Mark Bankin
Artist Statement
Mark Bankin is a NYC-based choreographer and dance diagram specialist. He directs a repertory ensemble that draws on archives and movement-notation partitions to craft rigorous, formal, structurally exacting works. His dance-theater dramas, devised with multidisciplinary collaborators, investigate memory, loss, disintegration, and interiority; they are grounded in psychosomatics and states, informed by dramaturgical inquiry, and employ a distinct piece-specific movement framework and devising methodology. He eschews conventional proscenium settings, self-producing in abandoned churches, decommissioned warships, and soon-to-be-demolished warehouses, where architecture’s entropy mirrors the body’s.
Artist Bio
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A member of the International Council of Kinetography Laban (ICKL), Mark studied at the Folkwang School with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and as a Fulbright Scholar at the Conservatoire de Paris; he has danced with Butoh masters Yoshito Ohno, Tetsuro Fukuhara, and Gekidan Kaitaisha. From 2018–2022 he built an award-winning archive of extinct Tibetan Gorshay dances and now serves as a movement notator with Core of Culture’s Bhutanese Dance Archive. His choreographic work has been presented at Fondation des États-Unis (Paris), Hošek Contemporary (Berlin), Power Station of Art (Shanghai), and Holy Trinity at Lincoln Center (NYC). He has created over seventeen original works across France, Germany, Japan, China, and the United States, and is a commissioned choreographer with notAmuse Theater, Dances We Dance, ACUD Theater Berlin, and The Why Collective.
Previous collaborators include:
Dancers: Colleen Edwards, Rosy Gentle, Holly Mitchell, Brigitta Bogenschutz, Beate Fisches, Charlotte Aucella, Camille Constanti, Christine West, Héloïse Ponsonnet, Alyssa Bodmer, Taylor Bonadies, Laura Izquierdo, Gabrielle Duval, Kathleen Caragine, Margherita Tisato, Marlen Nickel, Madeline Robertson, Fox Conner, Maria Kireeva, Cara McManus, Natalia Nikitin, Jeevika Bhat, Chloe Brown, Julia Asher, Camilla Cason, Luisa Rüster, Sara Valenti, Eva Kaack, Olga Rabetskaya, Dianna Warren, Faith Kimberling, Stephanie Lau, Hayley Rose Brasher.
Lighting Design: Cheyenne Sykes
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Installation Design: Amanda Rose Austin, Katarina Marcelja, Devan McCulloch
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Musicians: Christina Swanson, Karina Camile Parker, Ciera Cope, Allie Altieri, Sydney Anderson, Derek Weagle, Thomas Daae-Puissochet, Amanda Rose Austin, Nathaniel LaNasa
