A Deer Walks into a Dance -Victoria Marks, Work at the Nimoy Theater
I so wish I could go see Victoria Marks’ upcoming work at the Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles. If you are local and able to go, please treat yourself.
Victoria is an extraordinarily talented artist and choreographer, and she was also a thoughtful and inspiring teacher during my graduate work at UCLA. There was something particularly meaningful about learning from someone so deeply engaged in her own creative practice—someone whose work explored not only movement, but human relationships and the stories we carry in our bodies.
Her work spans dance, choreography, and film, and somehow, wonderfully, she was willing to serve as an adviser for my special project in graduate school. At the time, I was studying dance/movement therapy through my clinical work with older adults in the partial hospitalization program at Century City Hospital. I was interested in how movement and the body might help us understand psychological experience in ways that words alone sometimes cannot.
I have always appreciated Victoria’s willingness to stretch beyond her own discipline and become curious about what I was exploring in the field of dance/movement therapy. I was also simply in awe of her work.
Mothers and Daughters, directed by Margaret Williams in 1994, remains especially vivid for me, and after all these years, I still think about that piece. It is deeply psychological and profoundly moving. Without words, the piece communicates something about the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship—love, identification, separation, tenderness, conflict, and connection—in a way that, for me, surpassed much of what I was reading at the time in developmental psychology.
Much of that literature had been shaped by white male theorists working within cultural traditions that often viewed the experiences of girls, women, and mothers through reductive, patriarchal, and sometimes misogynistic frameworks. Then there was this dance.
Mothers and Daughters seemed to cut through all of that. It went straight to the bone, but with love and care.
That is one of the extraordinary possibilities of movement and creative work: the body can communicate what theory sometimes struggles to hold. Dance can show us something about attachment, distance, power, vulnerability, longing, rupture, and repair without reducing those experiences to an explanation. And in watching other bodies move in relationship, we are allowed to reflect on our own—how we inhabit our bodies, how we move toward and away from one another, what we protect, what we carry, and how we connect.
What a gift it was to have a teacher who was both a generous educator and such a remarkable working artist. And what a gift that artists like Victoria Marks continue to create work that invites us to think, feel, and experience human relationships through the intelligence of the body.
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