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hey there-
my name is marion and I am a dancer, choreographer and educator currently living on the land of the Munsee Lenape and Canarsie peoples, known today as Brooklyn nyc. I dance, I sing, I make things, I teach, I stand with the Movement for Black Lives and the marginalized. My work is an energetic and tonal collaging of movement, sound and light- 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 radically consider what else both imaginatively and constructively. My work has recently been presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater (creative residency), Danspace Project (DraftWork), Gibney (Work Up), New Dance Alliance, 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 was most recently a 2019-2020 season artist at The Chocolate Factory Theater (creative residency Dec 2019) and Gibney (Solo for Solo Spring 2020). I have been an artist in residence at The Chocolate Factory Theater, Mana Contemporary, Amherst College, Gibney (Solo for Solo 2020 & Work Up 2018), 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. Since moving to New York I have had the pleasure of working for BAND|portier/Kendra Portier, Laura Peterson Choreography. 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 have recently been on faculty at Freeskewl, Dancewave, Gibney 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. Raised with the values to take risks, listen, learn and make home in environments outside my comfort zone, 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. |
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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. My physical research critically engages with concepts larger and more complicated than myself, like feminism, abolition, whiteness, and post-apocalyptic societies. Within this space, I push my person past physical and imaginative comfort to shape multiplicitous layers for radical transformation and building. 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 abolitionist organizer, educator and curator Mariame Kaba, 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. Through acknowledging complexity, I remain committed to listening, learning and working to be a stronger accomplice and artist in my community. |
photo above by Poupay Jutharat as seen in the New York Times July 1st 2021, full virtual article here
/photo above courtesy of marion, film still above courtesy of marion + evan carter/