On my way to America, 2015
1st - Innocence
2nd - Fire works
3rd – Walking on pieces
In a small dance studio space two wooden children's chairs are back to back, each holding a plastic gun and a white rose. Gingerbread cookies surround the chairs covering all the possible spaces to walk. The audience is seated around the space in an unconventional manner, disrupting the space between spectator and performer.
After a glimpse of the objects and space, and in reaction to three distinct sound layers played loudly to fill the space, professional dancer Laurel
Sears creates an improvisational performance shaped entirely by the unpredictability of this audio/visual encounter. The piece is designed to create a dialogue between the audience, the setting, and her movement, as she guides us through Innocence, the Event and the Emotion left behind afterwards.
Ms. Marques's deliberated and disciplined work ethic results in a tightly conceptualized body of work that requires contemplation and often participation. “I want to create an intimate space for reflection but also a place for conscious and unconscious participation” says the artist. “With this new pieces I found myself trying to justify the paradox of beauty and ugliness that we Americans face everyday.
Here is the Missoulian article, by Cory Walsh.
The Bus Tour 2014
The “Bus Tour”, August 2014, was a site-specific dance performance created through collaboration between choreographer and director
Amy Ragsdale and visual artist Janaína Vieira-Marques.
A bus with 45 people on board headed north on highway 200 to three locations along the Blackfoot River in Missoula, MT. The dance performance included six professional dancers from Headwaters Dance Company and also 20 community dancers. Along the way to each location,
the audience saw three dances choreographed by Ms. Ragsdale and assembled visually by Ms. Vieira-Marques, speaking to the beautiful
and complex landscape in juxtaposition with features of an economically depressed community in Montana. Passengers were also surprised by
unexpected performances, snapshots, seen out the windows along the way while a humorous narrator inside the bus presented some historic
facts about those places.
The locations for the dance performances included an old mill warehouse in Bonner, a Ponderosa Pine forest and an abandoned road cut through rocks on the side of the river.
Amy Ragsdale and visual artist Janaína Vieira-Marques.
A bus with 45 people on board headed north on highway 200 to three locations along the Blackfoot River in Missoula, MT. The dance performance included six professional dancers from Headwaters Dance Company and also 20 community dancers. Along the way to each location,
the audience saw three dances choreographed by Ms. Ragsdale and assembled visually by Ms. Vieira-Marques, speaking to the beautiful
and complex landscape in juxtaposition with features of an economically depressed community in Montana. Passengers were also surprised by
unexpected performances, snapshots, seen out the windows along the way while a humorous narrator inside the bus presented some historic
facts about those places.
The locations for the dance performances included an old mill warehouse in Bonner, a Ponderosa Pine forest and an abandoned road cut through rocks on the side of the river.
