Photography by Effy Grey
Doves Don’t Fly at Night
2025 – Quintet – 40 minutes
This full-length work began during Mar’s Choreography Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow and is the culmination of a two-year exploration that started with Someone is Rocking You from Above and evolved through the solo Por Debajo de la Rodilla. The piece investigates the body’s relationship to religious urgency, memory, and vulnerability—channeling trembling, prostration, and repetition into a shared, visceral state.
Premiered at Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NYC
Por Debajo de la Rodilla
2024–2025 – Solo – 12 minutes
Maria Angela (Mar) Talavera-Tejeda’s Por Debajo de la Rodilla is an immersive solo that explores guilty fervor and the yearning for salvation. Rooted in the body’s non-verbal language, the piece draws from ancestral memory and gestures inherited through the women in her family—becoming a physical excavation of devotion, silence, and vulnerability.
Presented at the EstroGenius Festival and Arts On Site (2024), and at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (2025).
Someone is Rocking You from Above
2023 – Quintet – 12 minutes
Created under Doug Varone's choreographic mentorship through the Devices program, this quintet explores the urgency of striving toward something unattainable. Through repetition, collapse, and suspended gestures, the dancers move through a shared physical intensity, where perseverance, tension, unbalance, effort, and exhaustion dissolve into a collective state of surrender.
Premiered at Manhattan Movement and Arts Center (NYC).
Photography by Nicolás Garrido
Still
2024 – Dance Film – 9 minutes
Co-directed by Mar Talavera-Tejeda, Verónica Garrido Lecca, and Elías Mujica, Still follows six women attempting to move forward as a collective—only to find themselves caught in a cycle that returns them to the same place. Oscillating between chaos and harmony, the film becomes a meditation on stagnation, agency, and the pressure to conform to societal beauty standards.
Official selection at international screendance festivals, including San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival (Canada), and Mirada Corta (Mexico).
Hey…in here you will be safe
2023 – Trio – 10 minutes
This trio explores the reconstruction of women's instinctual capacity, questioning what happens when they stop fulfilling the roles society has imposed on them. Through three performers who initially obey these rules, the work reflects on the moment when the impulse to listen inward becomes stronger than the need to meet expectations.
Created through the Emerging Choreographer Series by Mare Nostrum Elements and premiered at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (NYC).