Developed by dancer and choreographer Lester Horton in the United States during the first half of the 20th century, this modern dance technique merges various influences and disciplines—ballet, jazz, traditional African and Native American dances, and yoga—into a distinctive and effective method. It sculpts strong, supple, adaptable, and well-coordinated bodies while serving as a technical foundation that frees the dancer’s expression. Particular attention is given to back work, the articulation of the spine with the pelvis, the geometry of movement, spatial awareness, and musicality.

 

True to tradition, Maya’s teaching is precise, generous, and enriched with insights drawn from her own practice, approach, and understanding of the technique. Discovery, laughter, challenges, and sore muscles guaranteed!

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The classes will be accompanied by live music, performed by: Zouratie Kone and Honoré Kouadio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- workshops -

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16.08   2:15-4:15 PM   &  23.08   4:30-6:30 pm

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A technical, sensory, and creative laboratory, the workshop designed by Maya is a dedicated space-time for artistic exploration and development. In close dialogue with the needs of the dancers, it explores the fundamentals of movement (time, space, weight, dynamics, and qualities), the relationship to others and the performative environment, the discovery of new pathways within the body, and the embodiment of multiple imaginaries. Both physical and sensitive, individual and collective, this research is driven by curiosity, play, and self-surpassing, enabling each participant to expand their self-awareness and the scope of their possibilities with joy and confidence.

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- BIO -

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Native from Belgium with Cameroonian origins, Maya BALAM MEYONG is a dancer, creator, teacher and what she envisions as a light gardener. She is the co-founder and artistic director of The Dancing Society, a movement-based art company, and of an emerging international dance festival, the Perpetuum Mobile.

 

Maya graduated with a BFA in Dance from PSPBB/Paris 8 University and completed Rick Odum’s professional training and teaching programs under a scholarship award. She further deepened her practice through several intensive programs at the Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham Schools in New York City. Alumnus of the Springboard Dance Montreal and of the Jacob’s Pillow Contemporary Program, Maya is an awardee of the Vocatio Foundation as well as of Phil Collins’s Little Dreams Foundation. She holds a dual bachelor's degree in Law and Philosophy from Saint-Louis University, Belgium, where she explored the possible congruence between movement practice and theory in her thesis “Poetics of the Invisible. For a Dialogic Philosophy of Dance”.

 

Current member of the Akram Khan Company, Maya embodies other artists' vision with grace and dedication while crafting her own creative path between practice, performance, reflection and communal celebration. She weaves sensitive experience, imagination and poetry, with physicality and abstraction, nature and storytelling at the heart of her practice. Maya's work is an invitation to experience realms beyond the familiarity of words, logic or conventions as she believes there is infinite beauty to be found in artscapes that cannot be told as well as they can be perceived and that dance is an open door to those mystical spaces.