Melanie Maar Comes to The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater (www.chocolatefactorytheater.org) continues its Thirteenth Anniversary season with the premiere of Spaces and Tones, a new performance by Melanie Maar. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

"In this second phase of the Line Death Dance project, I am collaborating with audio-visual artist Kenta Nagai. As a duo we are returning to The Chocolate Factory Theater after 8 years. Artist Madeline Best is taking part by lending her eye to the light." "Ours is a return, as well as a continuum, an homage, a transition, a sort of a collapse of time to rebuild a performative realm of relatedness between senses, spirits and artistic approaches. It's a process of engaging with content and production structure equally so it both can feed the animals of our creative desire and unfinished business. We invite your presence to change the tone."

Line Death Dance is an ongoing performance residency project self-reminding, celebrating and sharing the nonlinearity and ambiguity of being in the creative process. During 4 two week performance residency phases throughout 2018/2019 Line Death Dance serves as a transition project enveloping The Chocolate Factory Theater's current space into their new space, coalescing the past and the future into the present process.

Being In Concrete Light - the first residency phase of Line Death Dance - took place at The Chocolate Factory's soon-to-be-renovated permanent facility in May 2018. Instead of an accumulative process towards a final 'show', all four phases generate complete cycles and performance events that are effecting each other as part of a relational web. Line Death Dance proposes a non-hierarchical production structure to investigate its performance making and sharing.

The project follows a desire to involve a diversity of mutual voices into a material and immaterial dialogue about performance culture, production, meaning and process throughout. Line Death Dance is supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Melanie Maar is a New York based dance artist from Vienna Austria. Her work shares a sentiency and intimacy between movement and sound, animalism and humanism, femaleism and objectism, between resonance and struggle. It's a feelingness she desires to relate to, to observe and to follow into performative and process oriented projects.

Maar was awarded the 2015 Grant to Artists from The New York Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her choreographies have been presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, The Kitchen: Dance and Process, Dance Theater Workshop, Laboratory Arte Alameda Mexico, ImpulsTanz Vienna, Tanzfabrik Berlin and Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf.

Her writing has been published at Entkunstung.com and EU Movement Disorder Journal. She has grown and created work through close collaborations with sound artists Kenta Nagai, Christian Schröder, Anaïs Maviel, with the performance collective Masters of Ceremony, with light/visual artist Lindsay Packer and through working on composer Anthony Braxton's Pine Top Aerial Project.

Performers Marilyn Maywald-Yahel and Laurel Atwell have also been integral in developing her work. Ongoing co-curation for Entkunstung/Performance in Vienna. Co-curation for Moving Sounds Festival for The Austrian Cultural Forum 2013 and The Movement Research Festival 2010. She was an MR artist in residence and is currently part of their artist advisory council. Melanie has performed for and studied with artists like luciana achugar, RoseAnne Spradlin, Janet Panetta, Daria Fain, Walter Dundervill and Luis Lara Malvacias.

Her project -process as guide- is an ongoing study group model for dance artists. Maar also works with senior citizens of the Bronx and teaches workshops internationally for dance people. Recently at TanzQuartier and Tanz*Hotel Wien, Movement Research NYC , Pieter L.A. and as a guest teacher at Middlebury College Vermont and The New School/Lang College NY. www.melaniemaar.com

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