Priscilla Marrero
Interior Beauty in Motion Fellow January-June 2022
La Pelvis Project: Live with LULU
Photo: courtesy of Priscilla Marrero
Priscilla’s participation in The Salon consists of a series of online gatherings centered around the pelvis, and which invites a diverse roster of practitioners ranging from dance, somatic practice to breath work. This program will run January-June 2022, on Thursdays for each session. Join us as we shake, educate, and shine together!
Photot: Kali Veach / La Pelvis Project, 2022
Priscilla Marrero (ella/she) is an experimental performing + teaching artista from sunny Seminole, Taino and Tequesta land, also known as Miami, Florida. She is a passionate storyteller and loves to discover new ways to collaborate with interdisciplinary artistas through live performance or filmmaking. She has performed and presented her collaborations in the Musée Dapper (Paris, FR), The Empty Circle (Brooklyn, NY), Miami Light Project (Miami, FL), Inkub8 (Miami, FL), Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church (New York, NY) y más. Priscilla has received support from grants such as Artist Access Grant, Miami-Dade Community Grants, Here and Now Grant, and Gluck Fellowship Grant, MFA Graduate Fellowship, and currently the Chancellor's Distinguished Fellowship Award. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in Performance and Choreography (09’) and is currently an MFA Candidate for Experimental Choreography from the University of California Riverside (22’) for her research practice on La Pelvis. Priscilla lives and works on/with Munsee Lenape land, known as Harlem, NY and often travels to Miami Beach for el mar and some familia time. Priscilla Marrero related links: website / IG / Vimeo /
All sessions were free and open to the public upon RSVPing. Any donations collected went directly to support La Pelvis Project.
This series was made possible with the support of the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts, Interior Beauty Salon, and the University of California Riverside Dance Department.
Click HERE to contact @priscilla_performance_artista
VIDEO ARCHIVE OF SESSIONS:
Still of Jessica Garet by Nicolás / Click on image to play video
Session with Jessica Garet of Aire Healing
In this session Jessica Garet discusses how our body, especially our pelvis, holds the potential for our greatest creativity and connection to our vitality and authentic expression. She invites and guides us in exploring how breath can help us to uncover energetic blocks stored in our body and use the body’s wisdom to access increased sensations of safety and a return to feeling a deeper sense of belonging. The intention is that if the body and spirit can remember their innate gifts of safety, connection, pleasure, and expansion then the energy of trauma, loss, grief, and pain will have a greater ability to flow and be liberated.
Still of Justin Morris by Nicolás / Click on image to play video
Session with Justin Morris
“I feel the most at home when I am with my friends on the dance floor and we are getting our lives, creating a portal to a world otherwise, where liberation and pleasure can be found. This offering hopes to foster a space where we will turn inwards as a collective in hopes of manifesting a sense of release across dimensions; physically, mentally, and spiritually. The offering will build upon and use the improvisational structures and movement practices of twerking, the Feldenkrais method, Bartenieff fundamentals, and ratchet music as a bridge to getting to this multidimensional release for the individual and the collective.” Justin Morris
Still of Alfons Grabher by Nicolás / Click on image to play video
Session with Alfons Grabher
“Why don't you just say what you want to say? How can we ever find the right words within the infinite possible combinations of words and sounds of a spoken language? And furthermore: Can we compare spoken language to physical movement? For example, in spoken language, would the repeated shouting of a single word be the equivalent to the repeated execution of a single motion? And consequently, would telling a longer story be the equivalent to a longer movement sequence? In movement, what would constitute a congruent story? What makes or breaks the grammar of movement? In this context I present a selection of movement sequences from Somatic Education, inspired by Moshé Feldenkrais, to experience the pelvis like we might experience the subject, object or verb in a sentence, or the agonist, or antagonist, or a side character, or maybe even the setting in a story. Does any of this make any sense? What do we need to make sense of movement? In popular media we see famous clinical psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists produce a lot of very elaborate and complex spoken language, but why don't we see them teach equally sophisticated movement classes? Let's find out!”
Still of Tiffany Madera by Nicolás / Click on image to play video
Session with Tiffany Madera / Baladi workshop with Hanan
Baladi means Country in Egypt. It can describe a person, homeland, a rhythm, dance, or various aspects of life.
Participants engage with Baladi technique and combinations, an Egyptian women’s folk and social dance, through the framework of Hanan’s signature social justice lens that examines race, gender, politics, identity, and activism.
With an added focus on the pelvis, this workshop discusses the history of Raks Baladi dance, (known in the west as bellydance) in its geographic and transnational context, how it came to North America and how to articulate the multiple meanings of the dance through an intersectional feminist framework, as embodied by the pelvis, its undulations and its many meanings
Still of final gathering with Priscilla Marrero and LULU by Nicolás / Click on image to play video
Session with Priscilla Marrero and LULU
For our final gathering in La Pelvis Project Presented Live with LULU. LULU and Priscilla are interested in bringing folx together in conversation, in movement, and in celebration of the time we have been spending together as Interior Beauty In Motion Fellows in The Interior Beauty Salon from January-June 2022. We guide a movement and breath practice inspired by diverse Afro-Caribbean social dance forms, somatic awareness, self-inquiry, and improvisation. We close the gathering with dialogue about the experiences of the participants, and manifest for future La Pelvis exchanges.
Biograhpies:
Jessica Garet (she/her) is a licensed clinical social worker specializing in body/spirit-based experiential practices for healing including breathwork and somatic/sensation-based inquiry. As an arts enthusiast and vocalist, Jessica has a particular interest in working with creative professionals, helping them to navigate creative energetic blocks and nurture their inner voice. She has been holding space for healing since 2006 and presently offers individual and group work online only. Jessica Garet related links: website / IG /
Justin Morris (they/them, fluctuating pronouns) is a transdisciplinary artist, teacher, and community advocate based in Southern California. They began cultivating their practice at a young age at family functions and have continued to tie and ground their work in blackness, queerness, playfulness and ratchedry. Justin has performed/collaborated in performances and dance-based works with artists Jay Carlon, Sue Roginski and Kirsten Johansen, Kevin Williamson, Alex Shilling, Colleen Thomas, visual artist David Lamelas, Rebecca Bryant, Rosa Rodriguez-Fraiser, and Summation Dance Company. Justin holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from CSU Long Beach’s Department of Dance and was recently a faculty member at Renaissance High School for the Arts in Long Beach. They are currently pursuing graduate studies at University of California Riverside in Experimental Choreography.
Alfons Grabher born in 1974 in Vienna, Austria, is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner, and a graduate Engineer from the University of Applied Sciences, Vienna, specialized in Biomedical Engineering. Alfons has worked for over a decade as a Software Engineer, and since 2006 as a Feldenkrais Practitioner. His Youtube channel Improving Ability (formerly named “Feldenkrais with Alfons”) ranked #1 on Feedspot’s Top 20 Feldenkrais Youtube Channels in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. He is author of several books: an introduction to Feldenkrais classes My Feldenkrais Book, a workbook with movement lessons Getting Better day by Day, and an inquiry into language, essay writing and movement instructions in his book Movement Based. Alfons works with clients via video chat and in person. Before the COVID-19 lockdowns, for a period of 5 years, he had his own studio in Bregenz, Austria. His website in German language features a journey of 60 class recordings in German language, and is one of the most visited Feldenkrais related websites in German language. Alfons Grabher related links: IG / YouTube / Facebook
Tiffany Madera is an artist at the intersection of film, dance, contemporary art and social justice. Anchored in Caribbean aesthetics, Madera’s work is provocative and global, bridging movement and visual vocabularies from North Africa, the Caribbean and Americas to examine diasporic thought and bodies. Working with feminist and post colonial theories, her projects seek to reconcile gender and diasporic trauma. Through her films and projects, Madera creates transformative opportunities for healing and building community.
Based in Miami Beach, Madera directs Hanan Arts, an intersectional feminist arts non profit and produces festivals, social practice interdisciplinary projects, curates contemporary art exhibitions, performs and choreographs dance and directs and produces documentary films. As an educator, Madera serves as Adjunct faculty at Barry University. In collaboration with various non profits, Madera has taught dance and performance extensively in a women’s correctional facility, with adjudicated, homeless, marginalized and immigrant youth, adult survivors of child sexual abuse, rape and sexual assault, all using Raqs Sharqui/ bellydance as her unique calling card.
Her award winning films and projects have been funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ware Foundation, Green Family Foundation, state, and local government, and national awards. Tiffany Madera holds a Masters's Degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Florida International University and a Master’s Degree in Performance Studies from New York University Tisch School of the Arts.