Maya Oliva - Intensiivien työpajat / Workshops for Intensives

Composition workshop

In this composition workshop, participants will be guided in crafting movement through choreographic tools and structured improvisation. The aim is to help each dancer define their singular way of organizing movements in space, emphasizing individual personal styles. The workshop will introduce tools to transform artistic concepts, texture, or intuition into movement language. This will be done while thinking also about how is this movement language perceived by an outside eye or audience. 

Additionally, we'll explore how to consciously be aware of the dance techniques we reproduce when moving, again identifying personal styles within them. Participants are invited to reflect on these techniques in relation to what ignites passion and stimulates intellectual curiosity.

The workshop blends group and individual exercises with discussions, encouraging participants to articulate and analyze their approaches to their work and practices both verbally and through movement.

Maya Oliva (they/she), is an Italian choreographer and dancer based in Helsinki. With family roots in Italy, Poland, Venezuela, and Canada, they have lived in Montréal, Firenze, Milano, New York, and Brussels. They completed three years of studies at P.A.R.T.S. in 2016 and, in 2022, graduated with an MA in Choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki. They performed their projects such as With a pair of dirty gloves, You didn’t see this coming, Bolero, Mostruosa, Thickness Flows, Something about light, and In perpetual blooming, despite the gods in Europe and South Asia. Maya has worked in various project constellations, from leading projects to being a dancer for choreographers, collaborating in duos or larger groups with flat hierarchies. Influenced by their nomadic background, Maya explores belonging and home through movement and performance. Their choreographic tools aim to embrace the undefined, ambiguous, and the other—creating a dance that transitions between body, synthetic sounds, voice, and textiles. With a desire to embrace multitudes, Maya seeks to open up spaces also to uncomfortable and eerie realms. They approach topics like loss of home and anxiety by focusing on transitions between fragmented movements, breath, voice, and inhabiting the in-between spaces of different languages.

photo: Antti Rintala