Mariana de los Rios
🇵🇪Lima, Peru
About
Dancer, teacher and movement researcher with over twenty years of experience, based in Lima. She began training in Lima at Pata de Cabra and Espacio Danza, and danced for three years with Andanzas, the university company of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, before moving to Buenos Aires for advanced study in dance, improvisation, butoh, Contact Improvisation and somatic education. She spent several years with Roxana Galand's Naturaleza de la Fuerza system and began Feldenkrais training in 2016 with Kathrin Smithback. Since returning to Peru in 2019 she has taught self-awareness through movement in PUCP's somatic education programme and Contact Improvisation at its performing arts faculty, alongside group and individual classes in alignment and dance, and she co-founded Contacto Improvisación Perú, a platform for research and dissemination of the form. She describes finding in Contact Improvisation an understanding that she too could be an earth, and other bodies an earth for her, and finds support for her dancing in Feldenkrais, in practices exploring the nature of force in the body, and in the simple observation of clouds, cats and stacked stones.