Choreographer and dancer Mariana Valencia’s lyrical, witty, and transgressive performances are created from rigorously ordered sequences where movement, song, and spoken text are improvised upon in front of audiences. She foregrounds personal experience against the broader cultural context and is invested in the idea that improvisation carries emancipatory potential. She believes that when we lose all other power (safety, predictability, peace) we are left with our bodies and must make use of them, ideally in liberatory ways. Inserting cultural, traditions into contemporary dance spaces, her movement lexicon draws on numerous sources, from social forms and the vernacular – say, cumbia and pedestrian movement, to her ethnographic research and modern and post-modern vocabularies - all informed by the politics of a queer, Latina sensibility.

photo by Charlotte Curtis