Melanie Maar

Residency at ImPulsTanz 2010

Project:

Spaces and Bones

a piece by Melanie Maar in collaboration with Kenta Nagai

In this project I am exploring performance as a live archaeology of the natural and cultural expressed in our individual physicality. The choreography, a sound installation and ritualistic events in the theater space will create a special site where the moving human emotional body is framed and observed. Animal spirits guide our roles.
Wilderness is contained only by a beam of light.
In our work we continue to explore the creative possibilities between live music and dance through the kinetic connections between us as performers. We ?nd common ground in the unknowable and untangible that constitutes the substance of our disciplines.


Melanie Maar is a choreographer and dancer originally from Vienna, Austria. She works, teaches and lives in her space, The Loft, in Brooklyn. The current collaboration with musician Kenta Nagai will premiere in December 2010
at The Chocolate Factory in New York City. Maar recently co- curated the Movement Research Festival NY 2010- HARDCORPS. Her last choreography Phenomenal Bodies was presented by Dance Theater Workshop in April 09. Maar’s studies in neuroscience developed through her solo Off and On which toured various Movement Disorder Congresses between 2005 and 2007. Other choreographies and improvisations have been seen in San Francisco, Vienna, Lisbon, Oslo and Berlin. Maar began her training at her mother’s studio, Tanzstudio Maar for Ballet and Flamenco in Vienna in 1983. Other teachers include Janet Panetta, Ballet and Daria Fain, Qi Kung.
She has worked extensively with New York choreographer Luciana Achugar , as well as with RoseAnne Spradlin, Kate Weare, Luis Lara Malvacias and others.

Kenta Nagai is an audio-visual artist and performer, originally from Niigata Japan. His keen sense of physicality is reflected in his current exploration of the physical properties of sound and its impact on human emotion and the body. This interest has led to numerous collaborations with dancers (Boaz and Anika K Barkan, Daria Fain, DD Dorvillier, Bob Eisen and Jennifer Monson among others) throughout his career as an improvisor and performer in New York City and abroad. Nagai has appeared in numerous concerts at venues including Carnegie Hall, Roulette, Issue Project Room, Lincoln Center Out Door Stage, Rubin Museum, Hershhorn Museum at Smithonian Institute, Sculpture Center and Japan Society.

Photo © Verena Kurz