
Choreographer and artist researcher, Marie-Louise Crawley trained with Marcel Marceau in Paris and then joined Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil as an actor for seven years. In the UK she has worked with the Birmingham Opera Company, Marc Brew, Gary Clarke, Ballet Cymru, Rosie Kay Dance Company, and Avid for Ovid. Recent choreography includes pieces for the Tate/ARTIST ROOMS Robert Therrien exhibition and for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Marie-Louise is an Assistant Professor in Dance and Cultural Engagement at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University. Her research interests include dance and museums, and areas of intersection between Classics and Dance Studies, such as ancient dance and the performance of epic.
Marie-Louise was APGRD Artist in Residence for six months from January to June 2017. During her residency, Marie-Louise developed a site-specific dance piece, Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), in the gallery spaces of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology.
Likely Terpischore? (Fragments) is based on four female figures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Galatea, Myrrha, Philomel and Medusa. It takes the foundational principles of ancient pantomime as its formal starting point - a solo, masked and narrative dance form - but within Crawley’s choreographic practice the ancient sources are re-imagined in order to find new possibilities for twenty-first century performance.
