La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club will present MAN WOMAN by Vangeline Theater as part of the 21st annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Performances are April 18 at 8pm and April 19 at 2pm at The Downstairs Theatre, 66 E. 4th Street. 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).
MAN WOMAN is a Butoh work by Vangeline that revisits the iconic photographic series Man and Woman by Eikoh Hosoe through a contemporary feminist lens. With fantastical costumes by Machine Dazzle, a visionary queer artist, and a richly textured electro-acoustic score by Ray Barragan-Sweeten, this 21st-century reimagining centers the female body as sole author and performer. Women have historically been positioned as mirror or muse in relation to a male counterpart. MAN WOMAN playfully examines how a female body navigates, adapts to, and ultimately exits this male-dominated system. It remains in dialogue with its original conceptual framework while asserting a decisive shift: the female body is no longer responding to history — it is writing it.
Vangeline is a New York–based teacher, choreographer, and dancer specializing in Japanese Butoh. She is the artistic director of Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute and is widely recognized for a rigorous, research-driven approach that expands Butoh’s relevance in the 21st century. Through her all-female company, her work unites Butoh with social engagement and activism, centering historically marginalized voices. She is the founder of the New York Butoh Institute Festival, Queer Butoh, and The Dream a Dream Project, an award-winning program bringing Butoh to incarcerated individuals. Her work has been presented internationally. She is the author of Butoh: Cradling Empty Space and recipient of a 2022 and 2026 NEA Dance Awards.
Ray Barragan-Sweeten (b. 1975) is a visual artist & sound maker based in New York and Rhode Island. He has performed and screened works at Moma/PS1, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Issue Project Room, Participant Gallery, Microscope Gallery, The Kitchen, Roulette, and toured throughout Europe as a member of Fabrica Musica. He has released music as f13 on Beige Records as The Mitgang Audio on Suction Records. In 2010 he co-founded DataSpaceTime with visual artist Lisa Gwilliam and has exhibited, performed, and screened works at Centre Pompidou, Parish Museum, City Center NY, Microscope Gallery, AS220, Next Festival at BAM, Florida Atlantic University, and Cica Museum. He has taught at Guggenheim Museum and was guest artist faculty at Sarah Lawrence with L. Gwilliam. DataSpaceTime is represented by Microscope Gallery in NYC. www.raysweeten.com
Machine Dazzle is a beloved downtown bon vivant and creative provocateur whose work spans costume, set design, performance, music, and visual art. Based in New York since 1994, he is known for intricate, unconventional wearable art and immersive environments that blur boundaries between fashion, sculpture, and theater. His collaborators include Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz, Big Art Group, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, Basil Twist, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Opera Philadelphia, Spiegelworld, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His designs were featured in Taylor Mac’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, later adapted into an HBO documentary. Machine is a 2017 Bessie Award recipient, a 2022 United States Artists Fellow, a 2024 Emmy Award winner, and delivered a TED Talk in 2023. His solo exhibition Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzledebuted at MAD NYC.
This program was supported in parts by the Japan Foundation New York, the New York Department of Cultural Affairs, Chelsea Factory, Mercury Store, the Monira Foundation, New York Council on the Arts, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Creative Team Credits
Directed, choreographed, and performed by Vangeline
Costumes by Machine Dazzle
Music by Ray Barragan Sweeten
Lighting by Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa