MAIA MELENE D’URFÉ
FISCALLY SPONSORED BY VELOCITY
ARTIST BIOS
maia melene d’urfé is a Seattle freelance dancer and choreographer, who creates and researches movement that challenge the body and mind to thoughtfully display sensations, textures, and musicality. 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. They dance and train with the local contemporary dance, Breaking, and House communities and have worked with companies and choreographers zoe | juniper, Undercurrent, Cameo Lethem, Elia Mrak, Tariq Mitri and Beth Twigs. Their choreography has been presented internationally at Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporanea de Mexico (CDMX), and (upcoming, 2025) Quinzena de Dança de Almada (Lisbon, PT), nationally at ADF (Durham, NC), Estrogenius Dance Festival (NewYork, NY) and Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), and locally in Seattle, through Northwest Film Forum, 12 Minutes Max, The Bridge Project, in collaboration with Ash Miller / Faunix, The Hybrid Lab – curated by Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, and Seattle International Dance Festival. In addition, they have 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. Through their dancing, choreography, and curation, they work on exploring abstract and personal thoughts through movement, and aim to meld their experience with street styles, contemporary dance and music to create something intricate and visceral.
Dancing and making movement feels like an imperative, a genuine expression of my sensations, convictions, fears, and musings. I’m not a person of many words, but 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, sometimes a poem falls out immediately and sometimes its meaning is slowly formed out of gibberish. My approach to movement is influenced by training in Forsythe technologies for abstract concepts about the body’s creation of lines, angles, torsion, circularity, points in space, and spatial trajectories, specificity and muscular control from Popping, rhythm and musicality from House, and strength and fluidity on the floor from Undercurrent and Breaking. With each piece I make, 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. While my work is physically rigorous and moves through many styles, 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 hope audiences experience my work as thought and emotion provoking, a thing created with intention and thorough research, and are willing to share a moment of feeling with me.
HOW TO SUPPORT
To join the community of support for maia, please contact erin@velocitydancecenter.org, or make a gift at the link below. As a fiscally sponsored project, all gifts to maia made through Velocity Dance Center are tax deductible.