MARINA ELANA

BIO

Marina Elana has performed with the most important flamenco companies in the United States over the past twelve years including Caminos Flamencos, Maria Benitez’s Teatro Flamenco in New Mexico and Noche Flamenca in New York City. Marina has performed with Noche Flamenca for the past eight years and has toured extensively with the company both nationally and internationally. In one of the most recent performances, Brian Seibert from The New York Times reviewed her as “a dancer of distinction.” Marina was chosen to perform and present her choreographies at the New York International Fringe Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out Festival, the Queensboro Dance Festival and Stanford University’s NExT Performance Series. Last year in San Francisco, she co-created her first major production, Tattooed, which Rene Renouf reviewed as "one of the most effective flamenco performances I have ever seen." Marina has been a master teacher in flamenco at The People’s Conservatory in Oakland for the past year. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Film and Media Studies specializing in “Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Performance.”

PRESS

“Marina Elana dances a slow burn in a dark velvet dress, her exquisite hand movements offering hypnotic grace in opposition to the steps furiously marking complex beats below.”

— Megin Jimenez, NY Theatre Wire

“a dancer of distinction”

— Brian Seibert, New York Times

“Marina Elana, who has several gorgeous long winding solos, is fair-skinned and petite, dark and direct in her attack, yet soft at the same time.”

— Jamuna Chiarini, artslandia

“Marina Elana displays concentration and finesse in her dancing as well as unexpected comedy in her role as Ismene, a chatty Valley Girl narrator blithely filing her nails as her sister Antigona leads blinded Oedipus across the stage.”

— Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

“Few dancers can match the intensity of Soledad Barrio’s flamenco, but Marina Elana as Ismene takes a good shot at it, following up a devastating monologue in English (“I’m bilingual,” she simpers) in which she bitches about her sister’s self-sacrifice. It is the viciousness of her bile, combined with the cowardice of her position, that makes the tragedy credible, and contemporary. Mean girls rule.”

— "Antigona Flamenca," danceviewtimes, Tom Phillips

“Marina Elana, bailaora natural de San Francisco que parece que “sa criao” en el Tardón del arte que derrama...el momentazo de la noche llega con el tema P’atrás, unas seguiriyas donde cada uno de los componentes de este sugerente proyecto pone su granito de arena, destacando cada uno en su solo, para dar paso al más trabajado de los taconeos de Marina Elana, que sabe aunar con soltura el duende y la vanguardia en su particular estilo. ”

— ACHTUNG!, Selu Sanchez

“Her solo in La Ronde was purely delightful as she moved with confidence and assertiveness. First, she danced with guitarist Eugenio Iglesias and it was flirtatious and romantic. Her arms were eloquently seductive. The second part of her dance was with bass guitarist Hamed Traore. I’ve never seen flamenco danced with just a bass guitar and it was terrific. Traore was utterly convincing, thoroughly masterful, and their partnership was lots of fun. I look forward to seeing more from Elana.”

— Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn, Bachtrack

“Dancer Marina Elana captivates in a sultry duet with her bata de cola. Emerging barebacked from beneath a pile of midnight blue ruffles, like a mermaid departing the sea, she oozes into the top of a shimmering floor-length gown. Cradling the trailing ruffles, she lays them down to rest like a child. Later she inflates them behind her head, invoking the virgin’s mandorla, then surrenders her body under the weight. In a closing duet with Barrio, the pair circle and face off, tussle like animals battling over prey. Modern attire—frame-hugging black leather pants and tanks—and the electric charge between the two women, signal flamenco’s female revolution and its opening to new narrative terrains.”

— Carolyn Merritt, thINKingDANCE

“The trio of younger female dancers ascertain a coy romance to their movement, in particular the confident Marina Elana, with her precise gaze and unfaltering yet impressionistic footwork, which details a seductive yet inviting incarnation of flamenco.”

— Wesley Doucette, Broadway World

“We hear the ancient-sounding “scorched throat,” as Lorca would put it, of Manuel Heredia, an older, bardlike Gypsy singer, with a thick beard and long frizzy hair. In one number, he hurls his lament at the dancer Marina Elana, pulling her into his cavernous emotion. (“Your body has to be the throat of the singer,” Barrio has said.) Then, there is Elana’s sensual duet with a blue satin dress—a sharp contrast to Barrio’s plain black attire. Elana begins on the floor, crumpled beneath a pile of ruffles. As she rises, her bare back to us, she pulls the lavish dress up onto her body, fitting herself into its curves and working its long train into a lyrical dance, an image recalling John Singer Sargent’s 1882 painting “El Jaleo.”

As for Barrio, she is everywhere, even in her absence. She leaves plenty of heel stamping—and the dress—to Elana, who, at times, feels like an avatar of Barrio’s younger self. It is an impression affirmed in a dance that Barrio and Santangelo choreographed for the two women. The duet is one of the few of the vignettes to break with the flamenco form. In it, Barrio and Elana are dressed, twinlike, in tight black pants and shirts. At one point, Barrio touches Elana, and later they hold each other’s head in an anguished grip. These are startling moments, because flamenco, for all its eroticism, does not abide touching. At the instant of contact, the sexuality of the form weakens and dissipates. Barrio has said that she was drawing on Ingmar Bergman’s film “Persona,” with its fatally merged identities. Whatever the psychological connotations, what we see is an engrossing struggle over a dance that must be passed on—but not yet.”

— Jennifer Homans, The New Yorker