Victoria Marks
Encyclopedia
Victoria Marks 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
. She led her own dance company, the Victoria Marks Performance Company in the 1980s.
Victoria Marks in the 1980s and early 1990s started the Victoria Marks Performance Company in New York. In 1987-1988 she went to London on a Fullbright Fellowship in Choreography. She returned to London again in 1992 to run the choreography program at the London School of Contemporary Dance where she began making works for individual artisits. Marks began her work with mix-ability dancers in 1992 when Margaret Williams asked her to create a dance for the camera with the mixed- ability company CandoCo. Marks hoped to change the auidences view of disabilities by portraying them as sexy, smart, funny, and powerful. Marks loves creating movements that communicate ideas and change peoples perspectives.
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."
Choreography
Choreography is the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified. Choreography may also refer to the design itself, which is sometimes expressed by means of dance notation. The word choreography literally means "dance-writing" from the Greek words "χορεία" ...
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
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, 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
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. She led her own dance company, the Victoria Marks Performance Company in the 1980s.
Victoria Marks in the 1980s and early 1990s started the Victoria Marks Performance Company in New York. In 1987-1988 she went to London on a Fullbright Fellowship in Choreography. She returned to London again in 1992 to run the choreography program at the London School of Contemporary Dance where she began making works for individual artisits. Marks began her work with mix-ability dancers in 1992 when Margaret Williams asked her to create a dance for the camera with the mixed- ability company CandoCo. Marks hoped to change the auidences view of disabilities by portraying them as sexy, smart, funny, and powerful. Marks loves creating movements that communicate ideas and change peoples perspectives.
Stage
- Action Conversations(2008) Based on a workshop run by Marks that allowed veterans to talk about their experiences and work through difficulties with exercises and dance. Deals with what it is like to be a soldier.
- Not about Iraq
- Dancing to Music (1988)
- Dust
Film
- Veterans was about five veterans dealing with PTSD in Los Angeles, and dealing with flash backs of war as they try to go on living their lives.
- Men (1997) was about seven men in their 60s and 70s from various backgrounds.
- Mothers & daughters. Ten pairs of actual mothers and daughters and what is the same and what is unique in each pair.
- Outside In (1994) was the first collaboration between choreographer Victoria Marks and director Margaret Williams with the *CandoCo Dance Company. Included six disabled and non-disabled 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."