Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study
In an effort to deepen our understanding of what dance is and how it has functioned throughout human history, this prismatic book project is dedicated to an artist-centric perception of dance history. Diverse dance artists from the American dance field contribute personal views of how dance has unfolded over time, answering the question: “Who is in your imaginary dance family tree, FROM the beginning of time to YOU/now?”
Twelve illustrated booklets, each written by a working choreographer, address the subject of dance history from nonacademic, subjective, poetic perspectives. Text by mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne
MOTOR Journal 1/3:THE SOLO (2022)
motor is a print publication dedicated to dance and writing about dance. motor explores the choreographic potentiality of writing about dance and gives dance a space of critical endurance in print. Seeing dance as an undervalued and under-accessed art form, motor opens dance up to wider audiences through experimental and inter-disciplinary engagements.
Women and Performance Journal Volume 30, Issue 2 (2020)
Women and Performance Journal: a journal of feminist theory, publishes interdisciplinary feminist perspectives in various fields of performance studies, as well as queer, critical race, and post- and decolonial theory.
Mariana Valencia’s Bouquet (2019)
Mariana Valencia's BOUQUET is a borderless form of memoir. Living between choreography, autobiography, poetry, and standup, Valencia reckons with individualism in her everyday life as a dancer as she moves across the United States, Mexico, the Balkans and into the geography of her past.
ALBUM (2019)
Mariana Valencia's solo performance ALBUM assembles song, text, and dance into a multifaceted album that draws from choreographic methodology, personal narrative, herstorical and intergenerational kinship, and popular culture. The first title in Wendy's Subway's Document Series, ALBUM expands on Valencia's performance to include her spoken script in its entirety alongside choreographic descriptions and new annotations, original song lyrics, diagrams, drawings, and visual representation. Navigating childhood memory, mourning, family, and vampires through factual, humorous, and grave observations, Valencia archives and performs a self herstory as an album in image and song.
Marking the Occasion gathers archival materials from a residency at Mt Tremper Arts, and represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, "Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work?" Curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis gather writing by David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi, exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event.