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).
Como es Aquí, es allá
2022 – Duet – 6 minutes
Como es aquí es allá is part of the same choreographic inquiry as Las que Habitan—a continued exploration of how embracing our inner shadow allows us to reconnect with intuition. The duet reflects on mirrored realities and shared internal landscapes: what happens in one body reverberates in the other, as if moving through a shared subconscious space.
Created in a time of physical distance, the work evokes presence, memory, and the quiet pull between two beings. Through responsive partnering and weight shifts, the dancers engage in a conversation where closeness and absence blur. It is a subtle yet persistent search for wholeness through each other and through the parts of the self we’re taught to avoid.
Como es aquí es allá premiered at Gibney Theater (NYC) in February 2022.
Las Que Habitan
2021 – Dancefilm – 13 minutes
Las que Habitan is inspired by the story of Vasalisa from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The film explores a return to intuition and inner knowing, invoking the presence of multiple feminine selves that live within—especially the ones that are hardest to face.
Through a raw and poetic physicality, the performers move through spaces of recognition, resistance, and ritual. Las que Habitan is both an offering and a reckoning: a call to listen to the voices we’ve silenced and to embody the wisdom that lives beneath them.
Las que Habitan has been selected for several international screendance festivals, including NukhuFest, Mignolo International Screendance Festival, Women’s International Film Festival, Serbest International Film Festival, and the 3er Festival de Mujeres de Medios Audiovisuales (Argentina).
Una Hebra
2021 – Dance Film – 6 minutes
Seven women flow through the same space without knowing it. They inhabit their emptiness, living their journeys without any hurry. At some point, a new space and reality are woven: One thread (Una Hebra). Their bodies speak together. Seven voices move from a unique path that keeps encountering the homogeneous.
Una Hebra was presented at the 33° Danza Nueva Festival Internacional de Danza ICPNA (Lima, Peru) in 2022.