Vanessa Vargas / Manuel Fajardo

In Smoke, transatlantic dance/performance collaborative Vanessa Vargas / Manuel Fajardo explores notions of rootlessness, exile, and disappearing as an embodiment of invisibility. This interdisciplinary project depicts the varied ways in which people can disappear, by choice or forced invisibility, as social, political, geographical, and cartographical reality.

MarinaLaRivera is a collaborative, horizontal and interdisciplinary project created by Venezuelan artists Nela Cote (Málaga), Mariana Alviárez (Buenos Aires), and Vanessa Vargas (New York). After migrating, they decided to keep on working together as a political and geopolitical strategy, developing collaborative remote proposals across the Atlantic, connecting other art makers in the process, trying to break the conditions of imagination and creation on the dance practice, working on State|Nation dynamics, body encounters, and liminality in time and space. Since 2013, MarinaLaRivera has worked on different dance projects, including “Exoesqueleto” (2013) “Becoming (In)visible” (2015), and “Smoke” (2017), presenting these projects in Venezuela, Argentina, Spain, Perú, and New York. In 2017, they received a residency at Espacio Belgrado in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Manuel Fajardo: Venezuelan, Mexico-based dancer, performer, and choreographer. Manuel explores improvisation in dance and teaching, based on somatic and release techniques as the main pillars of his artistic experience. He has facilitated workshops for different communities, focusing on communication through movement. Currently residing in México D.F, Manuel is participating and collaborating in different projects with Makina DT Dance Company.

He was part of the permanent cast of the Taller de Danza de Caracas company (2002/2005), a guest dancer for the Teresa Carreño Ballet Theater (Venezuela) as well as for several other companies: Dramo, Rastro Dance Company (based in New York), Felix Rucker, and Jeremy Nelson, among others. In 2005 he got a grant from the National Council of Culture (CONAC) to participate in an exchange program with the Higher Institute of Arts (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. In (2006) he moved to Mexico and joined Tumakat Contemporary Dance Company. In 2012, he was a beneficiary of the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) to develop his 3/3=1mprovisación project. In 2014, he was the resident artist at the National School of Arts in Denmark, creating his “¿Quién es?” choreographic impro solo.

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