Marjory Smarth

Marjory Smarth was born in Haiti in November 1969 and raised from childhood on New York City's Upper West Side. From her earliest years, she moved between Haitian cultural forms and the streetdances circulating through the city, performing in school productions, competitions, street jams and battles. That combination of theatrical training and improvised social exchange shaped her entire artistic life.

During the 1980s, Smarth carried street-dance experience into New York nightlife, where house dance was being shaped through sustained participation in clubs. At seventeen she appeared in a music video with the hip-hop duo Super C & Casanova Rud. By the late 1980s she was performing professionally with recording artists including Diana Ross, Heavy D and CeCe Peniston, and her work extended to film, including appearances associated with *New Jack City*, *Boomerang* and *Strictly Business*, as well as a performance at Jacob's Pillow.

Smarter increasingly became a choreographer, teacher and cultural historian. She taught house and hip-hop across the United States and internationally, working in Japan, the United Kingdom, Africa, Russia, Italy, Austria, Brazil, Canada and Taiwan. She was documented in Sally Sommer's *Check Your Body at the Door*, a record of dancers from the late-1980s and early-1990s New York house scene. In 2007 she served among the inaugural judges and instructors of House Dance International, helping to validate and shape emerging house-dance institutions through her presence and authority.

Smarth died of cancer on 12 February 2015. Throughout her illness she continued to teach. Community memorials stress her role as a reciprocal force between dancer, DJ and dance floor. Her phrase "Live True, Dance Free" endures as an expression of the values associated with her practice: personal truth, generosity, musical engagement and freedom within community.