
TiLTING VERTICALITIES
A dance for trust moving through a collective holding
Affecting effects
towards peaceful states
TiLTING VERTICALITIES is a body of work nurturing and expanding a coreographic space, process & experience in the interior of an artwork.
We are invitated to sense ourselves exploring, investigating and experimenting with our own balancing movement and gestures, for creative notions to (re)emerge; of trust, grounding, interdependence, tension, care, movement, rest & support.
TiLTING VERTICALITIES (exercise #±1) needs more than one person involve for it to work; leaning back, balancing, counterbalancing, rebalancing together inside a 1 x 5 meter paintings resting on elastic natural rubber band, echoing the healing and restorative qualities of latex to rubber trees. They are organic forms for us to inhabit,
as for the movement & conversations emerging from hanging out and moving together.
All in all, a nourishing and safe space is created by everyone taking place, exercising peaceful states for sharing space, as having each other’s back, in‘the art of holding together’.
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—at the International Festival of Learning (IFL.1), part of Dance, Intimacy and the Civic, a programme of research curated by Independent Dance, exploring dance in relationship to the civic realm and the potential for dance to influence social change. Performers Laura Doehler & Claudia Tonietto at Imperial War Museum Park, Tibetan Peace Garden. Photo Nikki Tomlinson.
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TiLTING VERTICALITIES is a body of work nurturing and expanding a coreographic space, process & experience in the interior of an artwork.
We are invitated to sense ourselves exploring, investigating and experimenting with our own balancing movement and gestures, for creative notions to (re)emerge; of trust, grounding, interdependence, tension, care, movement, rest & support.
TiLTING VERTICALITIES (exercise #±1) needs more than one person involve for it to work; leaning back, balancing, counterbalancing, rebalancing together inside a 1 x 5 meter paintings resting on elastic natural rubber band, echoing the healing and restorative qualities of latex to rubber trees. They are organic forms for us to inhabit, as for the movement & conversations emerging from hanging out and moving together.
All in all, a nourishing and safe space is created by everyone taking place, exercising peaceful states for sharing space, as having each other’s back, in‘the art of holding together’.

—at the International Festival of Learning (IFL.1), part of Dance, Intimacy and the Civic, a programme of research curated by Independent Dance, exploring dance in relationship to the civic realm and the potential for dance to influence social change. Performers Laura Doehler & Claudia Tonietto at Imperial War Museum Park, Tibetan Peace Garden. Photo Nikki Tomlinson.

A recording of TiLTING VERTICALITIES, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, "The Art of Holding Hands", acrylic ink 29,7 x 42 cm, 2024
—TiLTING VERTICALITIES is generally shared with and for cultural public performance programmes, research and educational contexts, groups and individual workshop-lab sessions.
Some participants have experienced and expressed:
“TiLTING VERTICALITIES enacts a place of rest and support that is radically mutual. We sense and negotiate our own and one another’s weight and energy, and the ground, to find safe places off the vertical where we can hang out, snuggle, stretch and play. This piece - whether observed as sculpture & painting or experienced from within - unfolds the delicacy, vitality and strength of embodied interconnectivity.”— Lizzy Le Quesne, dancer and writer, PhD Somatic Dance | Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.
“In TiLTING VERTICALITIES movement acquires the most subtle tonalities of a painted work, as discrete bodies produce an almost static, delicate choreography, balancing the acts of holding and letting go.” — Mara Polgovsky, art historian and filmmaker, Birkbeck, University of London.
“TiLTING VERTICALITIES enacts a place of rest and support that is radically mutual. We sense and negotiate our own and one another’s weight and energy, and the ground, to find safe places off the vertical where we can hang out, snuggle, stretch and play. This piece - whether observed as sculpture & painting or experienced from within - unfolds the delicacy, vitality and strength of embodied interconnectivity.”— Lizzy Le Quesne, dancer and writer, PhD Somatic Dance | Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.
“In TiLTING VERTICALITIES movement acquires the most subtle tonalities of a painted work, as discrete bodies produce an almost static, delicate choreography, balancing the acts of holding and letting go.” — Mara Polgovsky, art historian and filmmaker, Birkbeck, University of London.
“I find your work incredibly powerful in nourishing my own practice, repertoire and sense making within and beyond both the spoken word and active listening. I can’t thank you enough for the care, forensic exploration of complex ideas in an approachable and utter compelling way.” — Alex Bell, FRSA FCCT FIoL FICRS FLS | Portland Education—global leadership & innovation coaching | Oppi Global
“We live in days of solipsism and separation: Marga is one of the few artists today who can bring us back together, who see past our crabbed and shuttered reality into something deeper and broader lying behind it. Enter one of her works and you will lose your hold on yourself. Your gyroscopes will move off-axis, your centre of gravity will shift. You will not be the same as you were.” —