Vanessa Vargas

Venezuelan, Brooklyn based dancer, performer, dance educator and researcher.  She holds an BFA in dance from the Escuela Taller de Danza de Caracas (first class honors) a Laureate in Mass Media and journalism from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, a M.A in Mass Media and Social Research from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (first class honors) and M.A in performance studies from Tisch School of Arts (New York University)
    
She works in social practices, behaviours, emotions, and rituals, from dance and performance to communication, culture studies and social theory. Since 2002, She was part of the permanent cast of Taller de Danza De Caracas, The Venezuelan National Dance Company, and worked with various choreographers and independent artists in Latin America, collaborating as a dancer and choreographer. She is based in New York since 2014, where she continue working as a dancer and performance artist: she has been performing for companies such as Rastro Dance Company, Accidental Movement, Kinematik Dance Theater, ChamekiLerner, and as a performing artist for the New York Museum of Modern Art, --MoMa, in different exhibitions including Lygia Clark’s, James Lee Byars’, David Lamelas’, and Yoko Ono’s, developing her experience as a dance educator and researcher, working for Performa Institute as a research assistant, and teaching workshops, both theoretical and practical, creating choreographing projects through collaborative and interdisciplinary practices, with dancers, performers, actors and visual artists. She has been presenting these works in different venues and events such as the Festival de Jóvenes Coreógrafos (Caracas, Venezuela) Dixon Place, Triskelion, Creators Collective, Pioneer Works, (New York) and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima, Perú) and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recently she received and scholarship to attend Barcelona International Dance Exchange in Barcelona, Spain this coming April 2018.

As a teenager,  she started  her career as a contemporary dancer and developed my professional skills at the Fundación Escuela de Danza de Caracas, led by Yuri Cavalieri and José Ledezma –the contemporary dance pioneer in Venezuela, who studied under the tutelage of Merce Cunningham in New York City in the 60’s-. She was member of the third cohort of graduates of this institution in 2002 (with honors). Since then, she has developed her teaching and artistic work as a member of the permanent cast of the Taller de Danza de Caracas Company, broadening her experience as an interpretive dancer participating in numerous workshops –Release, Graham, Limón, contact-improvisation- in Venezuela as in other countries, including Cuba, Costa Rica and the United States. Being a member of the permanent cast of the Taller de Danza de Caracas Company, she has participated in more than twenty sessions -one per year- of improvisation, choreographic composition techniques and physical work with Dutch choreographer Mirjam Berns, whose work is based on several dynamic and interpretive elements -such as the notions of space, energy, rhythm, and silence as choreographic proposals, the relation amongst dancers, motivation, commitment and sensitivity in motion- rather than plain technical skills. This approach to dance defined her profile as a contemporary dancer. She was a founder of the first cast of contemporary dancers at the National Venezuelan Dance Company, and she also was invited –as an interpreter- to several independent projects held by Venezuelan choreographers such as Armando Díaz, Félix Oropeza and Luis Villasmil, and Felix Ruckert (Germany) amongst others.