Marcela Torres

Marcela Torres was born in Salt Lake City, Utah into the lineage of mesoamerican diaspora; bracero’s, poultry factory workers, Spanish-speaking Mormons. She creates experiential spaces to reconstruct the specificities of US interpellation onto BIPOC bodies. Employing immersive practices of performance with interactive object making and public organizing into an experiential interrogation of social structures. Torres’s most recent projects have concentrated on social ideologies of violence, how it is felt, how it ripples, how the energies of aggression can be channeled into more productive movements particularly through the study and incorporation of martial arts as a form of resolution and healing. Their performance, Agentic Mode, spoke about the psychology of survival and how one enacts violence on others in order to procure their own existence through a unique dance form based on martial arts logistics and gameplay. While at Bemis, Torres plans to further explore dance and its cultural implications through the work of Katherine Dunham’s anthropological research on Afro-Latin dance and its usage of cigars in performance.