Why tend to performative art?   To me the answers comes when I feel the suffocation of the materialist mania, or the transactional wellness and sexuality industry in and around us. Or when I notice how witnessing someone on stage or in life in their truthful expression just changed both of our hearts and next action.

It feels clear to me that the immaterial worlds of meaning, communication and spirit hold it all together and is where transformation first occurs before we can see it. These untouchable realms need our tending and integration. I need to tend to those realms to feel connected to myself and related to my surround.

My mother is a dancer. Her dance studio was in our house - I grew up with the challenge and beauty of a lack of separation between life and art. I feel a deep sense of purpose and curiosity when making such connections and when I consciously participate in personal and collective art-life processes. Meaning to simultaneously experience and interpret life as its own art work. Like a Greek drama. The meanings within these experiences that reveal themselves, give me joy, transform some pain and bring motivation to create aesthetic projection surfaces, or psycho-sensory experiences for audiences and students to connect to individual meanings that are catalyzing movement within their own life processes. 

Some things get in the way, like technocracy's greed for transparency, internalized productivity and self-improvement. In aiding myself and others out of those systemic habits I use my skills of improvisation and of activating subtler sensory perceptions, as a way to distract from the dominant judgmental, rational realms. I create space for dualities to exist simultaneously and interdependently as simple as 'dancing' and 'existing', 'pleasure' and 'pain', 'stillness' and 'explosiveness',  'pretending' and 'being'. Performing for me, with its essence of presence and practicing change, is as much a necessary school of dying, as a school of sourcing life code.

I love when the magical drama of our mundane reality reveals itself through performative attention, connecting the stories and cells of all involved. Possibly a good trick by the gods to grant us the liberating perception of life being a grand ‘show’ . The eventual closing of the last curtain always looming, can  make for much concern and plenty nowness to enjoy.

 

Melanie Maar is a New York and Vienna based dance artist from Austria. She was awarded the 2015 Grant to Artists from The NY Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her latest project GENERATIONS, a collaboration with light artist Lindsay Packer, premiered at ImpulsTanz Festival Vienna 2024 and has been presented at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn and Bennington College, VT. Her prior project ‘Line Death Dance', a ceremonial performance residency at The Chocolate Factory Theater through 2018 -2020, has brought forth a book, a short film and a virtual Newsletter in partnership with ENTKUNSTUNG and the Austrian Cultural Forum NY.

Her choreographies and improvisations have been presented by venues such as Danspace Project NYC,  Judson Memorial Church, The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Kitchen and Movement Research in NYC, Laboratory Arte Alameda Mexico, Impuls Tanz Vienna, Volkstheater Vienna,  University of Applied Arts, Kultursommer Wien, Dessous Gallery Vienna, ForumFreiesTheater Düesseldorf, Tanzfabrik Berlin and at Pollinate series in Tokio. Other 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 Lindsay Packer, Christian Schröder, Kenta Nagai, Anaïs Maviel  and the performance collective Masters of Ceremony, as well as working 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: Bennington College Residency 2024, 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 2015. Its a study group model for dance artists interested in art/life processes. The program takes place in 3 month cycles. Recently 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 Masetti in Vienna in 2021. School Of Dying

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, 4 years of Kung -Fu training and many years of club dancing in NYC.

Since she ended her formal education with high school and has been seeking understanding, methodologies and teachers outside of academic structures ever since. She has completed her studies in Somatic Sexology through the ®Somatica Institute and Body Electric School in 2019. 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 Master Li Jun Feng and Master Mantak Chia who she holds her teaching certification from. Between 2010 and 2019 she taught Qi Gong in various dance related contexts and for private clients.

Intensive work with touch during years of professional massage work and various somatic practices like BMC and The Feldenkrais Method are shaping her way of perceiving and of guiding others.

Melanie worked with senior citizens of the Bronx for 6 years, regularly holds Discos for severely disabled folks in Vienna and teaches workshops internationally for professional dancers and performers, including for Movement Research,The New School/Lang College NY, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Tanz Quartier Wien and at ImpulsTanz Vienna.