Patricia Hoffbauer Center for Fiction: This Is Not May ‘68. Part of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club will present the World Premiere of Center for Fiction: This Is Not May ‘68. by Patricia Hoffbauer as a part of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. Performances are April 16-18 at 7pm and April 19 at 3:30pm at the Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th St., NYC. Tickets are $30 (general), $25 (students/seniors), with a $50 Support the Artists ticket option. Tickets are available at https://ci.ovationtix.com/42/dept/2540. 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).

In Center for Fiction: This is Not May ‘68, the past arrives late. 1968 does not settle into history: it lingers as something unresolved, still pressing against the present with a kind of retroactive shimmer. What once seemed distant suddenly feels urgent again. The choreography stages a series of delayed recognitions: what belonged to history now belongs to us. Every gesture, citation, and pause becomes a site where meaning forms after the fact, where the body registers what it could not have known before.

Directed and choreographed by Patricia Hoffbauer, this bold new work gathers eleven performers, ages 25-80 in a charged encounter between generations. Through a dynamic mix of text and movement, together they reimagine historical struggles for power, love, and knowledge. Here, the past activates us. The unfinished revolutions of 1968 cast a restless shadow, pressing urgently against our present time. As memory and bodies collide with lived experience, performers are propelled into unexpected situations and daring new possibilities.

Patricia Hoffbauer is a Brazilian-born, New York City-based dance artist whose work spans decades and multiple collaborations across artistic disciplines. A longtime presence in the downtown performance world, she has been creating dance and performance work since the late 1980s, in collaboration with writers, performers, and dance artists. Commissioned/presented by many dance departments, her work has also been presented by Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, The Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, Gibney Dance Center, and La MaMa Moves! among others; highlights include Who Killed Carmen?, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop and presented by the Whitney Museum; Para-Dice, commissioned and presented by Danspace Project; Small Dances for Intimate Spaces and Friendly People, developed through Gibney Dance Center DIP residency; and Getting Away with Murder, presented at La MaMa Moves!

Hoffbauer’s writing has appeared in Movement Research Performance Journal, Performance Arts Journal (PAJ), Writings on Dance, and in anthologies including Talking Visions (edited by Ella Shohat for the New Museum) and The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance and Memory (Wesleyan University Press). She is a founding member of Yvonne Rainer’s performance group, the Raindears, with whom she toured internationally, participating in the creation of original work and performing Rainer’s early solos. Hoffbauer has taught at Princeton University, Hunter College, and is currently an Associate Arts Professor in the Collaborative Arts Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Creative Team Credits

CHOREOGRAPHY, DIRECTION, WRITING - Patricia Hoffbauer

DRAMATURG, WRITING - Flavio Ribeiro

COSTUME DESIGN - Karen Boyer

LIGHTING DESIGN - Les Dickert

MEDIA DESIGN - Tal Yarden, Léna Townsley

CINEMATOGRAPHY - Jeanna Criscitiello, Bill Tunnicliffe

PERFORMERS - Rachel Ha-Eun Lee, Grace Yi-Li Tong, Noah Witke Mele, Fran Janal, Tom Rawe, Peggy Gould, Luis A. Lara Malvacías, Vincent McCloskey, Keith Sabado

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.

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