Mariana Valencia Comes to REDCAT in April With JACKLEAN (IN REHEARSAL)
Performances run April 24-25.
Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), CalArts' center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, will present choreographer Mariana Valencia's Jacklean (in rehearsal). In Jacklean (in rehearsal) Valencia is joined by musician Jazmin “Jazzy” Romero as they improvise dance, sound, and text to propose that the rehearsal process can be the performance.
Drawing on their shared Latina identity—Valencia's Guatemalan, and Romero's Salvadorian and Mexican descent—this piece considers their queer, Brown, and first-generation immigrant experiences. Valencia's dance draws on everyday gestures, social dance, freestyle, and postmodern traditions, and is accompanied by Romero's polyvocal repertoire of cumbia, punk, jazz, and electronic music in a dynamic interplay. Jacklean (in rehearsal) considers the interplay between the individual, the collective, and inherited intergenerational transmission, in a work that savors the thrill of the unexpected.
Choreographer and dancer Mariana Valencia's lyrical, witty, and transgressive performances are created from rigorously ordered sequences where movement, song, and spoken text are improvised upon in front of audiences. She foregrounds personal experience against the broader cultural context and is invested in the idea that improvisation carries emancipatory potential. She believes that when we lose all other power (safety, predictability, peace) we are left with our bodies and must make use of them, ideally in liberatory ways. Inserting cultural traditions into contemporary dance spaces, her movement lexicon draws on numerous sources, from social forms and the vernacular, all informed by the politics of a queer, Latina sensibility. Valencia has held numerous residencies and received awards for her choreography, most notably a 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2023 Creative Capital Award, the 2018 Bessie Award for Outstanding “Breakout” Choreographer, a 2018 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists Award, and a 2015 Jerome Foundation Travel and Study grant. Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2019. Valencia's writing reaches beyond the stage through her books: Mariana Valencia's Bouquet (3 Hole Press, 2019) and Album (Wendy's Subway, 2019). Her writing has recently been included in the anthology Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study (Dancing Foxes Press / Wesleyan University Press / Big Dance Theater, 2024). Valencia has toured in the United Kingdom, Norway, and the Balkans. She has received major commissions from the Abrons Arts Center, New York; Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York; Chocolate Factory Theater, Long Island City, New York; Danspace Project, New York; Performance Space New York; and The Shed, New York.
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