MARY TEUSCHER

As an educator, I value inquiry and student centered learning. Previously I worked in K-12 education. Currently, you can most often find me collaborating with teachers and students to build work that integrates movement and story. My performances are made for all ages. Ocassionally I also teach theater, visual art, shadow puppetry and creative writing. I recognize the arts as ways of knowing and am driven by my belief that access to high quality arts education is a human right.

I also dance and make dances. My embodiment practice foregrounds the use of instinct, sensory perception, connection and emotions. How can we use dance as a meditative tool to experience physical abandon and creative flow? 

As a choreographer, I value risk taking, authenticity, wordlessness and nonlinear storytelling. I build feminist, queer affirming performances that explore the dynamics of liberation. I believe these performances produce their own kind of knowledge. Often this knowledge exists outside the idea of “aboutness” yet it is still deeply real and can influence consciousness, other people and the world in which we live

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I am interested in make believe. I am not interested in glamour or fame. I am interested in dealing directly with life through my dance practice. And I love this practice because it subverts language. At the same time, dancing helps me to understand the world. Dance is thinking. For me, dance is thinking. 

This work has most significantly been informed by early childhood experiences that occurred before I became aware of all the ways the world objectifies the female form. Embodied experiences of swimming in the ocean, swinging on swings, playing soccer, surfing, cross country skiing, climbing trees, and diving off of high rocks into large bodies of water; it is these memories of motion that continue to most strongly influence the development of my movement vocabulary. Although invested thoroughly in the idea of technical training, dance for me has never been about precision, rather it is a continual exploration in the practice of freedom and the study of change.