Led by Choreographer and Artistic Director Marla Phelan, Movement Museum creates multi-disciplinary works rooted in dance. Committed to elevating artists while expanding the way audiences experience dance, we offer low-cost, high-caliber performances and outreach initiatives that make dance accessible to all.
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World Premiere NYC 19-21 December, 2025
La MaMa Presents Birth + Carnage — a new choreographic work by Marla Phelan. Created in collaboration with astrophysicist Dr. Blakesley Burkhart, Birth + Carnage transforms computational simulations of stellar birth into visceral movement, projection, and sound. With direction by Tim Richardson, digital art by REINFECTED.ME & KLSR, and sound by James Newberry, it bridges the worlds of art, science, and technology — illuminating the beauty and chaos that lie at the heart of creation.
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From Directors Marla Phelan and Tim Richardson, PILLARS is a triptych video and live performance installation presented by Future Stages Festival at The Juilliard School's Center for Creative Technology. Inspired by The Pillars of Creation, a stellar nursery in the Eagle Nebula, dance is woven through a landscape of stellar birth and death while exploring female identity and women as pillars in the creation of life.
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Obscure Passage is a filmic tone poem- a symbolic narrative interplay between ritualized movement and sacred iconography. The triptych installation centers the audience spatially within the work and ‘embodies’ the viewer as the third character in the piece. Directors Marla Phelan and Tim Richardson see the film as a cinematic portal - an experience that draws upon religious meta-narratives to explore the universal nature of ritual.
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The Fell of Dark, a short film directed by Marla Phelan and Tim Richardson, is inspired by the profound and communal strength found in ritual practices. Dancers emerge onto a sacred pavilion, performing a symbolic procession of mourning. Their ritualized movement embodies the healing power of human connection. The Fell of Dark is made in response to the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the overdose crisis and to the families silenced by its stigma.
