcultural and transdisciplinary community of artists.”
Mark DeGarmo Dance presents original artist-scholar works that reflect and celebrate the multi-cultural experience of our communities. Over the past 20 years, Mark DeGarmo, the recipient of this year’s Martha Hill Mid-Career Award, has created and produced over 100 dances and 28 international tours involving cultural diplomacy and exchange in 12 countries across Latin America and Europe. “Las Fridas” will tour Mexico in 2016.
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