Marcus Baldemar
wpZimmer resident in 2019
Marcus Baldemar is a dancer living and working between Brussels and Stockholm. He started his professional dance training in Umeå (Sweden) in 2004, followed by a year at SEAD (Salzburg, Austria) before ending up at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. After graduating from the training cycle in 2008 he has worked as a freelance dancer for various choreographers around Europe, such as David Zambrano (Shock), Rui Horta (The Tears of Saladin), Andros Zins-Browne (Limewire, &&&& and The Host) and Albert Quesada (Slow Sports & Wagner/Ligeti). He has also collaborated in creating pieces, such as Fun, Laughs, Good Time with Ludvig Daae and Rebecka Stillman or Manuskriptet Dodo with Karina Sarkissova, a project initiated by Koreografiska Konstitutet in Stockholm. From 2012 to 2014 Baldemar took part in the creation and performance of The Knife/Sorkklubben’s Shaking the Habitual the show, which toured through Europe and North America. At the moment he is involved as a performer in Eveline Van Bauwel’s new piece Infinite journey/In this together and Daniel Linehan’s upcoming creation dbddbb. As a choreographer, Marcus Baldemar is working on his first solo performance.
projects
Reading Rhyme
Baldemar on his project: “Reading Rhyme takes place in a simple setting: one microphone, one body, perhaps some music (a nice ambiance to set the mood), perhaps some lightly salted chips and non-alcoholic cider. It is a poetry reading. It is a dance performance. The body is a reader. It is also a writer, a dancer, a carrier and courier of multiple stories. The body is often quite one dimensional in its physical representation. We are often quite one-dimensional in our reading of bodies and their physical representation. The body, in this case, is mine: white, male and homosexual (of course, there are no such things, they are just leftovers from linguistic structures and semantics deriving from history edited by lumberjacks and other ‘real’ men) – however, the written voices I will be transmitting are not mine, at least not from the start. They are words and sentences filtered through the genius minds of selected others*.”
*By others I mean two things: 1. Other than myself. In this case: friends and professionals. 2. The kind of ‘others’ lumber jacks (ab)use as an excuse for building actual physical borders where there used to be earth, wind and fire (read: women, people of color and more-sexuals).
credits
Concept & direction: Marcus Baldemar
Creation: Daniel Åkerström Steen, Marcus Baldemar
With Zoe Poluch, Linnéa Martinsson a.o.
Performance: Marcus Baldemar
Texts (by / inspired by / borrowed from): Stina Nyberg, Meri Alarcon, Mykki Blanco, Marcus Baldemar, Daniel Åkerström Steen, Linnéa Martinsson, Zoe Poluch, Ursula Rucker, Kassandra Smith, Leslie Feinberg a.o.
Set, costume & light design: Daniel Åkerström Steen
Co-production & residencies: MDT (Stockholm), wpZimmer (Antwerp), CAMPO (Ghent), c.off (Stockholm), Workspace Brussels, P.A.R.T.S. Summer Studios (Brussels), ImpulsTanz (Vienna)