 | |||||
| Image by Rebecca Puretz |
Marielys is a Puerto Rican artist, scholar and activist, currently completing MA in Dance Studies at SUNY/Brockport. She received two departmental awards, the "Jacques and Dawn Lipson Award in Performing Arts" and the "Moserrat Award", to participate in Kinitiras Choreography Lab Summer 2012.
_________________________________________________________________
My interest in choreography:
A feminist vision that comprehends the body –or the bodies- as
resource of knowledge influences my work. Therefore, I acknowledge
that my body’s multidimensionality is intrinsic to any aspect of
my life. This has led me to question the parameters of my artistic
practice, re focusing it towards processes and experiences rather
than products. Nowadays, my creative process and artistic
endeavours are based on an interdisciplinary perspective and
encompass professional collaborations. Dance, film, photography,
installation art, and performance art -among other manifestations-
are the resources I use to embrace the complexities of the moving
body and its relation to spaces, contexts, processes and
structures. It has been through dance improvisation that I have
been able to merge the conceptual and practical aspects of my
practice and create mutable realities/experiences. The body –or
bodies- has become the centre of my practice and discourse
proposing a corporeal subjectivity, rather than a cognitive
subjectivity.
Even though composition is present in my work,
choreography is an unknown territory for me. I have “learned”
choreography from different perspectives that respond to
particular aesthetics. These experiences have successfully taught
me how to identify these aesthetic structures and the politics
behind them. However, my understanding of the choreographic
process is informed by a psychosocial perspective where the
individual and social self are in constant interconnection with
the existing social contexts –and realities- and where taking an
explicit political stand is inevitable.
At
present, I am interested in validating the creative process as a
space where critical dialogues can take place, knowledge can be
deconstructed and reconstructed to create new structures. I
believe that what I understand as dance and choreography have the
capacity to propose new strategies of social interactions. This is
where my interest in studying and practicing choreography comes
from. I intend to deepen my understanding of choreography to
discover how my body creates and recreates structures and how
these structures relate to my social contexts. Kintiras
Choreography Lab is a space for uncertainties, explorations,
discoveries and critical dialogues.
_________________________________________________________________________
THE HUMAN FACTOR: ACCUMULATION 1
The phrase The Human Factor was articulated by choreographer Robert Clark during the second week of the lab. This phrase and the proposition of bringing back "humanity" to the choreographic endeavor made an incision on my flesh and my ideas. I have been trying to embody this "principle" not only in my creative process and artistic practices, but also in my every day life -easier said than done-. However, I strongly believe that embracing our humanity -and therefore the humanity intrinsic in others- is the foundation of new knowledge.
