(How to Feel Your) Body as a Crossroads is a community dance workshop for these times. For being in/with uncertainty. For holding & moving through complexity. For making a pact with joy. We will draw from Latin social dances, Orixá symbology, post-modern release technique, improvisation, and our own spirit-body knowing to be in community and sacred play. Whatever your level of dance, we promise this workshop is for you... all bodies welcome!
Marina Magalhães is a border-crosser, bridge-builder, and dance-maker from Brazil currently living on unceded Uypi land stewarded by the Amah Mutsun people (AKA Santa Cruz, CA). Known for her provoking performance work and radically inclusive pedagogy, Magalhães invites people of all kinds to find the connection between movement-making in the body and movement-building in our communities. Her choreography has been called, “stirring... hypnotic,” by the LA Times and, “riveting... a physical and emotional feat,” by South Africa’s Creative Feel Magazine. Her current Creative Capital Award-winning project, “Body as a Crossroads” (BAAC), is dedicated to unearthing, shaping, and sharing cross-cultural practices that honor spirit-body connection and collective liberation. As a community-rooted teacher and organizer, Magalhães is known for spearheading pedagogic initiatives that uplift racial and healing justice— most notably, the Dancing Diaspora platform she ran from 2017-2021 in partnership with Pieter Performance Space. Magalhães was based on Tongva Land (AKA Los Ángeles, CA) for seventeen years until 2023 when she relocated to Northern California to join the UC Santa Cruz Department of Performance, Play & Design as an Assistant Professor. She identifies as an academic-interventionist (in the lineage of feminist scholar M. Jacqui Alexander) and is committed to centering Afro-Latin social dances and BIPOC experimental dance within the university's arts curriculum.
This event is funded by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Grant and the Ohio Hispanic Heritage Grant, with support from The Ohio State University Department of Dance, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, the Latinx Studies Program and the Center for Latin American Studies.
