Doves Don’t Fly at Night

Photography by Effy Grey

Doves Don’t Fly at Night began during Mar’s Choreography Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow, where she was invited to deepen a personal movement language shaped by urgency, repetition, and inherited devotion. The piece emerges from a two-year research process rooted in Catholic ecstatic practices, bodily memory, and non-verbal language passed down through the women in her family.

The work evokes the sensation of trying to reach something that may not exist. It moves between ritual and trance, between surrender and resistance. A shared physical vocabulary—kneeling, bowing, trembling, rocking—becomes a vehicle for expressing what is often suppressed or unspeakable. The dancers move as if in response to an invisible call, entering a collective state of heightened intensity.

Doves Don’t Fly at Night invites both performers and audience to witness the body as a site of devotion, guilt, and longing—without trying to resolve it.

Premiere: March 20, 21, 2025
Venue: Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY
Duration: 40 minutes
Production and Choreography: Mar Talavera-Tejeda
Choreographed in collaboration with the dancers: Francesca Dominguez, Flora Ferguson, Isabele Rosso, Arnel Wilson, Lucia Flexer-Marshall
Rehearsal Director: Francesca Dominguez
Costume Design: Lucia Tozzi
Lighting Design: Cheyenne Sykes

Music:
1440 promp. parv. 518/2 wawyn, or waueryn, yn a myry totyr, oscillo by Akira Rebelais
The Unity of the Mind by Valentina Magaletti
Desprenderse de lo Humano by Efrain Rozas (Peruvian composer)
Camino by Murcof
Toada e Desafio (Fotografía) by Jaques Morelenbaum
Persian Wheel, Drum Message, and Circular Translation by Christophe Zurfluh
Part 2 by Matthew Herbert
Flint March by Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams