Bio
‘ Why make art? Though I don’t know the answer exactly I feel a steady meaningfulness and curiosity for being in the ArtLife process. Being art is a way for me to keep looking and relating. To keep not knowing. To resist adopting Technocracy's lust for transparency, internalized productivity and self-improvement.
I use my skills to activate subtler sensual perceptions that can resist assumptions of the rational realm. I create binaries like animalism and humanism, femaleism and objectism, the mundane and the magical, so I can get thrown off by their oneness in unsuspecting ways. I adore the word Ecomysticism.
The visual realm, the erotic, the ‘live’ is where I feel at home, where I experience speakable and unspeakable meaning. I create environments for artists and audience in which each person’s own way of being present and projecting meaning can come to the foreground. Including all the challenges, I love collaborating and learning from artists of different mediums to make that happen. What kind of attention, or drama does it need for us to recognize aspects of ourselves reflected in others, or aspects of ourselves reflected in our shared non-material world?
My way to contribute to this reality is to open a space for psycho-sensual introspection, for exploring the interdependency of ‘deathness’ and ‘liveness’.
In performative attention and in improvising, in whatever medium it manifests, I can best pay homage to the relational mystery existing in all our lives. Dancing, including ‘just being’ can be a sensual tool for relating to the non-linear, all dimensions inter-connectedness with humans, animals, nature, objects, spirit, space and time. I long to experience such a communion and to offer it to others.
I desire to open curtains to aspects of the actual world around us and let it reveal the the drama, the magical theater of this mundane reality. Possibly tricking ourselves into thinking it’s a ‘show’.
Melanie Maar is a New York and Vienna based dance artist from Austria. Her last project ‘Line Death Dance’ has become a platform for a ceremonial performance residency a The Chocolate Factory Theater through 2018 -2020, as well as for a book, a short film and a virtual Newsletter. ENTKUNSTUNG and the Austrian Cultural Forum NY were partners. Maar was awarded the 2016 Grant to Artists from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her choreographies and improvisations have been presented by Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory Theater, DiP at The Kitchen, Laboratory Arte Alameda Mexico, Impuls Tanz Vienna, Dessous Gallery Vienna, FFT Duesseldorf, Tanzfabrik Berlin and at Pollinate series in Tokio. The performances in various gardens, galleries, bars, lofts and living rooms are of equal relevance to her work. Melanie's writing has been published at Entkunstung.com, Movement Research Performance Journal and the EU Movement Disorder Journal.
Continuous collaborations influencing her work with sound and visual artists Christian Schröder, Kenta Nagai Anaïs Maviel, Lindsay Packer and the performance collective Masters of Ceremony as well as formerly with composer Anthony Braxton’s Pine Top Aerial Project. Melanie co-curated the 2013 Moving Sounds Festival for The Austrian Cultural Forum NY and The Movement Research Festival 2010. Residencies include: Judson Memorial Church Artist in Residence 2021, FFT Duesseldorf 2019 ,residency at The Chocolate Factory NY 2018/2019. Impuls Tanz Residency 2016, Laboratorio Condensacion Mexico 2015. Kaatsbaan residency 2011, Movement Research Artist in Residence 2008, The Kitchen Works in Process 2009.
Melanie has been creating and leading a program called ‘process as guide’ since 2016. Its a study group model for dance artists interested in art/life processes. The program takes place in 3 month cycles. This year she guided 4 artists into graduation of a 2 year independent DIY MFA program she created from this study group.
During the pandemic she also co-founded The School of Dying with Alexandra Kleinheinz in 2021.
She has performed for and studied with artists like luciana achugar, RoseAnne Spradlin, Antonio Ramos, Janet Panetta, Daria Fain, Walter Dundervill, Luis Lara Malvacias and Gertraud Maar. Experiences that have deeply influenced her dance background are growing up in her mother’s ballet dance studio, her father’s bodily disability, studying at the former Trisha Brown School and years of club dancing. The work with touch and various somatic practices with individuals are shaping her artistic relationships.
Since she ended her formal education with high school and has been seeking understanding, methodologies and teachers outside of academic structures ever since. She is currently completing her studies in Somatic Sexology through the ®Somatica Institute. Guiding individuals in their sexual and relational living is part of Melanie's practice. In 2004 she began studying Qi Gong with Daria Fain, as well as with Masters Mantak Chia and Li Jun Feng. Between 2010 and 2019 she taught Qi Gong in various dance related contexts and for private clients.
Melanie worked with senior citizens of the Bronx for 6 years, teaches workshops internationally for dancers, including for Movement Research, Tanzfabrik Berlin and a was a recent guest teacher at The New School/Lang College NY, Tanz Quartier and at ImpulsTanz Vienna.
bio page through Foundation for Contemporary Arts:
http://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/melanie-maar