Mission

About Oni Dance
Oni Dance is a newly formed dance ensemble led by the choreographer and artistic director Maria Gillespie. Oni Dance is a pick-up company of LA’s finest contemporary performers that seeks to investigate movement concepts and human experience that elevates dance into a physical world ripe with kinetic volume and wit. With idiosyncratic movement and poetic punch, Oni Dance transfixes the eye on complex and sublime movement puzzles that seethe with intense physical skill and kinetic extremes. 2005 marked Oni Dance’s first season and included the premiere of works at The Getty Center and The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT). Oni Dance is based in Los Angeles and has performed in Tokyo, Japan, Colorado, and NYC at The International Dance Festival. As a choreographer, Gillespie is intent on stripping conventional movement of its comforts and making idiosyncratic movement feel like a first language. The movement language of Oni Dance is fueled by the imagined, the remembered, and the actual worlds that originate from psychological events. These dances unfold to reveal the inevitable kinetic underpinnings and responses of the heart and mind.

Mission Statement
As artistic director of Oni Dance, I am determined to create vibrant and idiosyncratic dances that inspire both emotional and kinetic insight. Oni Dance serves as the medium for me to propel myself and the viewer into a realm where the untamed psyche challenges one’s expectations of the body’s confines. I want to hone our perceptions to appreciate detailed, unconventional movement. Through my choreography, I create dances that offer the viewer a nearly palpable encounter with the rawness of human experience.
Through classes, workshops, and public performances, my company and I challenge and educate the regional community in the vernacular and aesthetics of contemporary dance. Through a virtuosic and highly nuanced movement language, I hope to reveal work that invites the viewer to expand their vision of what movement expression can encompass.

Artistic Statement
In creating dances, my point of genesis is always the movement itself. Starting with improvisation, I will uncover movement elements that communicate the expressive volumes of bodies navigating between velocity and rest. I imagine the performing artist to be the creating artist as well, spontaneously capturing unpredictable moments in the body and in space and thereby giving set dance a nuance not reproduced by any other. I am perplexed and enthralled by stripping movement down to its core to emphasize and alter its context, thus creating a new way for it to exist in the body. I enjoy allowing psychological inspiration to alter the initial meaning of movement material. I thrive on creating movement that throws the limbs off the body, devours space, rides on momentum, and dives off center. I am interested in creating intricate environments, which expose the multi-faceted layers of the human psyche ranging from poignant and tender to raw and far-flung.