about
Marianne is a performer, performance maker, choreographer, and facilitator based between Berlin and Leeds with an Mphil in creative writing (Swansea University), focusing on the relationship between text and embodied live performance.
Her mission: to make words sweat.
Her method: to love through conversation.
The communication of stories is what motivates Marianne to make work that combines humour, surreal imagery, guttural dancing, multiple voices, and... chat. She uses a collaged and cumulative approach to narrative to explore how global issues such as climate change and the housing crisis affect us emotionally in our most intimate places.
As a choreographer, she aims to initiate, organise and hold spaces for dance and talk conversations between diverse groups of people.
After graduating from Northern School of Contemporary Dance with the Writing Award (2015), she continued her studies at the experimental moving and performing arts centre Espacio Lem (Buenos Aires) where she focussed on physicalities that support the communication of the spoken word. Her projects have since been supported by Arts Council England, Arts Council Wales, Leeds Inspired and Dachverband Tanz Deutschland. She is a participant of the Tailor-made Fellowships program of Οnassis AiR (Athens) 2022-23.
In 2023 she was commissioned to make site-specific performances by Volcano Theatre (as part of the programme 'The Shape of Things To Come') and This Current Between Us (a group exhibition in Athens) for which she collaborated with Marina Miliou-Theocharaki to make the duet ‘Holding Strategies’. Her solo ‘The Dirt’ has been performed in theatres in England, Wales and Berlin.
Active in participative contexts, she has particular experience working with womxn and young people with refugee backgrounds. She has been collaborating with the women's group at Meeting Point (Leeds) since 2015, delivering four projects to date, all supported by Leeds Inspired.
Marianne spends each summer as a guest lecturer in choreography and creative practice at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Here she leads the site-specific module, culminating in 'Out There', a public festival of student work.