Maya Odim
Maya Odim: has an interdisciplinary practice rooted between poetry and dance, anchoring their artistic approach to dealing with how words move and what bodies they are a part of. Maya overlaps symbolisms of language with vocabularies of gesture. Maya received honorable mention in the 2024 Ruth Weiss Foundation Poetry Competition, was a multidisciplinary artist resident at Ragdale (2023), and The Poor Farm, WI (2024). Maya has self published poetry and been published in places including Fnews Magazine, The Performance Response Journal and the Chicago DanceMakers Forum Blog. Maya is a Poet in Residence with the Chicago Poetry Center and an adjunct lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.
This project will be time to plan the staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “What Use Are Flowers?”, with the play’s dialogue communicated wholly through dance. Hansberry held multitudes —an activist, writer, and journalist— echoing and in the wake of that legacy, this restaging will be choreographed after conversations with dancer comrades, improvisation and set practice, and time spent writing. I will think about the body talking, many different kinds of movement qualities, gestural dialogue and languages of gesture.
