About Mara
Mara Snip (she/they, 1991) is theatre performer, actress and writer in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. In 2013 she graduated at the Codarts conservatory in Rotterdam with a bachelor of music in music theatre and is since 2020 based in Berlin.
Her work is described as drama-electronic, documental music theatre. She writes from her personal trans-experience and shares this through creating musical landscapes in which she uses her voice, loopstation and synthesizer. In contrary to hostile public spaces towards trans people, the theatre allows Mara to invite the audience to exist on her terms and queer vision. Her hope is for the audience to live that queer future back in daily life.
Mara 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. She breathes, sings and moves out of the desire for radical tenderness and builds her practice around the belief in the power of vulnerability and femininity.
In the past years she created two solo-performances at Het Nationale Theater in The Hague, collaborates with Boogaerdt & Van der Schoot, starred in ‘Gloriette’ by Leila Hekmat at HAU, and co-directed and performed ‘1000 Airplanes on the Roof’ from Philip Glass at the Neuköllner Oper.
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 public space. She made it her art to dive deep into the depths of the darkness and proudly shows the power of vulnerability.