MOVEMENT ARTIST
this is the time, and this is the record of the time
-Alicia Pugh, Alethea Alexander, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé-
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
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.
endlessly circling, your mind finds out
-maia melene d’urfé-
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]
-maia melene d’urfé-
[photo: Preston Wadley]
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.
endlessly circling, your mind finds out
-maia melene d’urfé-
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]
recent works
a crisis of standing
a crisis of standing is an examination of failure, flexibility, and firmness in an ever-evolving, metastable form. How does one stand in the fullness of their complexity - in their lightness, darkness and inbetween-ness? Three dancers embody facets of an individual as they reflect on the challenge of being alive, searching for meaning in nothingness and expansion in emptiness.
- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé, Natalie Grant -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Natalie Grant -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé, Natalie Grant -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé, Natalie Grant -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé, Natalie Grant -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]
- maia melene d’urfé, Natalie Grant -
[lighting: Trevor Cushman, photo: Jim Coleman]
this is the time, and this is the record of the time
this is the time, and this is the record of the time is a quartet investigating fracture and how we respond to shattering, exploring the impulses to fix, hide, fight, or sit with the pieces. We discuss what fracture looks like in a variety of spheres (personal, interpersonal, communal, global, and existential) and the tension between risk and control - to live is to risk fracture. A fracture destabilizes a structure or system and we each have our own subjective understanding of what amount or kind of instability we can tolerate and when we cannot stand for it. We wrestle with this in tension and in care somewhere between erosion and reconstruction - in the fear of unraveling, we speak loudly from below.
- Alicia Pugh, maia melene d’urfé, Alethea Alexander, Ashley Menestrina -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Alethea Alexander, maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Alethea Alexander, Ashley Menestrina, maia melen d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Alicia Pugh -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
- maia melene d’urfé, Alicia Pugh -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Alicia Pugh, Alethea Alexander, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
- Alicia Pugh, maia melene d’urfé, Alethea Alexander, Ashley Menestrina -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]- maia melene d’urfé, Ashley Menestrina, Alethea Alexander -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Jim Coleman]
endlessly circling, your mind finds out
An investigation into the sensations and textures of dis[morphia]
[phoria]
[thymia]
- maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]- maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]- maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]- maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]- maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]- maia melene d’urfé -
[lighting: Becca Blackwell, photo: Joseph Lambert]
I’m sitting facing the wind
I’m sitting facing the wind delves into the experience of pressing forward through uncertainty. Three people move through rhythm, melody and words in continuous motion, holding the images of moss on trees and water flowing through a narrow channel. They slide together and dispersed across the space as a dynamic, multi-surface body with strength, tenderness, and care. Together, we look into the blue.
- Alicia Pugh, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Rafa de Copilco]
- Alicia Pugh, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Rafa De Copilco]
- Alicia Pugh, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Rafa de Copilco]
- Alicia Pugh, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Rafa de Copilco]
- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Devin Muñoz]- Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Devin Muñoz]-Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Devin Muñoz]- Alicia Pugh, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Devin Muñoz]- Alicia Pugh, Ashley Menestrina, maia melene d’urfé -
[photo: Devin Muñoz]