A Filipina-American choreographer, performance maker, dance and vocal artist, educator, writer, and activist.
Marie is a 2024 Harlem Stage WaterWorks Emerging Artist Fellow and from her time with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Choreography with the company for contributions to the 2021 production “Deep Blue Sea.” She was a 2023-24 Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow, 2023 GALLIM Moving Artist Resident, and the 2022 Asian American Arts Alliance Jadin Wong Fellow.
Marie was born in Singapore, grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada and Boston, MA, has lived in NYC in almost every borough except Staten Island since 2012, and received U.S. Citizenship in 2019. She is of Batangueña lineage from her mom’s side from Mataasnakahoy, Batangas on the Philippine island of Luzon, and of Ilonggo lineage from her dad’s side from Iloilo City, Iloilo on the Philippine island of Panay.
Marie performed with choreographers Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-2024), and Carolyn Dorfman (2016-2018); and musicians treya lam, Sugar Vendil, and Sirintip Tippan Phasuk, among other world building artists. Her choreography has been presented internationally in Germany, the Philippines, China; and nationally across USA. Recent highlights include Taikang Space (Beijing, China), TOPAZ Arts residency, choreographer for treya lam at Joe’s Pub and MASS MoCA, and choreography for Kyoko Takenaka at Lincoln Center.
“But as Marie and her collaborators let their bodies sing, we were there: together, in our imagined memory.”
—Luna Beller-Tadiar, THE AMP
My practice as a choreographer, performance maker, and dance and vocal performer is rooted in radical empathy, care economies, and sustainable revolutionary futures. My work erupts the colonized brown Filipinx body as a site of liberation through re-turning and re-rooting to land, spirit, and each other.
My onus is in retrieving and re-imagining forgotten memories sown into the genetic manuscripts of the body’s fascial maps. Through inherited cartographies of my people, I connect across the gulf of continents, time, and lost stories as a migrant daughter of Filipinx parents. My practice includes site-specific choreographic score, found-sound and animist music compositions, and relationship tuning between the sacred connection between performer, environment, and audience. These practices become tools for remedying our bodies’ removal from our homelands and our spirits’ dissociation from our bodies. Profound influences include fascial work with elders in managing chronic pain; traditions of my Batangueños and Ilonggo families; six years performing in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company; and my relatives’ impact as operating room nurses.
I commit to kapwa (Tagalog for ‘I and the Other are One’) as a promise to re-imagining a just horizon. Through making the invisible seen and heard, I seek to be a channel for my ancestors whose sacrifice fuels me to physicalize their accumulated visions into existence.