The Brooklyn Rail

You’re on a thin square of AstroTurf the bright green of a cleaning agent, reclining on one of two beach chairs: aqua or plain orange, both with an International Klein Blue structure. Or maybe you’re squatting on a white plastic carton, the kind used for transporting food or tools, staring at the work jacket draped beside you. Or maybe you’re actually on a pair of roller skates the color of clementines, gliding through a museum lobby. Wherever you are, you’re among equipment for a casual life, which is anything but. Making things happen—buying an orange, crossing a room, or creating a show—requires cooperation and effort. It’s dance o’clock, which raises the question: can you center effort—the way the work works—without resorting to the eternally disappointing trope of heroism wed with the virtuosics of suffering? Can we watch you, quite simply, get to it and through it?

These objects are props, not just for life but also for shows, all by the choreographer and dancer Mariana Valencia. Valencia creates performances that approach work (and because it’s still dance o’clock, we should really use the word rehearsal) as material. She creates webs of form and feeling in order to bounce around them at the show, riding channels of communication that have as much to do with experimental dance as with standup comedy, talk shows, and conversations with friends. Her work is an invitation to be casual and intimate with processes of making and doing. You see the operation of a dance, a joke, or a story rendered both quotidian and dear. This March, Valencia presents Jacklean (in rehearsal), a collaboration with the musician Jazmin “Jazzy” Romero, at the Museum of Modern Art. In the time between now and then, we had a chat.

Amit Noy (Rail): Collaboration feels like a central axis in your recent work. In Heera (2022), you collaborated with thirteen-year-old Heera Gandhu, an Urban Youth Theater student at Abrons Arts Center. Jacklean (in rehearsal) is a collaboration with the LA-based musician Jazzy Romero. But in the couple years before, you were making primarily solo pieces. What shifted?

Mariana Valencia: During the lockdown, I started reassessing how I wanted to continue to make work, and what was possible. Venues were feeling precarious, and our bodies were as well. It took me toward a more urgent kind of doing. I asked myself: if I want to continue to make work, what should it look like and what can it look like?

The promise became that I’ll continue to practice, and the goal is now to share it. The goal is no longer to create perfect performance. The goal is to share the work in progress—again, and again, and again, and again, and again. The way that it looks is maybe not that different from the work I was making before—there’s sound, there’s lighting, there’s a costume. But the practice and the rigor behind what’s presented is the object of my focus.

In Jacklean, there’s a set of motions that Jazzy and I work through, like a band playing a set. But what happens within each motion varies. We work within a theme of that motion, improvisationally.

Rail: Do those motions have titles?

Valencia: They have titles, and they have moods, and they have looks. There’s “Warm Up,” there’s “Contact Improv,” there’s “Goth,” there’s “Party,” there’s “Sing this Song,” there’s “A Medley.”

Rail: How does this idea of “the work is never done” relate to the parentheses in the title: (in rehearsal)?

Valencia: The work is never done, but also, the work is play. The work is playful. We’re playing with the idea that Jacklean is never done, and that this venue, the Museum of Modern Art, is perhaps the most elegant we’ve been in. We respond to the venue—if we were in a warehouse, we would use whatever we had there. Jacklean at MoMA is the most elegant offering, so let’s call it what it is. It’s rehearsal. It’s Jacklean, in rehearsal.

Humor is a big part of our work. Not because we necessarily identify as comedians, but because we find that the unpredictable rupture of humor is lovely, within the so-much-ness we’re grappling with in the world. Humor, as much as timing, is important as a rhythm for reset.

I like to invite the audience in. It’s not participatory—it’s not, “Everybody sit down, now I gotcha.” I’m not trying to trick anyone into anything. It’s more like hosting. How can I make a place for a stranger within my home of performance? How can I tell them we can both be active here? I have found that humor and direct address has been a way for people to settle in and become more relaxed. Sometimes they’ll participate in ways that I’m even surprised by.

Casual movement—an intentional pedestrianism—is often part of it too. It’s my way of going: “I have a body, you have a body, you can sit down in space and watch me arrive. I’m not a finished product. I’m not necessarily showing up at my best, although of course I’m trying my best.”

Rail: There’s an idea, in dance, that something is only ever good if it looks hard to do. Casual undercuts so much of what people expect.

With Jacklean (in rehearsal), you’ve already shared the piece publicly a couple of times, in different formats. How has your experience of the work differed when you’re actually in rehearsal, versus when there’s an audience there?

Valencia: When I was making solos, I used to say that I didn’t really know the work until I performed it. That is even more true now. The premise is rehearsal, yet I don’t know what the premise of rehearsal is until I’ve performed rehearsal. We’re definitely performing, only with process as the premise. I’m not calling the work process-based, because if I did that would separate the end result from the process, which I’m trying not to do.

So to answer your question, rehearsal actually looks more like physical therapy now. Finding the strength to go in all the directions, or to hold back. It’s more about packing my bag, and then at the show, I unpack it. This old thing.