mark degarmo dance
STATEMENT
Mark DeGarmo Dance (MDD) is a leading NYC 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. MDD educates under-resourced and marginalized NYC Asian American & Pacific Islander, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Latinx, & other communities and children; creates, performs, and disseminates original artistic and scholarly work; and builds intercultural community through dance arts.
STUDIO Theater 310
Partnerships in Literacy through Dance and Creativity©
President Barack Obama commended Dr. Mark DeGarmo & Mark DeGarmo Dance for “your service to your community and the nation.” The National Endowment for the Arts deemed our evidence-based New York City public schools program “a national model.” Research published in Teaching and Teacher Education journal cited “promising evidence” that our embodied cognition dance and literacy program’s students grade 4 state reading tests increased by a “statistically significant” amount.
For more information about bringing our dance program to your schools, please contact us at info@markdegarmodance.org.
NYC DOE Vendor Code: DYN041000. NYC DOE Contract #: Q1129BS
Virtual Salon Performance Series for Social Change
Mark DeGarmo Dance's Virtual Salon Performance Series for Social Change is a unique forum to develop works-in-progress facilitated by dancer, choreographer, writer, and researcher Dr. Mark DeGarmo to support and present under-resourced and under-recognized performing artists in New York City & State, U.S., and globally. We encourage Asian American, Pacific Islander, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Latinx, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+, 50-plus, and others to apply. VSPS provides a facilitated opportunity for the general public to view, engage with, and demystify the creation of original dance and movement works-in-progress of emerging, mid-career, and established artists.
Australian researchers in creativity, education, and the arts published a 2024 article about their experiences of Mark DeGarmo Dance’s Salon Performance Series 2019 https://njdrama.scholasticahq.com/article/92748. The 2025 theme is no borders, no hierarchies for Zoom broadcasts February 6, March 6 and April 3. Deadline to apply: September 30, 2024: https://markdegarmodance.org/performance/.
For more information on how to apply or to attend: https://markdegarmodance.org or info@markdegarmodance.org.
Las Fridas: A Movement Installation and Offering
The 60-minute work explores a transcultural transdisciplinary art, theater and performance space, while the sum of its two parts suggests a strange new surrealistic view of painter and revolutionary Frida Kahlo's life and traumas.
Las Fridas challenges its audiences to examine their own history, heritage and assumptions about Kahlo, gender, power relations and aging. The implicit question the work proposes is: “What might Frida Kahlo's life have been like had she lived beyond the age of 47?”
In making an offering of this work on Mexico’s Days of the Dead to the world of the living and the dead, Mark DeGarmo pays homage to his mothers, grandmothers, mentors and friends, including renowned choreographers and dance educators Anna Sokolow and Hanya Holm, educational theorist Maxine Greene, Living Theatre Co-Founder Judith Malina, and composer Judith Sainte Croix.
Audience members of past seasons remarked the work is not only “genius” and “brilliant in composition and execution” but “in a way, frightening... the way great art always should be.” The piece is “not scared to push the audience right up to the edge that the performers are living on” and “wonderfully in your face, both literally and metaphorically.”
For information about booking performances & our 2024-25 Mexico City premiere performances see https://www.markdegarmodance.org/las-fridas/ or contact us: info@markdegarmodance.org
Global Dance Circle for Social Change
Our December 21,2024 theme is Celebration! Send us 10 seconds of your best moves in an environment to info@markdegarmodance.org. Deadline: November 30, 2024.
We want to link elbows across the Earth with our global dance communities. In 8 editions, we have featured over 400 dancers from 6 continents, 34 countries, and 29 U.S. states.
For more information and how to apply: https://markdegarmodance.org/performance/ or info@markdegarmodance.org