Marka Danielle

Modern and Ballet Faculty

Marka Danielle

Marka Danielle

Marka Danielle has been performing Classical and Modern Ballet, along with Dance for Musical Theatre since she was nine years old. Marka was raised and trained in Baltimore, MD at the Harriet Sauber Eisner Studio and The Baltimore Ballet. She also regularly performed with The Baltimore Actors Theater, Spotlighters Theater, The Vagabond Players and other local professional theater companies.

After high school at the The Bryn Mawr School, Marka studied at the Boston Ballet School and was offered a full scholarship at The Boston Conservatory and then Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where she was invited into the Ailey’s prestigious Ailey II Performance Company.

In 1981, having been offered a job to teach Modern Ballet in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Marka took her work there for nearly 8 years, training dancers and actors, as well as performing in and choreographing for Concert Dance, numerous International Musical Theater Productions, Television and Movies.

Upon returning to the United States, in order to have Health Insurance, Marka became a Firefighter and EMT, working for The James Island Fire Department and Charleston County EMS, in her mind, a new kind of performance art. Always the dancer and teacher, she also renewed her studies in anatomy, physiology, kinesiology and pedagogy, in order to train dancers and non-dancers alike to be HEALTHIER of body and mind. She became a Personal Trainer and is a Corrective Exercise Specialist with the National Academy of Sports Medicine.

After a cervical Spinal Cord Injury in 1994 that should have left Marka paralyzed from the shoulders down, she used her own Dance Fitness program, Ultimate Physicality, a ballet based exercise program which she created in Argentina, as her physical therapy. In 2001, she was invited to teach this technique at the Medical University of SC and at other dance and fitness studios.

After a second SCI in 2012, that left her an incomplete quadriplegic and full-time wheelchair user, Marka studied wheelchair dance in New York City with Kitty Lunn and Alice Sheppard at Infinity Dance Theater, where she was invited to perform, as well as in Atlanta with Full Radius Dance Company. She has performed in Integrative Dance performances in Charleston, with members of Annex Dance Company, Ballet Evolution and Laura Ball’s UNED!TED Concert Series. Marka is presently continuing her training in Yoga to be a certified Yoga Instructor, adapting it for all physical abilities as she has had to for herself.

Marka now takes her passion for dance to a whole new place of awareness. She is more determined than ever to help dancers of all ages and levels to stay fit and healthy and hopes to share with anyone who wants to watch and/or learn, her expression of the Art that she has always loved, along with the message that SCI and other physical challenges, doesn’t mean life as you knew it has ended, it just means the journey has changed directions.