For a 20th anniversary at its scrappy East Village digs, the three-week La MaMa Moves! festival has identified a theme: “Resistance & Transformation.” Given the extravagant cost of living, it’s resistance enough to make anything in New York—a salad, a coffee date—much less a dance. John Jasperse’s quintet (April 10–13) exemplifies the generational scaffolding that compensates for scant material means. Mesmerists Vicki Shick, Jodi Melnick, and Cynthia Koppe share a seminal bond with the late, slippery-boned Trisha Brown, whose idiom Jasperse and they corrupt for their own use before passing it on to the premiere’s youngest members. Likewise the formalist-conceptualists for whom Jordan Demetrius Lloyd (April 25–27) once danced. (They include Beth Gill, Netta Yerushalmy, and Jonathan Gonzalez.) With casual, minimalist patterns, Lloyd transfers meaning to wherever the dance takes place. His choreography “reads the room,” softly animating its histories. More unusual for a theater south of 14th Street is the inclusion this year of artists who have wrought enlivening changes on traditional, highly codified forms, such as the Irish step dancer Nic Gareiss with the Quebecois folk fiddler Alexis Chartrand (April 25–27) and Amalia Suryani (April 26–27), versed in Borneo’s Dayak tribal dances. —Apollinaire Scherr