About Mara
Mara Snip (1991, NL) is a theatre performance-artist based in Berlin.
She redefined herself in the safety of the underground club-scene of Berlin and is finding her way back into the light.
She breathes, sings and moves out of the desire for radical tenderness and builds her practice around her belief in the power of vulnerability and femininity.
She considers her transition the ultimate form of self-expression and lets it be her compass for a connected, creative and authentic life. Every day is a renewed, deepened relationship with her developing body and invites fresh and compassionate ways of existing. Transitioning brought her an extraordinary force of autonomy and drives her to reclaim space for the visibility and rights of queerness within our suppressed, dysfunctional society.
Bio
when Mara was nine years old her parents took her to a health institute to understand how she identified in her gender. They asked her the question: If you were to have a magic wand what would you be, a boy or a girl? Mara answered: A mermaid. They concluded she was just a boy with a wild imagination and let her take theatre classes. In daily society she felt alienated and wrong, but within the theatre Mara found celebration of her differences and a feeling of belonging. When she decided to study theatre, the by-the-patriarchy-intoxicated university made her believe again a mermaid cannot exist. Over the next fifteen years she tried as hard as she could to be a young man and to suppress her femininity.
She used theatre as a form to validate her existence and didn’t feel alive without an audience. The more masculine she presented herself, the more praise she received. She managed to get rid of her mermaid-tail and had nothing to express anymore. She felt lost and hopeless. She lost her ability to play or imagine magical things. She did nothing anymore.
But in this nothingness there was space for her imagination to slowly and quietly slip through.
She reconnected with her source of expression and creativity and tried to work through her fears and insecurities. She started to feel her magical powers again. She let her hair grow, moved countries and changed her name.
Now she’s ready to present and express herself the way she sees fitting. In her artistic practice she focuses on the position of the transgender within the patriarchal society and the relationship between the queer body and the audience. She made it her art to dive deep into the depths of the darkness and proudly shows the power of vulnerability.