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- cellularly, individually, sociopolitically and societally. Amidst an energetic and tonal collaging of movement, sound and light, I call upon intuition, imagination and our very real world to shape a collective environment for us- as a consenting audience, as a society- to live in, dream in, journey through and be altered by.

My work poses questions on the constructive nature of transformation and liminality; on how we can embrace alternative orders and understandings by subverting normative realities.

I believe art should support progress towards more mindful societies. In my work, I critically engage with concepts larger and more complicated than myself, like whiteness, conscious femininity, and post-apocalyptic cultures. I aim to push my person past physical and imaginative comfort to shape multiplicitous layers for transformation.

As of late, my work has expanded and welcomed influence by recent mentors: vocalization influenced by Miguel Gutierrez; improvisation and conversing with the absurd influenced by Michelle Boulé; world-building influenced by Joanna Kotze; and somatic and energetic physicality influenced by Anna Sperber.

Additionally, I am informed by my identity as a white Latina dance maker and, usually, the sole white body on stage. In my own work to dismantle oppressive systems- systems that I often perpetuate as a white artist- I take lessons from choreographers like Juliana May, who engage directly with whiteness in ways that provoke public discourse. Currently, I listen to and draw inspiration from the work of people of color, like feminist poets Yrsa Daley-Ward, Nayyirahh Waheed as well as late pop star Prince, appreciating this work and its creative merits, while not appropriating them. I acknowledge the complexity here, but remain committed to listening, learning and working to be a stronger ally and white artist at this point in my trajectory.