Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina‑American choreographer, dancer, singer, and research artist merging ancestral memory and futurity in building worlds. The daughter of parents from Batangas and Iloilo, Philippines, Marie’s family migrated from Singapore, Manila, Toronto, and Boston, with her making lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY home. Marie’s interdisciplinary work studies queer resistance and lost stories in our body’s fascia, expansing collaborations in dance, voice, theater, and sacred spaces. Her solo and collaborative work have been presented at CPR, Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Joe’s Pub; and internationally at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin) and UGNAYAN (Manila). She is a former performer with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company from 2018-2024, and as a part of the company, received a Bessie for Outstanding Choreography for contributions to “Deep Blue Sea.” As a freelance performer, she has worked with inspiring artists Faye Driscoll, BAYE & ASA, Yin Mei, Sugar Vendil, Ching-I Chang, treya lam, Kyoko Takenaka, among others. She is a 2026 NYSCA Grantee, 2025 NEFA National Dance Project Finalist, 2024 Harlem Stage WaterWorks Fellow, 2022 Asian American Arts Alliance Jadin Wong Fellow, and 2025-26 TOPAZ Arts AAPI Dance Resident Artist.
Marie’s practice amalgamates lived experiences, lost stories, forgotten memories, misunderstandings, and curiosities of both body and earth. Her dance theater work manifests through dance, storytelling, and live sounds of intimate relationships, contrasting textures, tense ironies, and radical empathy, inviting audiences to re-imagine how the Filipino concept of kapwa or –I and the Other are One– can connect our world. Marie currently researches in between the United States and the Philippines: ancestral technologies, land-based practices, and mythologies of Philippine babaylans (shamans, that go by different names in different regions).
STONE BELLY is a dance-theater performance that calls upon the wisdom of the Philippine babaylan’s mythology in the healing of their katawang lupa, Tagalog for earthly bodies, dis-membered from their homelands, environment, and each other. Inspired by a two-year research odyssey of the Philippine babaylans (precolonial shaman matriarchs whose traditions still persist today), the work involves dance and live sound as a shape-shifter between the parallels of the immigrant body and the land/water bodies of our earth. The theater becomes a belly of stone—a site of lost souls—where memories are hardened into timelessness, stuck within our bodies folds. Inspiring a critical connection between land- based labor and physical healing, STONE BELLY considers that their service to the land is in direct relation to the worlds you rebuild. It questions the impact of soul loss from migration, genocide, and capitalist gain—and its impact on the land and each other.
“My creative history with New Dance Alliance goes a way long. Since my friend, Chivas Sandage brought me to New Dance Alliance to rehearse in early 90’s, the place has become a part of my creative life. The long time existence of the studio and Performance Mix Festival are vital to the artists who seek and explore deep into their process. Whenever I step into the studio, it’s a new space with a lot of memories. I lie down on the floor, listen to my body, and I dance. It is valuable. The time in the space nurtures my practice and artistic vision. Karen’s vision of Lift-Off residency, feedback sessions, providing peer to peer connections are more significant than ever. It has been helping us to get through 2020 and we are going into 2021.”
– Nami Yamamoto
New Dance Alliance
182 Duane Street
New York, NY 10013
All venues are wheelchair accessible.
