Margarita Bali

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Margarita Bali

Margarita Bali is a choreographer, video dance and video-installation artist and teacher. Together with Susana Tambutti, she has co-directed the Argentine contemporary dance company Nucleodanza for twenty-five years, and toured her choreographic work in over 100 venues in Europe, North and South America, India, Korea and Australia. In the last fifteen years she has concentrated her interests in the production of multimedia and interactive works, site-specific architectural video performances and sculptural video installations for museums, galleries and alternative performance spaces.

Born in Argentina, Bali attended the University of Buenos Aries departments of Physics and Biology, and transferred to USA graduating with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. She continued her education in other fields with studies in contemporary dance, choreography, design, sculpture, interactive technologies, video filming and edition in institutions in USA and Argentina such as: University of Washington, Dance Theatre Seattle, Ballet del Teatro San Martin, The Factory of Visual Arts in Seattle, Rodolfo Hermida Video School, and many video, dance interactive and telematics workshops including Hypermedia Lab in Buenos Aires, Arizona State University Dance and Technology seminars, Dance Forum Monaco and Nottingham Digital Cultures Lab.

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

Margarita Bali’s main project, Escaleras Sin Fin, is a new video-dance on the subject of bodies on stairs. Inspired by Seattle’s many staircases and the art of M.C. Escher, her work plays with his ideas of puzzling perspectives and infinity patterns. Other inspiration includes Argentine writer Julio Cortazar’s short stories Instructions on how to climb a stair, and the more poetic and philosophical counterpart Instructions on how to climb a stair backwards. Her work considers how staircases, beyond their practical architectural function, have in many civilizations represented power, status, a climb for knowledge, and also a more spiritual reaching for the gods; during her residency in April 2018, Bali worked with local dancers and artists and premiered a video on the subject at the Northwest Film Forum. She also presented a site-specific video installation at Meany Hall adapted from works related to the ocean (El Acuario Electrónico), dancers in galaxies (Homo Ludens Espacial) and human birds (Vuelo Rasante).

ESCALERAS SIN FIN (STAIR/CASES)

Directed by Margarita Bali
Created as part of the University of Washington's Creative Fellowships Initiative,
funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation