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Pleasure and the Pandemic: LaMama Moves! Outdoors

Shared Program: LaMama Moves! Dance Festival 2021
Jasmine Hearn/ Songs from Pleasure Memory
Sugar Vendil/ Test Sites
Outdoors at Downtown Art/Alpha Omega, New York City
May 23, 2021

-- By Tom Phillips 
Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips 

Jasmine Hearn Photo by Steven Pisano

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. 

Pits of the Pandemic

Kolonial 
Stefanie Batten Bland, choreographer 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York (online) 
May 3-17, 2021

by Tom Phillips
copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips  

Photo by Maria Baranova

America is starting to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us.  Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts Center of New York is already out with the first fruits of an ugly season --- a piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID health and safety protocols.