Artists Reach Out: Mariana Valencia

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Mariana Valencia

Mariana Valencia
(photo: Charlotte Curtis)

Mariana Valencia is a New York based choreographer and performer. Her work has been presented by Danspace Project, American Realness, AUNTS, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Performance Space, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (DC), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and internationally in England, Norway, Macedonia and Serbia. Valencia is a Whitney Biennial artist (2019), a Bessie Award recipient for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer (2018), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award to Artists grant recipient (2018), a Jerome Travel and Study Grant fellow (2014-15), and a Movement Research GPS/Global Practice Sharing artist (2016/17). She is a founding member of the No Total reading group and she has been the co-editor of Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence (2016-17). She has held residencies at Chez Bushwick, New York Live Arts, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Gibney, Movement Research and at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR). Valencia has worked with Lydia Okrent, Jules Gimbrone, Elizabeth Orr, Kate Brandt, AK Burns, Guadalupe Rosales, Em Rooney, robbinschilds, Kim Brandt, Morgan Bassichis, Jazmin Romero, Fia Backstrom and MPA. In 2019, she published two books of performance texts entitled Album (Wendy's Subway) and Mariana Valencia's Bouquet (3 Hole Press). Valencia holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA (2006) with a concentration in dance and ethnography.

Mariana Valencia in Air (2020)
(photo: Jeenah Moon)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes. I've had about nine national and international engagements postponed to 2021-23 but, in my mind, that feels like 2034-35.... No one ever knew the future; projections feel silly now. Our community of dance artists, choreographers, tech and venue staff is undergoing a huge strain.

On a personal level, I'm not sure what the horizon holds, but I'm staying resourceful. Some institutions and organizations have offered me small video projects which I'm grappling with because the medium is not live, and I don't "make" video art. It's like asking a therapist to stop talking in session, but they can still meet with their patients. A big "HOW?" looms over me.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I learn through example and by doing; I'm an observer. I grew up watching my family dance at social gatherings; I learned to dance. I was taught to cut and sew garments; I make some of my costumes. I was taught to memorize poetry at a young age, so I have skills in memorizing my scripts. I learned to build things, so I craft the sets in my shows from scratch and ready-made compositions. This learning from example and doing is what has revealed to me the art that I make, and it has helped me re-frame and devise the layers of my performances.

Above and below:
Mariana Valencia in Air (2020)
(photo: Maria Baranova)

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

I'm practicing a daily mode of survival, one hour at a time, and it gives me a short scope of what is possible, since the possibility of what I've known is a bit impossible to envision in the future. I make the bed, cook, read, organize the spices, move the crystals and rocks from one surface to another. I take long walks. I Windex the mirrors.

Seeing these tasks through lends a sense of home, it honors where my body lives and moves and that care for me is similar to the care I give to my projects. So I'm grateful to blend the home/work space daily. I'm re-imagining the 40-hour work week, in particular how the 40-hour work week has impacted when and where I've presented my work.

Why are shows at night? Because we work during the day. Why do shows cost money? Because the arts have been established as a market that isolates entire communities from "it" within Capitalism. These shortcomings have given a price to the art I make, my time, my value.

I'm rethinking how I will continue to move through my community while questioning the scaffold that has stifled us/me. I'm feeling hopeful about this thinking; the need for each other and community has never felt so deep. I've been thinking about staying active and present so that I don't have to feel reactive and chased.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I care about the people that I love, and that makes me think about love at-large and how if we all feel love for someone or something,  then the love web is wide and connected. I've been ruminating inside of the web and navigating it from this viewpoint and essentially, the goal is the path, and the path has many encounters, so let's honor each other.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

My work has been focused onto the personal/political and the abstraction of these subjects for some time now. I now imagine my work on some sci-fi frequency (on video because of the pandemic) of just me doing things that bring me joy, that frame me as I am in my daily tasks. If I make who I am visible as "I am," then maybe I don't have to keep railing about how "in the margin" I've been made to live.

I define who I am. I also often erase that vision and, instead, envision this daily "me" on video with a really clear political statement that continues to shine a light on the ugly, the unfit and the underserved-- so, as is my custom, it will probably be a blend.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

Do a day at a time. Don't try hoarding past or future time by dwelling and planning. Listen to right now and be with that. Reaction is different from action. Action gives me meaning, reaction shows me a deficit, a lack and a certain late sense of arrival.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Mariana Valencia in "AIR"

Mariana Valencia in her 2019 solo, Bouquet
(photo: Madeline Best)

AIR
by Mariana Valencia
Performance Space New York
January 9-11, 16-18

Very early in Mariana Valencia's new solo piece, AIR, she half-drops into a space of privacy with a person who has come out of the audience to sit in front of her, back turned to the rest of us, and assist her as she makes a change of clothing. You can only see Valencia's steady eye contact with this aide, who is Black, and mostly only hear Valencia's end of whatever verbal exchange might be going on, since the other person, in her few responses, is very soft-spoken. Valencia has already shown herself to be a self-possessed, warm and wry presence and continues to do so throughout this segment. So she easily holds our gaze and interest in place even though her attention is lavished on her helper. What a moment and what a performer--at once, holding us at bay, gathering us in and suspending us between worlds!

Truth be told, she had me at Lotería, the oversized, cream-colored sheet of paper she distributed to each of us (instead of the usual program notes, which we'd get on the way out) after we took our seats. Inspired by the popular Mexican card game of the same name, this sheet, printed in green, served as a clever introduction to a variety of popular culture figures of Mexican descent--from tv astrologer Walter Mercado to Tejano music star Selena to film actress María Félix--cited as major influences on Valencia's life and aesthetics. The first touch of this sheet of paper took me out of "downtown" and all that means as I believe it was supposed to do. It opened up a sense of another influx of energy, a source of creativity that is most often unknown, ignored, devalued and certainly unexpected in these climes, and that felt really, really good.

AIR asks us to consider the what-if of putting kids on stages instead of cages. Its random cinder blocks and white plastic crates suggest an environment of denial--I invite you to contemplate both uses of that word--that diminishes us all. And its prancing, spritely performer uses a droll sense of humor to persuade us how effortless it can sometimes be for marginalized people to absorb and slip into the codes of another culture--from picking up how to say "hello" in England to switching from butch to femme clothes in a Popeye's restroom on your way to a fancy wedding. It's a celebration of a kind of genius and maybe a subtle lesson for us all.

Lighting: Kathy Kaugmann
Sound Engineering: Jules Gimbrone
Music: Jazmin Romero

AIR's last performance happens at 7pm this evening. For information and tickets, click here.

Performance Space New York
150 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Mariana Valencia offers "Bouquet" at The Chocolate Factory

Mariana Valencia (right)
with collaborator Lydia Okrent in Bouquet
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia
Bouquet
The Chocolate Factory
April 18-27

Created and performed by Mariana Valencia, Bouquet examines authorship within the premise of transmission, relation, alliance and ensemble. Her body is the main archive as she quotes dances by Alvin Ailey, Trisha Brown, Frank Conversano and nia love, as well as Eurhythmics and Garifuna dance forms. Valencia also quotes sections of her old dances that were made with her longtime collaborator Lydia Okrent, who has also artistically directed Bouquet with an attunement to ensemble and reference. Valencia’s choreographic retrospective is partnered with her own body as she moves various objects about the space. A smattering of fake fruits, a net, a large piece of glass and a plinth -to name a few- accompany Valencia as she moves her way through a sound score of origin stories. The sound score is a series of letters that circumnavigate her creative path in New York, weaving also through her adolescence and stories from her early 20s. These reveal a vast range of serious, tender and humorous growing pains that lend her abstract movements a foundation that anchors them to the plurality of creation. Valencia fleshes out these movements, histories and influences, as if this timeline of encounters were the sole reasons for producing any work of art. In Bouquet, Valencia invites the audience to traverse a dense field of collective reference.

-- promotional text for Bouquet

What is it?

First thought as you take your seat inside The Chocolate Factory's performance space and look across the floor at a large, ungainly parcel wrapped in a net and resting on a long white base.

It's oddly shaped, and a gap in the tied net that displays an inner wrapping of pale aqua. There's also something small, squarish, equally mysterious stuck between this aqua surface and the netting.

As you continue glancing across the space, you notice the back wall sports a painting of a vase of flowers. A bouquet is a collection of flowers--a collection of things deliberately chosen for aesthetic effect for yourself or others to savor. By the end of Bouquet, you will understand Valencia sees herself as a bouquet.

She enters suddenly--Hi! Thanks for coming!--a radiant apparition, amusingly modest and yet a little larger than life. The red of her matte lipstick pops as does the metallic cobalt blue of the unitard she wears under dark khaki-tan slacks. She speaks. Her gesticulation--big, sharply delineated gestures--click into place with satisfying assurance even as they remain elusive in meaning. There's charm, a connection with her audience. But, over time, the verbal stream becomes choppy, broken into haltingly-delivered bits--word by word, syllable by syllable, incomprehensible sound by sound--as if, intermittently, she's withdrawing or retrogressing.

But check her face a bit later as she begins to unwrap and unpack her parcel. The singing and speaking voice you hear now is in the air, recorded, maybe comes from where the revealed items come from--the past, the archive.

"The game is on/Give me a call, boo/My love is strong/Gonna give my all to you."

Whatever you've expected the lumpy package to contain, it turns out to hold simple items which Valencia sets out in a clear, pristine arrangement and identifies--"a bandanna, a pillow, a mat...pomegranate, plinth, tempered glass"--without narrative explanation. They are, simply, "some of my favorite objects," and you're wise to accept these talismans as they are.

She does mention that the floral bouquet painting was made by her dad--"a Sunday painter."

A body is a mass of stories, each body unique in its collection. But that emergent individuality continuously circles back into the multiplicity of its sources. So, Valencia gives her all--or, at least, a fair representation of what all might be. And then she leads an exercise that draws the audience into this multiplicity as well. Now you, too--all of you--have joined her ensemble, joined with her voice, become her history and her future.

Made in collaboration with dramaturg Lydia Okrent
Sound: Jules Gimbrone
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Bouquet continues through Saturday, April 27 with Thursday-Saturday performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
(map/directions)

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn and Mariana Valencia

This weekend, Danspace Project presents shared evenings of work
by dance artists Jasmine Hearn (above) and Mariana Valencia (below).
(photos: Ian Douglas)

Maybe this Earth is a bed where each of us rests on the threshold of a dream or all of us can dream collectively. Sitting down to take in this spell by Jasmine Hearn (shook at Danspace Project) means drawing near a fire to hear old, passed-down stories, but the fire is invisible, the stories and songs muffled, the images shadowy, blurry. It might not matter if you can't pick up distinct words, follow sentences; if a song is made up of one word that trails off in the air or is simple sounds intoned in a flutey voice. It calls you to take part in the making.

The costumes are equally indistinct, cobbled together as if by a child who had leafed through pages of history, falling asleep atop them, dreaming and dreaming. The fabric--how unruly, voluminous, billowing, ennobling...or thrown together with function if not sense. The movements--how softly fluid, swirly, simple, repetitive, shifting, un-insistent, graceful, agile (Hearn, Angie Pittman, Dominica Greene...these three and also the traces of all who made this, continue to make this, one spectre floating into the other....) You see what you will see. You dream what you will dream, unfolding a chiffon dream engulfing altar steps like sea foam slipping over a shoreline.

"This is the answer to my 7 year old self who casted spells in her bathtub...spells that dripped honey, affirmation, and the belief that magic lives in the marrow of our bones."

"I am looking to evoke a realm, a place, a time, a memory when/where black women are not doubted." -- Jasmine Hearn

Concept and direction: Jasmine Hearn
Choreography and performance: Maria Bauman, Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Catherine Kirk and Angie Pittman
Costumes made in collaboration with Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency
Sound: Jasmine Hearn (includes a rework of Sylvan Esso's Die Young)
Video: Alisha B. Wormsley
Lighting: Kathy Kaufmann

Scene from shook
Angie Pittman (at left) and Dominica Greene (center)
with Hearn
(photo: Ian Douglas)

Mariana Valencia performs Yugoslavia
(photo: Ian Douglas)

"What are we if we are together but not related?"

In her solo, Yugoslavia, Mariana Valencia asks this question, specifically referring to her relationship to her Polish stepfather (and, I guess, in a way, her Polish stepfather's relationship to her Guatemalan mom).

One word that recurs in the work is blend. Spoken with Valencia's characteristic clarity and evenness, the word blend has its own physical pose. She hits it, and you watch it...for a few seconds. You might not understand it, but you can see it and recognize it when it comes around again. You learn a piece of movement language by immersive process.

Yugoslavia finds Valencia blending a lengthy monologue into movement in a way that seals any divide between verbal language and dance. That seems to work, although at least one person I spoke with afterwards found the piece to be not very dance-y. To me, it was a poetic marathon, a work of impressive endurance and grace under the pressure to tell a story with a lot of unexpected and seemingly unrelated moving parts and somehow make them hold together. Or not. I think, mostly, not.

At least, not for me. For me, they stayed demarcated, and that seemed okay. Or more than okay. That seemed the right thing.

In Yugoslavia, I intersect the First World, the Second World, the countryside, the imaginary plane and vampires. Factual, humorous, and grave observations depict my herstorical frame,” writes Valencia. With Yugoslavia, “I’m in search of the spiritual, in observation of the physical, and in awe of the artificial.” 

See, those commas and "ands" work well, and the way Valencia speaks shows you one thing after another. And that seems the right thing. More juxtaposition than blend. Blend might be an aspiration. Or not.

Writing about her inspiration for the piece, Valencia says, "visiting the Balkans (Serbia and Macedonia) has awakened my lineage through Slavic languages. I'll be tuning into identities that are landless, homeless, nameless, wandering, and exiled." In other words, not so blended.

Mention of the Balkans also brings me to that word derived from their situation--Balkanization, fragmentation often with tense and hostile juxtaposition of the separate entities. And then there's the discomfort of a young girl, Valencia, trying to sing Leonard Cohen lyrics with her dad without revealing her pleasure in the racy verses. Blending by omission? There's a single painting--just one--by her dad on a tripod in all of St. Mark's roomy space. And something about vampires because, we're told, the word vampire originates in the Serbian language. A lot of thingy things.

I watched Valencia take sheets of raspberry red construction paper and cut them into letters that she then arranged on the floor. I'm not particularly good with cutting paper with any degree of accuracy. But, apparently, she is. She went right to it, and the letters turned out well-shaped. They looked like themselves and like nothing else.

Choreography, script, costume, set and performance: Mariana Valencia
Original score: Mariana Valencia
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann

Shared Evening: Jasmine Hearn & Mariana Valencia continues tonight and tomorrow with performances at 8pm. No late seating. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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robbinschilds spells "Hex" at Gibney

Hex probes the complexities surrounding authorship, specifically how each collaborator influences the outcome of a day’s work, the building of material, and ultimately the finished composition. By exposing the cooperative agency in the construction of artistic vocabulary, Hex expands the notion of creator.

--from publicity for Hex 

Postmodern choreographers often pose questions or assign themselves challenges that seem mainly addressed to their peers. And just look around at who's sitting in the seats, supporting and grappling with the work--their peers. It's an inside job, a subset of the big, wide world of dance (even just that portion of it fighting for life in New York), a world in which values, philosophies, methods, needs and aspirations are quite diverse.

Portion of Hedia Maron's video for Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Anna Azrieli (top) with Eleanor Smith in Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

The dancing in Hex--an hour-long video/live work by robbinschilds at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--strikes me as a prime example of this situation. It's populated by interesting individual movers--Aretha Aoki, Anna Azrieli, Bessie McDonough-Thayer, Eleanor Smith, Mariana Valencia--overshadowed by premise and staging. Here, robbinschilds directors Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs yield authorship to these dancers as choreographers. The sixth maker--Vanessa Anspaugh--does not perform live in the piece.

We are committed to our cooperative practice as a means of subverting the archetypal 'male' trope of solo-creator. For this reason we see the process of collaboration not merely as a creative strategy, but also a feminist platform from which to cull a stronger collective vision.

--from "A short manifesto on Hex" by robbinschilds

The audience enters Gibney's Studio C to see four projection screens extended around the broad performance area, two of the screens divided to show two different scenes of the choreographers at work on solos that the ensemble will then take up as material to explore. We watch these images for a while, perhaps most naturally drawn in by the crisp intensity in Hedia Maron's closeups of Valencia and Azrieli.

Otherwise, where to look? Without received direction, our eyes flit and roam, scanning the screens, taking in fragments, randomly piecing one bit with another and another. In a real sense, watchers add to the authorship, and I wonder if Robbins and Childs factored us in.

The soundscape (Dana Wachs/Vorhees) often suggests street-side construction. The live performing seems fragmentary and accumulative, too. A single dancer first appears in the space--McDonough-Thayer, if I recall correctly--but we don't see other dancers in waiting, percolating in the open space to the rear of our seating. Something made me turn my head, though, and I noticed them. Over the course of the dance, one or more drifted into view or returned to this dark recess.  And, again, as a watcher (author?), I found I could relate--leaning in or leaning out from time to time.

Hex runs through Saturday, February 6. Performances are at 8pm plus an additional show at 5pm on Saturday. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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