Pursuing Ideas and Movement

Victoria Marks '78, a choreographer and professor of dance in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures, has been awarded a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Guggenheim Fellowships, according to the foundation, are awarded "to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." The awards can be used by recipients in any way they see fit to further their work.

Marks, who is also the recipient of grants from the Fulbright program and the National Endowment for the Arts, has spent the past 10 years developing forms of movement for "real people" (that is, non-dancers) and researching how to represent disabilities on stage. She will use her Guggenheim award to develop a full-length work performed by physically disabled Armed Forces veterans, some from Iraq and some from past conflicts.

"Sarah Lawrence taught me to connect my feelings and personal experience with intellectual inquiry," says Marks. "I learned that ideas are not antiseptic but are deeply connected to our emotional lives-what we believe in and what we rage against. And I learned that dancing is as much about ideas as it is about movement."

Marks choreographs for the live stage and for film. Her work has earned her many grants and awards, including an Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography and, for her films, Grand Prix of the Video Danse Festival (twice) and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association's Dance and the Camera Festival.