MOVEMENT ARTIST

[photo: Allina Yang]

Dancing and making movement feels like an imperative, a genuine expression of my sensations, convictions, doubts, and musings. I find my voice through quality, my language through physical facility, and my flow through melody and rhythm. I often discover what I have to say by moving through it. My approach to movement is influenced by abstract concepts about the body’s creation of lines, angles, torsion, fluidity, and spatial trajectories - I experiment with specificity and gesture, rhythm and musicality, and strength and fluidity on the floor. When I move, I feel as though I’m finding deeper and clearer relationships between these forms and modalities as I utilize them to express a feeling, conviction, or question without performativity.

My choreography is physically rigorous and moves through many styles, and I prioritize the texture or qualitative image of the movement to the point that it breaks from specific form and creates something beyond conventional styles or techniques. My work is an investigation into facets of the human condition and how we change or respond to difference and instability within the self, interpersonal relationships, community, and wider culture. I am interested in imagery and movement that vacillates between human and inhuman, sentimental and unsettling. I experiment with textural quality in my movement to evoke emotional states, association, and memory while utilizing form and musicality to create new movement pathways that are unique to me. I hope audiences are drawn in by quality, rigor, and experience my work as thought and emotion provoking. I dance and perform in order to feel something; when I dance and perform, it is so others may feel something.

[photo: Allina Yang]

[photo: Alllina Yang]

maia melene d’urfé is a Seattle dancer and choreographer. They hold a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and have traveled nationally and internationally to train with renowned conservatories, dancers, and companies, including San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, Trinity Laban Conservatory, and RUBBERBANDANCE. They dance and train with the local contemporary dance and House communities and have worked with companies and choreographers zoe | juniper, Undercurrent, Elia Mrak, Cameo Lethem, Tariq Mitri, Beth Twigs, and Witness Immersive. Their choreography has been presented internationally at Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporanea de Mexico (CDMX) and Quinzena de Dança de Almada (Almada, PT), nationally at ADF (Durham, NC), Estrogenius Dance Festival (New York, NY) and Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), and locally in Seattle, through Northwest Film Forum, 12 Minutes Max, Velocity Dance Center’s OUT THERE Experimental Dance Festival and The Bridge Project, The Hybrid Lab - curated by Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, and Seattle International Dance Festival. They have also produced three dance and mixed media events Liminal, ode, and ode • K’an, presenting their own work as well as creations by other local artists. As a performer and choreographer, maia is interested in following their creative intuition to create self portraiture of their internal landscape to investigate facets of the human condition and how we change and respond to difference and instability within the self, interpersonal relationships, and wider culture.