A DEER WALKS INTO A DANCE to Make World Premiere at Nimoy Theater

CAP UCLA and Victoria Marks Performance will present the world premiere of A Deer Walks Into a Dance on October 16–17, 2026, at The Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles. The work is a dance about describing a dance, and about describing ourselves.

The work asks what happens when the words we use to describe ourselves and one another become labels that can limit us, divide us, or even be used against us.

“The joke is built on the absurd idea that description could be more important than every other aspect of sensory experience,” says Marks. “I thought of it as a 'post-modern' joke, because it ironically emphasized verbal description over every other way of knowing. I used to think that joke was funny.”

Marks has long been interested in how dance communicates beyond words. Her attention to the work of disabled dance artists experimenting with audio description—the practice of narrating the visual experience of a dance for blind and low-vision audiences—opened another set of questions: How do you put a primarily visual, time-based experience into words without reducing it to words?

For Marks, disability artistry has opened up new ways of experiencing and understanding dance. How might we describe what we see, what we experience, and who we are without insisting on a single, authoritative answer?

“I love dancing precisely because it constantly invites multiple registers of attention and possibility,” Marks says. She admits that she has mostly failed to describe A Deer Walks into a Dance and has instead become captivated by our shifting identities as we move between imagined worlds, real worlds, and real lives. She asks, “Can we find new ways to see one another across our different experiences?”

Created collaboratively by Marks and performers Rian Alcid, Maya Billig, Karen Chuang, and Aaron Mason, and with original music by Simon Chernow, A Deer Walks into a Dance lives in the gap between what we see, what we say, and what we think we know.

A Deer Walks into a Dance resists easy interpretations. Marks hopes the dance offers something more compelling: the fortitude to connect with one another.

Victoria Marks is an Alpert Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellow, and Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, who has been making dances for stage and film for the past 43 years. Marks' work has continuously challenged conventional notions of virtuosity and embraced an expansive view of dancing bodies. In this, Marks has created dances for individual performers with disabilities, physically integrated dance companies, with elderly men, teen mothers, and with veterans, to name a few.

Currently, her projects include the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA, a gathering of dance artists whose focus on Disability Justice challenge “ability paradigms” and support disability aesthetics. Begun in 2019 in response to a lack of institutional support for disabled dancers and choreographers, the Dancing Disability Lab has evolved over the years to become a collective, artist-led exchange, recognizing the creative vision and wisdom of artists whose lived experience is informed by disability.

Marks' commitment to dance as a resource for changing the way society understands disability has been sustained for over 30 years, beginning with the award-winning film, Outside In, for Candoco Dance Company in 1992. Since then, Marks has participated in many dance and disability convenings including the 2016 Future of Physically Integrated Dance Convening in NYC and the ongoing DanceUSA “Deaf and Disability Affinity Group”.

Marks frequently employs a movement/discussion-based process she calls “Action Conversations” bringing two groups of people together who would otherwise share a social anchor. “Action Conversations” yield film or live performance. Continuing her interest in movement and conversation across difference, Marks recently led “Ten Questions: If not now, when?” an arts-based University-wide course and public event that brought together three outstanding members of UCLA's community from the arts, the humanities, and the sciences to address questions crucial to our contemporary moment. Some of these questions included: How do we remember? How do we heal? How do we love?

In addition to serving as Vice-Chair for Undergraduate Studies in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, Marks is the Chair of UCLA's new Disability Studies major. and the 2026 Artist Laureate in Culver City. https://www.culvercity.gov/News/Victoria-Marks-Artist-Laureate

Performance: October 16–17, 2026*
Venue: The Nimoy Theater
1262 Westwood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024