about

about marion/
My name is Marion and I am a dancer, choreographer and educator currently based in New York City. My work has recently been presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater (creative residency), Danspace Project (DraftWork), Gibney (Work Up), Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Green Space, Triskelion Arts, Center for Performance Research (Fall Movement), Movement Research at Judson Church, Amherst College, Dance Now NYC, Dance HOLO and the Domestic Performance Agency. I am a 2019-2020 season artist at The Chocolate Factory Theater (creative residency Dec 2019) and Gibney (Solo for Solo Spring 2020). My work is an energetic and tonal collaging- sourcing intuition and imagination, in addition to our very real world. My dances call for transformation and an undoing of ourselves, inviting us to feel, ask questions, and consider what else both imaginatively and constructively. I have been an artist in residence at The Chocolate Factory Theater, Mana Contemporary, Amherst College, Gibney (Work Up), Peaceable Barn, Turkeyland Cove Foundation, Prattsville Art Center, Catwalk Art Institute, and the Domestic Performance Agency. I have toured my work and teaching practice nationally to New Orleans LA, Seattle WA and Amherst MA. I began making dances professionally while living and learning in New Orleans (2011-2015). My work has been presented there at Catapult, Art Klub, the New Orleans Fringe Festival, Dancing Grounds, the Contemporary Arts Center, and the Tigermen Den.

As a performer, I currently dance for BAND|portier/Kendra Portier and Laura Peterson Choreography. Since moving to New York I have had the pleasure of working with Yackez/Larissa Velez-Jackson, Michelle Boulé, Athena Kokoronis, Shandoah Goldman, Melissa Riker, Annie Kloppenberg, Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty, Stephan Koplowitz, Vanessa Justice, Hollis Bartlett, Michiyaya, and apprenticed with David Dorfman Dance. In addition to performing and making work, I also teach dance to adults and young dancers in the New York area. I am currently on faculty at Gibney, Dancewave and Greenwich Country Day Middle and High School.

Originally from Riverside, Connecticut, a white Latina with a mother from Caracas, Venezuela and a father born and raised in Ancón, Panama (at the time part of the Panama Canal Zone), I was partly raised in Oaxaca, Mexico, where my parents (both Mesoamerican Archaeologists) do their excavations. I graduated with honors from Vassar College in 2009, where I studied Geography-Anthropology and was a member of the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre for four years. Instilled with wanderlust and the constant desire to take risks, listen and learn, I have been lucky over the last 10 years to call Honolulu Hawaii, Boulder Colorado, and New Orleans Louisiana home before landing in New York City in 2014.

about the work/
I dance and make dances to offer source points for transformation through an undoing of ourselves. Inside an energetic and tonal collaging of movement, sound and light, I call upon intuition, imagination and desire to shape a world for us- as artists and audiences- to live in, dream in, journey through and be transformed by. In addition to physical and vocal practices, my research also includes reading, writing, photography, drawing, discussion and deep listening. My process often extends from a collecting of bits and pieces of research, sensing what logic emerges, listening to what feels important, and then crafting, developing and texturing.

This process serves my aim to critically engage in socio-political discourse through my art-making. I believe art should support progress towards more mindful societies. By engaging with concepts larger and more complicated than myself- like whiteness, conscious femininity, and post-apocalyptic cultures- I push my person past physical and imaginative comfort to encounter, examine and shape what transformation occurs. By offering a transformative journey through the world of the work, I seek to shift emotional and social perspectives. I am drawn to make work that changes how the body feels: how our skin feels against the air, that changes the texture of the air itself, that changes how we sense where we are in relation to others.

I seek to offer a world in my work that activates an alternative embodied state and perspective of this world. I want it to change how we feel in our bodies and how we think, as witnesses. For our audiences, by experiencing a transformed embodied state and witnessing an alternative order, the work presents the imaginative opportunity to construct a changed reality outside of the theater in our personal relationships and societies.