The world premiere of Victoria Marks, A Deer Walks into a Dance, debuted at The Nimoy Theater in Westwood. This imaginatively compelling dance performance explores identity, language, and human connection interweaving emotional depth, spontaneity, playfulness, and humor.
Victoria Marks, A Deer Walks into a Dance
courtesy of CAP UCLA
At the beginning of the performance Marks prompts the audience to imagine being in a vast field. She speaks of how people in communities gather in rooms to try to figure things out. And so here we are prepared to put ourselves into the atmosphere and concepts she is about to present.
Marks works with her performers to develop movement, character, and social interaction collaboratively growing out of their lived experiences. Performers, Rian Alcid, Maya Billig, Karen Chuang, and Aaron Mason, project distinct personalities with a range of dynamic movements. The dancers seem to respond to one another in real time with subtle, awkward, absurd, empathetic, and vulnerable interactions. This approach to choreography fosters a feeling of authenticity for the audience to connect emotionally throughout the performance.
Augmenting the strength of the choreography and dancers, the production overlays the work’s conceptual framework with unique features. At certain points, in this 55-minute performance, Marks reappears on stage to provide narration. She tells a story about a hunter/king and his prey, a deer, and a deadly case of mistaken identity. We further understand the thematic interactions of the dancers as they recognize predators and prey in each other. As the dancers interact, words and phrases appear on the backdrop, prompting us to reflect on their meaning.
Photo by Jason Williams; Courtesy of CAP UCLA
Original music by Simon Chernow is driven by live rhythmic drumming with additional music complementing the expressive shifts. Costumes by Ravi Ranawaka accentuate the dancers’ style with Lighting Design by Katelan Braymer focusing on the shifting emotional mood.
Excerpts from Performer Biographies
Rian James Alcid is a gay Filipino American dancer and newly Certified Lagree Instructor. Maya Billig is a Los Angeles-based dancer, choreographer, DJ, and human animal woman.
Karen Chuang, dancer, choreographer, and educator, is a Taiwanese American daughter of immigrants, little sister, auntie, partner, and friend.
Aaron Mason is a son, brother, partner, uncle, and feline father and additionally, he is a psychotherapist and whose movement practices center on traditional West-African dance as well as diasporic forms of house and dancehall.
Choreographer
Victoria Marks is an Alpert Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellow, in addition to a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar. She is a professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, where she has been teaching since 1995. Her current projects include the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA, an artist-led exchange focused on Disability Justice and disability aesthetics.
A state of the art 300-seat theater, performances at The Nimoy Theater are curated by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. Website: https://cap.ucla.edu/ucla-nimoy-theater
