Mary Pearson is a dancer and performance maker based in Liverpool, UK. Her multi-disciplinary practice is rooted in improvisation and collaboration, with backgrounds in dance, visual art, comedy and experimental theatre devising.
As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner® she facilitates release of trauma held in the body. This informs her current interest in how performance practices can address collectively embodied traumas, in relation, in particular, to ancestral links with colonising and racialising histories, and a felt sense response to the climate crisis.
She toured solos FAILURE, The Sand Dog Cometh, and FoMO, mofos! internationally from 2012-2018. She regularly collaborates with other artists, recently including Carolina van Eps, Michael Kaddu, pavleheidler, Elvan Tekkin, Alena Kudera, mayfield brooks, Seke Chimutengwende, Yoav Admoni, Laura Döhler and Amy Voris.
She teaches CI, improvisation and performance in art spaces and higher education, sometimes called ‘FAILURE Lab’. She has been invited to teach at Ponderosa Tanzland Festival and P.O.R.C.H. summer school, contactfestival Freiburg (Germany), Improspecjie festival (Zagreb, Croatia), WCCIJam, PADL West (California, USA) Independent Dance, Live Art Bistro, CI Society Goldsmith’s (UK), The Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA), Edge Hill University, Liverpool Hope and John Moore’s Universities, University of Chester, University of Plymouth.
As organiser and curator, she has worked with artist-led initiatives like Ponderosa, Migrant Artists’ Mutual Aid, and Liverpool Improvisation Collective to create events and residencies: Con|VERGE and REMIX, ECITE 2014, Proximity: New Directions in Art and Social Repair, Raw Roar Rare, and If Only! Mary earned her B.A. at Oberlin College (USA), in Studio Art and English Literature, with dance, and studied physical theatre creation at Kiklos Teatro (Padua, IT).
In 2006 she co-founded Fool's Proof Theatre, whose work toured in the UK/US until 2011.