Marcus Baldemar

Marcus Baldemar is a dancer and choreographer originally from Kiruna in the north of Sweden. After many years in Brussels, Belgium he is now based in Stockholm where he makes work, dances in other people’s work as well as teaches dance and choreography. 

Marcus’ work wants to communicate a non-hierarchy between the emotional, the physical and the intellectual. One recurring interest is to find and/or create connections between a poetic/political language and a poetic/political body. This as an open, ever changing, question that accompanies him in the work. Author Leslie Feinberg once said “gender is the poetry we make of the language we are taught". In Marcus’ work he also sees movement and body as the poetry we make of the language we learn. He often works with text but in the end the dancing body is the main communicator. 

His starting point is often queer history and storytelling as well as the ambition to queer history and storytelling.

In his solo GALDR (2019) he looked at nordic mythology through a queer lens and danced/told an alternative story based on the Norse god Odin. With Polari Speaking Sex (2021) Marcus was inspired by a secretive language spoken amongst homosexual men in England from the beginning of the 20th century until the mid 1960s. Together with his collaborators they worked on the idea of a secret mode for communication that made possible to safely live and share queer joy, pleasure and intimacy in public. In the same year, together with Finnish dancer/choreographer Eliisa Erävalo, he created his first ever piece for children (ages 4-7). The work is bilingual (Finnish and Swedish) and is called Markus Lär Sig Finska (Markus Learns Finnish). Finally Fantastic (2022) shows a togetherness that leads all the way to death. How dying coexists with the imaginative, the joyful and the intimate. The piece can be seen as a meeting place and communal burial ground where a collection of people of different generations do and die together.