Portfolio Marla Francis
Marla Francis is a performance artist, choreographer, director, and pedagogue based in Milan.
Her research explores vulnerability as a form of knowledge and creative power. Through performances, somatic practices, and site-specific projects, she investigates the relationship between body, emotion, and transformation, generating experiences where the somatic meets the poetic.
Her artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of body, space, and the unseen. The body in her work does not merely perform; it remembers, echoes, and disturbs. It becomes a liminal entity between presence and absence, gesture and void, a threshold through which the unconscious and the repressed can surface. Space is not a backdrop but a partner: domestic, abandoned, or raw environments act as emotional landscapes, amplifying the body’s silent narratives.
In 2016 she founded I Figli di Marla, a collective and artistic research project moving between stage, installation, and image, centered on the idea of a temporary and affective community. With the collective, she has presented works in international contexts such as the Do Disturb Festival at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
She is also the creator of Emotional Dance, a somatic and political practice of feeling that fosters emotional release, deep listening, and presence beyond aesthetic or productive expectations.
She trained between Italy, France, and the United States, studying with Claudia Castellucci, El Conde de Torrefiel, Geraldine Pilgrim, Oscar Gómez Mata, and at the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio and Alvin Ailey School in New York. She was a finalist at the Giovani Realtà del Teatro competition promoted by the Nico Pepe Academy in Udine and a recipient of the SIAE – Nuove Opere Grant, developing her own performative research.
Her collaborations include institutions such as Palais de Tokyo, Fondazione Elpis, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Comunità Milano, Inruins, and Santarcangelo Festival, among others.
Her work stems from the desire to create spaces of resonance where the body can be listened to, traversed, and become a witness to its own feeling spaces where the invisible finds a form and transformation becomes a subtle act of resistance.
Portfolio Marla Francis
Marla Francis is a performance artist, choreographer, director, and pedagogue based in Milan.
Her research explores vulnerability as a form of knowledge and creative power. Through performances, somatic practices, and site-specific projects, she investigates the relationship between body, emotion, and transformation, generating experiences where the somatic meets the poetic.
Her artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of body, space, and the unseen. The body in her work does not merely perform; it remembers, echoes, and disturbs. It becomes a liminal entity between presence and absence, gesture and void, a threshold through which the unconscious and the repressed can surface. Space is not a backdrop but a partner: domestic, abandoned, or raw environments act as emotional landscapes, amplifying the body’s silent narratives.
In 2016 she founded I Figli di Marla, a collective and artistic research project moving between stage, installation, and image, centered on the idea of a temporary and affective community. With the collective, she has presented works in international contexts such as the Do Disturb Festival at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
She is also the creator of Emotional Dance, a somatic and political practice of feeling that fosters emotional release, deep listening, and presence beyond aesthetic or productive expectations.
She trained between Italy, France, and the United States, studying with Claudia Castellucci, El Conde de Torrefiel, Geraldine Pilgrim, Oscar Gómez Mata, and at the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio and Alvin Ailey School in New York. She was a finalist at the Giovani Realtà del Teatro competition promoted by the Nico Pepe Academy in Udine and a recipient of the SIAE – Nuove Opere Grant, developing her own performative research.
Her collaborations include institutions such as Palais de Tokyo, Fondazione Elpis, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Comunità Milano, Inruins, and Santarcangelo Festival, among others.
Her work stems from the desire to create spaces of resonance where the body can be listened to, traversed, and become a witness to its own feeling spaces where the invisible finds a form and transformation becomes a subtle act of resistance.