Victoria Marks

Victoria Marks creates dances for the stage, for film, in community settings, and for professional dancers. Her work addresses the body itself, as it serves as a touchstone for larger discourses on wellness, desire, rhetoric and power. Victoria is a Professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA where she has been teaching since 1995. Before taking her post at UCLA she lived in London, where for three and a half years she worked on her own choreographic projects and served as head of choreography at London Contemporary Dance School, a conservatory for the training of professional dance artists in Europe.

Awards

Marks is a 2005 Guggenheim fellow, and a 2004 recipient of the Irvine Foundation “Dance: Creation to Performance” Grant as well as an NEA Company Grant. She is a 2002 recipient of a California DanceMaker Grant through the Irvine Foundation and a 2001 COLA grant recipient from the Cultural Affairs Council of Los Angeles, which yielded the work, “Against Ending.” This work went on to win four Los Angeles based Lester Horton Dance Awards. In 1997, Marks was honored with the Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films, including the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival (1996 and 1995), the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.

RESIDENCY ACTIVITIES:

Choreographing Democracy:

Movement workshops explore foundational principles of democracy: (power with authority, privacy, justice, and responsibility). Depending on the group, the exploration can:
#Lead to a discussion of how dance can be a medium for civic understanding and or engender a discussion about democracy.
#Lead to the setting of a compositional problem that allows participants to create their own civic-focused work. These can be shared and discussed.

Knots: a workshop or series of workshops that allows a group of artists to share the “knots” or problems they are having inside their work. These are either group discussions, or they may become movement laboratories for the exploration of a group of shared problems.

Master classes

Movement practice, improvisation and composition classes are available for dancers or non-dancers.

Reviews of her work:

Lewis Siegel: (Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2005)“Victoria Marks is a spoiler, a troublemaker, a true subversive”

Sara Wolf: (Dance Magazine, July 21-August 6, 2005)In a review of the NOW Festival, 2005“Additional high points were Victoria Marks’ Not About Iraq and On Forgetting, companion dances that questioned the role of art during wartime. If it can accomplish anything, Marks seemed to answer, it is to expose the false sanctuary it offers.”

Sara Wolf: (LA Weekly, June 14, 2002)“Marks says her trio isn’t so much about September 11 as it is about impotence in the face of the inevitable, but the unforgettable events of that day plangently ring through the appropriately named “Against Ending’s” driven at full tilt movement. Part civic conversation and part tantrum, the piece has a scale and urgency that may surprise those more familiar with Marks’ dance films or her understated portraiture pieces, in which incremental shifts in intention (a look here, a mere twitch of a gesture there) reveal volumes. Another downtown New York choreographer who moved here sans company, Marks is one of the LA’s best-kept secrets. On one level the postmodernists’s intelligent, complex and witty work is always a statement about dance making….”

Elizabeth Zimmer: (The Village Voice, January 17, 1996)“...A choreographer of superior intelligence, lyricism, and wit....”

Sophie Constanti: (The Dancing Times (U.K.), January 1994)“Marks can focus your attention ..ment alone, yet she can also show you how pure dance is unavoidably shaped by human emotion, by a particular performer, by group dynamics and by how we choose to respond to these aspects of dance, of theatre, of people. “

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