NW Spotlight | All Over The Map Reflections by Satya Mari & Max Hanic
New Works Spotlight
A look inside our multifaceted, value-driven, community-responsive service organization
Beyond performances and programs, New Works is part of a living, evolving dance ecosystem. This monthly blog series highlights the unseen moments—the collaborations, reflections, and shifts that shape our community. It’s about the ripples of artist support, learning, and shared growth. Each story offers a glimpse into the evolving needs of the dance community and how we respond.
NW Spotlight | All Over The Map Reflection
by Satya Mari & Max Hanic
For this month’s New Works Spotlight, we are thrilled to feature the dynamic creative duo Satya Mari and Max Hanic. Their captivating work, Marilyn, brings contemporary dance into the vibrant open-air spaces of the Vancouver Public Library’s rooftop terrace and Granville Island as part of All Over The Map 2026.
Hauntingly beautiful and deeply visceral, Marilyn pulls its protagonist into an "elsewhere" of the self—a surreal landscape where hallucinations take hold and the line between reality and unreality blurs. Tangled in a web of her own misconceptions, spirit forces, and upside-down gravity, Marilyn wages a continuous battle to remain grounded in the present moment. Meanwhile, Max steps in as an observer—perhaps a distinct aspect of her psyche or a shadowy double—spectating her journey and heightening a world marked by a split self, inner conflict, chaos, and disruption.
Adapted specifically for outdoor site-specific spaces, Satya and Max presented these powerful performances on July 24 and 26, 2026. What follows is an intimate reflection from Satya and Max on their artistic process, exploring what it took to translate this complex, beautiful duet into the living, bustling backdrop of the city.
Marilyn was originally performed as a solo by Satya; Max came in later to sit and be a spectator and also to act as a “doppleganger” but in stillness…to see two sides of one.
Through re-establishing this duet for New Works we were drawn to staging images of being frozen in time and going back and forth between being interconnected with the other ones world and totally isolated.
We experimented with several scores and choreographic ideas of extreme togetherness, apartness and all the points in between. We played a lot with physical distance to each other which brought up how sensitive we could be to another's actions in movement and time, whether we felt the pull from another's motion or the disturbance of their gaze to bring us somewhere else in space.
We questioned how we could be pulled by other forces or realities that live inside, around, beside and throughout “us” while still being present enough to more concretely respond to each other.
Rehearsing in multiple public spaces (parks, basketball courts, back alleys) informed us of the many distractions we could use to orient ourselves to a certain environment and also inform new decisions to improvise with or introduce to each other.
About Satya Mari
Satya is a performing artist, filmmaker, improviser whose practice mainly lies in contemporary dance but is not limited to this form. Born in Vancouver, BC, she received her training at Artsumbrella, SFU and Modus Operandi and is now also based in Vienna, Austria. Some of her performance experience includes works by Tiffany Tregarthen & David Raymond, Kate Franklin, Alleyne Dance and Yi-Chun Liu as well as performing her own works and collaborations.
Instagram: @nopleasurein
About Max Hanic
Max Hanic has trained in the University of Alberta Fine Arts Acting program, La Faktoria Choreographic Centre in Pamplona and Modus Operandi in Vancouver from 2024-2025. He has completed scholarships with EDAM (Vancouver), The Good Women Dance Collective (Edmonton) and Circuit-Est (Montréal) and trained at Tic Tac Art Centre (Brussels), Espacio Tiempo (Madrid) and at the One Body One Career Countertechnique intensive in Amsterdam. He has worked with independent artists across Canada as well as creates his own choreography.
Instagram: @max.hanic
Why New Works Spotlights?
New Works delivers many unique programs, in many different ways, in support of many communities of artists. If you’ve ever asked a New Works staff member, “so, what does New Works do exactly?”, you’ve likely been met with a rambling run on sentence and a laundry list of exciting programs and projects that we have on the go. Up close it may look a little messy, but take a step back and you will see the container: all of our work exists in response to current gaps in the needs of the dance community. This looks like performance opportunities, partnership and collaboration, professional development, teaching engagements, mentorship, skills training, and many more. And we are just one small piece of this vitally diverse dance milieu.
We envision a healthy artist-centred arts ecosystem where connection, collaboration, and opportunity is celebrated beyond the container of our own organization. Through this ongoing blog series, we invite you to join us in witnessing artist experience through and beyond New Works programs, and in celebration of our living, breathing, shared communities.