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IMPRESSIONS: Mariana Valencia "Jacklean (in rehearsal)" at MoMA
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on March 25, 2025
Mariana Valencia at MoMA; Photo:Maria Baranova
Choreographer and dancer: Mariana Valencia
Sound artist, musician, and performer: Jazmin “Jazzy” Romero
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann
Organized by Lilia Rocio Taboada, Curatorial Associate, Department of Media and Performance
With thanks to Cam McEwen, Studio Museum/MoMA Fellow, and Kennedy Hollins Jones, former Black Arts Council 12-Month Intern, Department of Media and Performance
Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Kayva Yang, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs
March 23, 2025
What can improvisation show us about life? For Mariana Valencia and Jazmin “Jazzy” Romero, life and improvisation are inextricable processes of knowledge and memory—reliable, fleeting, fallible—grounded in a deep sense of trust that extends from the self into conversations of intimacy and collectivity. Or at its most basic, creating “something out of nothing.”
The artists discuss their approach to improvisation in MoMA’s Magazine Podcast to shed light on their shared “practice of remembering together” in the duet Jacklean (in rehearsal), presented in MoMA’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio performance space. The work is not, as its title suggests, exactly a rehearsal, but its tracksuit-clad explorations carry an air of casual transparency that depressurizes any atmosphere of formal performance. Jacklean is dense yet light, opaque yet accessible, the artists disarming in their honesty. Valencia and Romero are supremely well-matched playmates, their chemistry genuine and uncontrived as they co-rehearse an ever-evolving composition—or as Valencia puts it, “What if we just did it for ourselves in front of them?”
The artists weave sound, movement, and text scores together with a kind of rigor that persists but never takes itself too seriously. Their thinking is palpable throughout: a cascade of creativity that is focused yet diffuse and introspective without devolving into myopic navel-gazing. This sense of generosity stems from the titular character of Jacklean, who, as Valencia explains, is something of a utopian entity co-conceived years earlier in rehearsal with another collaborator, Lydia (we are on a first name-only basis with Lydia). As a fantasy sparked from a mix of wonder and desire, “Jacklean prefers the pronouns we and us, ‘cause Jacklean’s coming in the future. And in the future, there won’t be identity binaries.” Jacklean is a collectivity, an exchange, a process, an ethos, a “we and us” that Valencia and Romero dance, sing, play, and talk around in their improvisatory microcosmos.
From the start, Valencia shows us what she’s made of, how her mind works, how logic moves through her body. Legible shapes hold and split into glinting facets and sly, subtle inversions; threads and departures drop, turn back, pick up, and recalibrate, treading and retreading, making sense through space, rhythm, and perception. Romero, ringed by sound board and synth and slung with an electric guitar, lends her sonic stylings in an unforced co-inventory and co-ordering of the world. Swathed in the shifting color blocks, bright floods, and soft pools of Kathy Kaufmann’s responsive lighting, their shared world telescopes vividly before us through visual gestures that direct attention to a sensibility big enough for all of us.
Their vernaculars established, they begin to play in earnest—both artists speak, sing, and dance as natural interfaces for the operations of their bodies and minds. Valencia’s garrulous choreographies of text prod and chase her restless body using parallel devices of motif and repetition. At times movement overwhelms words, swallowing bits of spoken phrases into embodied punctuation. She delivers existential questions with masterful comic timing to disarm and strike deep on issues of culture, media and technology, and everyday experiences of subjectivity and relationship. Tuning up the background noise in her artist’s brain, she pokes at the strangeness of the pandemic-era time rupture, the precarious nonsense of money in dance, and other assorted oddities we might too easily take for granted. She examines these absurdities without discarding or dismissing them; processing them through words and movement—doing it for herself in front of us—is more than enough.
Valencia is never alone, as Romero remains her constant companion even in silence. Romero watches intently from upstage, laughing along with us at Valencia’s antics, all the while studiously calibrating her next moves. Her musical compositions merge house, punk, and cumbia sensibilities; she hoists her guitar to deliver the plaintive Chavela Vargas ranchera ballad “Paloma Negra” as Valencia kneels beneath her with a gaze brighter than the spotlight they share. As friends, collaborators, and Latinx millennials, the two artists deploy their synchronicities with warmth and joy as they dance a cumbia together. This passage tells us more about them than words ever could: they twirl in, out, and around, catching palms with ease, hips swiveling and arms guiding, feet gliding and ball-changing through known rhythms topped with the kind of shimmy that comes straight from the heart.
Valencia and Romero’s co-improvisation hints at a world where we might all co-improvise life together, building from what we know on a foundation of trust and an ethos of change. For now, they close with a song, sung in tandem in mirrored postures of power and vulnerability. “Tomorrow is my turn,” they sing, and somehow we know that they mean Jacklean: we and us, together into an unknown tomorrow.
