Best To Move
This self-portrait by Marcos Duran highlights the enduring maintenance of Indigenous mental health in today’s age of geo-political, technological, and race warfare. This performance as political action communicates my story about 21st century Indigeneity transcending colonial structures through the liberating act of dancing in public, at the intersection of land, sea, and sky amid the San Diego military industrial complex.
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Marcos DuranDirectorMinced
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Marcos DuranWriterMinced
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Marcos DuranProducerMinced
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Marcos DuranKey Cast"Self"Minced
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Project Type:Documentary, Experimental, Music Video, Short
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Runtime:8 minutes 58 seconds
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Completion Date:May 8, 2023
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Production Budget:2,000 USD
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Marcos Duran is an indigenous / hispanic multidisciplinary dance artist whose family is native to Sonoran Desert that traverses the Mexico/United States border. His work has been largely shaped by his time in New York, where he directed and performed in Marcos Duran Performance Group while an artist-in-residence at Center for Performance Research. Focusing on individuality within community building, he honed his abilities as a multi-disciplinary collaborator at the UC San Diego, bringing dancers, actors, designers, composers, and digital engineers together on stage for "The Underground," his MFA thesis at the La Jolla Playhouse theater district. In 2021 he was awarded 'Best Performances' for "Minced" at the Los Angeles Experimental Film Festival. Marcos was recently featured in the San Diego Union Tribune for his "Dancing With Dignity" human rights performance project in May 2024. He currently Lectures at UC San Diego and San Diego City College.
My work as a director-performer takes a multi-disciplinary approach in guiding diverse personalities, bodies, and abilities. I encourage individuals to develop their uniqueness within the ensemble by integrating voice work, writing, sketching, storytelling, body conditioning, craniosacral and somato-emotional training in the rehearsal process. I invite the viewer’s anatomy and imagination to respond to guided somatic integration, as well as geometric, literary, socio-political and cinematic references in the performance. The work emerges as a contemporary dance take on performance art, staging metaphorical and poetic adventures for physical performers and their audience, entering worlds of shifting spatial dimensions, psychological reckonings, and theatrical scenes that explore states of being ranging from eerily dark to exuberantly comedic.