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Why make art? Although I don't know the answer exactly, I feel a deep sense of purpose and curiosity when participating in the art-life processes that reveal themselves to me. 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. For me, being art is a way to continually consciously not know and thus resist technocracy's greed for transparency, internalized productivity and self-improvement. I use my skills to activate subtler sensory perceptions in my audience as to trick our habitual selves to expand from judgmental rational realms. In my pieces I create space for dualities such as animalism and humanism, femininity and object viewing, or the everyday and the magical in order to illuminate their potential commonalities.
Despite all the challenges, I love working with artists of different media, learning from them, finding common ground and working on our questions together. Like what kind of attention or drama do we need within the staged scene in order to recognize aspects of ourselves and of our collective unconscious in what we experience?
My way of contributing to the reality I am part of is to open up a performance spaces for our bodies and our psycho-sensory introspection for exploring the essential presence and interdependence of “death” and “aliveness”. With performative attention and improvisation I can best pay homage to questions and mysteries that exist in my life. Dancing, including “simply existing,” can be a sensory tool to relate to the nonlinear inter-connectedness of people, animals, nature, objects, mind, space, and time. I long to experience such a communion and desire to offer it to other people in the form of performances.
There we can open curtains to aspects of the actual world around us and let it reveal the drama, the magical theater of our mundane reality. Possibly tricking ourselves into thinking it’s a ‘show’.
Melanie Maar is a New York and Vienna based dance artist from Austria. She was awarded the 2016 Grant to Artists from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her latest project GENERATIONS, a collaboration with light artist Lindsay Packer, will premiere at ImpulsTanz Festival Vienna and has been presented at Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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.
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.
