Bouquet

Drama. Poetry. Art. Mariana Valencia's BOUQUET is a borderless form of memoir. Living between choreography, autobiography, poetry, and standup, Valencia reckons with individualism in her everyday life as a dancer as she moves across the United States, Mexico, the Balkans and into the geography of her past.

UNASSUMING & DECEPTIVELY TOUCHING....Ms. Valencia is the only person onstage, but one idea she imparts is that we are never alone: We are the product of our communities and histories, our parents and friends, songs we've heard and dances we've learned. Or as she puts it, 'a self isn't just itself.' A self is part of an ensemble, one stem in a bouquet....Ms. Valencia, who is in her mid-30s, has been working for the past few years in an autobiographical mode, striking a tone that can be both funny and mournful. BOUQUET is a multidimensional monologue, as physical and musical as it is verbal. Thirty-something, she proves, is not too early for a retrospective, which is, after all, just a way of taking stock of where you are.--Siobhan Burke, The New York Times

In BOUQUET, the notoriously difficult task of translating dance into language is taken on full force by a master practitioner. Mariana Valencia's book is both a document of the unarchivable and a 'shout out to the apocalyptic world we're living in.'--Paul Legault