Featured Artists
Marynia Fekecz-Mangan ·
Marynia Fekecz-Mangan is a dancer, performer, choreographer, teacher, and producer originally from Poland and currently based in Edmonton, Canada. She holds a degree from the Poznań School of Dance and has developed a multifaceted career in contemporary and interdisciplinary dance. As both an artist and a mother, Marynia integrates lived experience into her practice, weaving personal narrative with physical exploration to create work that is emotionally resonant, authentic, and socially grounded.
As Artistic Director of MfMdancerArtist, Marynia has created and produced several notable works. Her solo Face2Face was presented by the Good Women Dance Collective at Converge 2024, and her duet stopstopstop, created with Alison Kause, was showcased at Mile Zero Dance’s 2024 Magpie Dance Festival. These works reflect her dynamic choreographic approach, emphasizing vulnerability, collaboration, and innovation.
Marynia has collaborated with a wide range of dance companies, festivals, and artist-run centres, including Kokyu Studio of the Grotowski Institute, W&M Physical Theatre (Calgary), the Alberta Dance Festival, Good Women Dance Collective, Mile Zero Dance, and Harcourt House Artist Run Centre. She has also worked with artists and choreographers such as Justine A. Chambers, Linnea Swan, Nicole Charlton Goodbrand, Davida Monk, Melissa Monteros, Wojciech Mochniej, Anna Krysiak, Natalia Pieczuro, and Penelope Morout.
She participated in The Zero Lab, Mile Zero Dance’s curatorial initiative, and as a producer commissioned Penelope Morout and five local dancers to create COME HELL OR HIGH WATER, selected for Fluid Fest 2025. Through her work, Marynia contributes meaningfully to the Canadian dance landscape, fostering community, experimentation, and collaboration.
COME HELL OR HIGH WATER
COME HELL OR HIGH WATER is a powerful interdisciplinary dance work that examines how power moves between people—how it can trap, transform, or set us free. In a world of shifting emotional ground, five performers navigate tension, vulnerability, and resilience, continually testing the boundary between control and surrender.
The movement language is grounded, physical, and highly responsive. Bodies push, pull, lean, lift, and yield, negotiating weight through contact and proximity. Gesture expands into full-bodied momentum, then fractures into moments of restraint or stillness. Objects function as active partners onstage, shaping pathways and relationships, reinforcing the idea that power circulates not only between bodies, but through space itself.
Developed over two years through international collaboration with artists from Poland, Greece, France, and Canada, the work was realized in Edmonton by choreographer Penelope Morout and five exceptional local dancers. The result is a 42-minute performance that has undergone two full public presentations, establishing a foundation that is both fully realized and still evolving. Early showings revealed how strongly the work thrives on proximity, inviting audiences into an immersive environment where choreography, scenography, and lived interaction blur.
Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s What Is Power?, the piece asks whether openness in uncertain times can itself be a form of strength. Like wild geese on a long journey—adaptive, connected, and brave—the performers move through fear, loss, and transformation, willing to rise, fall, and rise again.
Cinematic, theatrical, and deeply human, COME HELL OR HIGH WATER offers a full sensory experience that is emotionally accessible and rigorously choreographic.